In an interesting alliance, the Sonoma County Farm Bureau and Greenbelt Alliance (a local environmental group in the Bay Area) have released a Land Use Audit intended to shape land use policies in Sonoma County.

Sonoma’s farming economy is, needless to say, a little different than the usual: vineyards command high market prices and attract considerable tourism to Wine Country, significantly filling the cash chasm that typically separates metropolitan and rural economies. Farmers in Northern California may also be happier with farm life; it sometimes seems that farmers in many other locales (especially given that the average age of American farmers is rapidly headed toward 65) are land speculators first and farmers second. Still, the Audit is a political breakthrough in coalition-building, since farmers had opposed earlier proposals to implement growth controls in Sonoma and elsewhere in California.

Peter Calthorpe (well, quoted by Andres) once distilled New Urbanism into two words: diverse and compact. John Massengale has a different phrase: walkable neighborhoods.

The short answer is that New Urbanism is about the making of walkable neighborhoods.

The short answer implies 3 things, all necessary for a walkable neighborhood:

1) There are places to walk to. That means the neighborhood has mixed uses, with stores and offices as well as houses and apartments.

Leon Krier’s definition of good urbanism is that you can buy a good cup of coffee within 5 minutes of walking out your front door.

2) That the neighborhood is, to use a horribly overused word, “sustainable.” That also has a few implications. The first is that you can fulfill most of your daily needs without getting in a car. If the town or village is isolated, there should be a train station or streetcar: in America, only the poor and the real urbanite will use buses on a regular basis. All of this requires a mix of incomes, so that there is a mix of society and workers.

If everyone has to drive to work everyday, the neighborhood is not sustainable in the long run…

3) People want to walk. That requires safe, beautiful streets. Pedestrians need sidewalks and protection from speeding cars, AND interesting, pleasant things to look at. Just proximity is not enough…

Neighborhoods can be hamlets or villages in the countryside, or part of a collection of neighborhoods in larger towns and cities.

David Roeder’s column alerted readers to a massive downzoning proposal for the Gold Coast and River North put forth by Alderman Burt Natarus. The proposal (big PDF) does some sensible bulk reductions to protect several historic districts from overscaled 50-story towers: the luxury shopping area at Oak & Rush, the “Cathedral District” surrounding Holy Name and Fourth Presbyterian, and a few other low-rises north of Marina City and in assorted Gold Coast blocks. Sure, density is usually a good thing, but the livable (and mixed) scale of these blocks allows sunshine to hit the streets.

The largest geographical change, though, reassigns huge chunks of River North — the aforementioned area north of Marina City, several blocks around the Merchandise Mart, and even the heart of the gallery district — from zones like C3-5 to B4-4. “Dash 4” bulk is probably appropriate, for it would allow mid-rise new construction in the 6-8 story range. However, rezoning from Commercial to Business would exlude, or at least require special-use permits from, a wide array of businesses: art galleries, beer gardens, auditoriums, transitional shelters, pet shops, liquor stores, hotels, cabarets, etc. River North staked its meteoric rise on these uses, and has maintained an extraordinary concentration of galleries, restaurants, and jazz clubs. Now, Natarus seems to want them out.

Another troubling precedent: rezoning the Fourth Presbyterian block to R8. Fourth will likely never move from North Michigan Avenue, of course, but if it were (and its members specifically exempted churches from the Landmark Ordinance in order to leave that possibility open), the church could be torn down for a residential tower with no retail frontage as of right. If the city is going to stand on ceremony and downzone to strip away Fourth’s incentive to move, then why not go the whole mile and rezone the parcel for single-family residential?