Growing Smart vs. Just Growing
Ohio Design Assistance Team Charrettes
Investigate Defenses Against Sprawl
CUDC Quarterly, 1:3 - Winter, 2001

The landscape of Ohio is dotted with some of the country’s most charming small towns and villages, established at crossroads, mill streams and canals as service centers for local farming communities, mill workers and barge crews. For the most part, these picturesque little settlements have lost their economic purpose and many survive almost entirely on their charm–as tourist attractions, or the homes of third- and fourth-generation residents.

Others within commuting distance of major employment concentrations, like Chagrin Falls or Hudson, have found renewed prosperity as country seats of the rich and nostalgic who are attracted by their small-town charm, historic architecture, walkable streets and the promise of a simpler life–which, of course, demands a corresponding complement of upscale retail and restaurants, health food and jogging equipment, antique shops and galleries.

Many of our historic towns, however, are just "in the way" of development, struggling to survive the rising tide of suburban subdivisions and big box retail flooding the farmlands which were once their raison d’être. Traditional in-town retail is decimated by suburban competition; the local infrastructure, schools and public services are stretched to breaking point by the influx of new residents; and increasing traffic and congestion are eroding the quality of life that made these towns attractive to development in the first place.

But perhaps the most damaging impact of these development pressures is the ambivalence of local policy makers and residents who, on the one hand, welcome the economic opportunities of growth, and on the other, resist the changes threatening their community. The result is usually a passive-reactive position where mitigation is substituted for positive planning and decision-making rests in the hands of developers rather than the community.

But can design play a stronger role in helping these threatened communities take charge of their future? This question was explored by the three Urban Design Centers of Ohio in two design charrettes last year, hosted by the cities of Springboro and Canal Winchester.

Along with the UDC here in Cleveland, the Ohio Board of Regents’ Urban University Program (UUP) supports Urban Design Centers in Columbus and Cincinnati. In 1999, the three centers were awarded additional funding by the UUP to undertake collaborative community assistance projects of state-wide significance. After consulting with a wide range of advisers in each of our regions, we adopted a theme of Defenses Against Sprawl: Design Strategies for Protecting Ohio’s Historic Towns and Villages.

Requests for Expressions of Interest in hosting a design charrette were issued to representative communities in each of the regions served by the three Design Centers, and from the responses received, we selected Springboro and Canal Winchester as the sites for our first two charrettes. In January and November respectively, after several months of preparation and planning with local officials and community leaders, these two little towns were overrun by a noisy, energetic, opinionated and mostly nocturnal team of volunteer professionals, students and academics who worked for three days outlining design strategies for shaping future growth.

Springboro is a little farming village established by Quakers in 1815 at the hot springs which gave the town its name. It is about midway between Cincinnati and Dayton, just off Interstate 75 which is the fastest growing corridor of southwest Ohio. The population of the town has tripled over the last 30 years and, at the current pace of development, is projected to double again by 2005. Most of this growth is in the all-too-familiar, placeless pattern of low density residential sprawl and commercial strip development. While much of the historic downtown remains intact–although deteriorating–its traditional role as the center of the community has been crippled by competing commercial centers; and the once serene agricultural setting of the town is scarred by congested arterials and scattered buildings of unrelated function, scale and appearance.

Historic town centers: a 19th-Century house in Springboro

Canal Winchester, which is about 20 miles southeast of Columbus, is facing the same kinds of growth pressure. It is a typical Ohio canal town, founded in the early 19th Century on the banks of the Ohio & Erie Canal which originated over 200 miles to the north in downtown Cleveland. The canal, of course, is long gone but traces of its route are still visible in a grassy swale that runs along one of the main roads leading into the historic core. Scattered stone remnants have been lovingly preserved, and there is an interesting shift in the geometry of buildings where the canal sliced through the grid of downtown streets. In fact, the canal right-of-way is almost entirely intact, except for the unfortunate siting of the downtown community center which the charrette team turned into a design studio for three days last November.

Like Springboro, Canal Winchester’s economic prospects are rosy, and both communities are quick to recognize the benefits of an expanding tax base, growing employment opportunities and a hot housing market. But why does it have to be so ugly? And why does it have to happen at the expense of the historic downtown and the environmental and community character that were often the only reason these towns have survived at all?

The charrette teams set to work in the belief that the answer to both these questions is: it doesn’t! In each location, our task was to define a framework for "growing smart", rather than just growing, and although the specific recommendations were particular to each town, the basic design principles of a smart growth policy were constant, and probably transferable to any similar situation. These principles include:

Identity: cultivating a strong sense of place or unique image and quality of experience in the downtown is the only way it can compete with the shiny new shopping centers. In Springboro, we suggested ways to reconnect the downtown to the river and hot springs, reclaiming the resource on which the town was founded and celebrating its role in the Underground Railway before and during the Civil War. In Canal Winchester, restoring and interpreting (although not necessarily re-watering) the canal as the place-making feature of downtown was almost a "no- brainer".

Open space: connecting sensitive natural areas and man-made parks and playgrounds in an open space system creates a structure of amenity to order new development. For Springboro, the open space system followed the pattern of small creeks and streams draining into the larger river, forming a pinwheel structure of open space centered on the downtown. Canal Winchester had a very different pattern of existing wetlands and drainage channels which, when connected, created a protective frame of open space around the historic core.

Balance: simply embalming a small town isn’t an option, especially when the rural economy that supported it no longer flourishes. Growth and preservation need to find an appropriate balance, where new economic opportunities complement the quality of life offered by the existing town and create a richer fabric of new and old places. With clearly articulated plans and design guidelines governing the location and form of new development, local officials can adopt a more pro-active stance on growth and have a much stronger negotiating position when they meet with potential developers.

Concentration: creating usable green spaces and preserving the natural drainage system requires that new development be clustered, rather than spread indifferently over the landscape. Creating a denser, more urban pattern in new development reduces the costs of infrastructure, avoids stark and often jarring contrasts between old and new, and allows for more community interaction and pedestrian activity. An example of this from our Springboro proposals is shown in the sketch above. Similar concepts were investigated for a new retail and office center and adjacent residential development on the outskirts of Canal Winchester.

Street network: developing an inter-connected network of streets distributes traffic more evenly and avoids the inevitable bottlenecks that occur at the key intersections of limited access arterials. Even a relatively small amount of growth can create horrendous traffic problems for rural towns because they are usually centered on a single main crossroads. By providing networks of local relief roads, traffic congestion can be reduced and access can be improved for pedestrians and bikers.

The Historic Core: the struggling downtown needs to reclaim its role as the civic heart, though not necessarily the retail center, of these communities. While no one can deny the popularity and convenience of the big box merchants (Home Depot, Walmart, Target and the like) and the strip centers and malls that contain them, more and more people are realizing that the "shopping experience" will never be an adequate substitute for a civic life. Rather than trying to compete head-on with the new retail centers, the historic downtowns can offer a welcome alternative of cultural and educational events and community traditions. At the same time, small downtowns can be great places to live, with interesting architecture, walkable streets and a variety of housing options not available in most new suburban developments.

None of these principles is especially novel; at most the charrettes produced a few new twists on what is by now conventional wisdom among progressive planners and urban designers. The design challenge is revealing how to apply them in exciting and practical ways that exploit the unique qualities of each location.

The cause of good design is usually at a disadvantage because the up-front costs of applying sound principles are always higher than the cookie-cutter solutions that real estate developers are only too happy to offer. It’s extremely difficult for a small town to mobilize the resources required to make plans that are appropriately site-specific and sensitive to often delicate natural and historic resources. The ODAT charrettes brought some big ideas to the table in each of the host communities and showed how they could be applied in each particular context, but the day-to-day work of implementing good design requires sustained effort and continuing dialogue between communities, developers and designers.

For this reason the most important outcome of the charrettes may have been a renewed public interest and enthusiasm for initiating public projects and creating stronger private development controls. Both Springboro and Canal Winchester have since initiated further planning studies to develop the design ideas produced in the charrettes.

The three UUP Design Centers will be exploring these principles further in a charrette later this year. A Request for Expressions of Interest will be issued in early April. If you want further information, to be included on our list of suitable communities, or have a suggestion for another theme/issue that needs this kind of exploration, contact the Design Center in your region. –Ruth Durack