Site Design for Multifamily Housing
Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods
168 pages
8.5 x 11
121 photos, 33 illustrations
Book Description
The United States is over eighty percent urbanized, yet over half of the population still lives in suburban settings, characterized by low-density, automobile-dependent development with separated land uses. These disconnected and isolated models of development have been linked to increased greenhouse-gas emissions and reduced quality of life, health, and social connections. In Site Design for Multifamily Housing: Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods, the authors explain that creating more livable and vital communities is within reach and the design and development of multifamily housing is a key component to reaching this goal.
Multifamily housing is an important component of increasing density, but large lot multifamily developments often lack connectivity and hence limit livability and walkability. Multifamily housing in suburban areas presents greater challenges than in urban areas due in part to larger lot sizes and street patterns that are often a mix of cul-de-sac, curved, looped, and dead-end streets. Increasing the livability of these developments is an important first step in affecting the livability of the country as a whole.
This handbook introduces planners, developers, and designers to ten key elements of multifamily site design, comparing typical and recommended conditions. Case studies of successful large lot multifamily developments as well as retrofit proposals for existing developments with low internal and external connectivity will demonstrate how the tools in the book can be applied. Examples are drawn from Oregon, California, North Carolina, and Arizona. The ideas and tools in this book, including the planning checklist, code guide, and code summaries, will help users to create more livable, vibrant, and healthy communities.
Review Quotes
"[A] straightforward guide that offers design criteria for pedestrian networks, street design, open space, landscape design, and more..."
Landscape Architecture Magazine
"Site Design for Multifamily Housing offers designers, developers and planners clear and cogent site design advice for improving connectivity, walkability and livability—features that are crucial to the design of better, more resilient suburban futures—all in an easily-referenced handbook format."
June Williamson, Associate Professor of Architecture at The City College of New York
"This book-- direct, concise, practical-- fits nicely into what may be a developing genre of guides to achieving greater sustainability without megaprojects and without immediate radical change in everyone's mind-set."
Planning
"This invaluable 'how-to' guidebook demonstrates easily understandable interventions that can be championed by the array of participants in city building. Site Design for Multifamily Housing is a distinguished and timely resource that will clearly motivate the transformation of North American suburban contexts to be more connected, livable, and enjoyable."
Scot Hein, Senior Urban Designer, City of Vancouver
"Site Design for Multifamily Housing is a much-needed urban planning resource that will encourage infills, retrofits, and the improvement of existing suburban sites through the introduction of design and coding techniques for better connectivity and better urbanism that are attractive to the emerging markets."
Galina Tachieva, partner and Director of Town Planning at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company
Contents
The Handbook's Purpose
Introduction
Site Design Criteria
Chapter 1. Pedestrian Network
Chapter 2. Street Network
Chapter 3. Access Points
Chapter 4. Edges
Chapter 5. Automobile Parking
Chapter 6. Street Design
Chapter 7. Building Massing & Orientation
Chapter 8. Open Space and Landscape Design
Chapter 9. Bicycle Facilities
Chapter 10. Relationships
Project Profiles
-Heron Meadows, Eugene, Oregon
-Cherry Orchard, Sunnyvale, California
-Colonial Grand, Huntersville, North Carolina
-Sheldon Village, Eugene, Oregon
Project Retrofits
-Riviera Village, Oregon
-Villas at Union Hills, Arizona
Project Checklist
Code Guide
Code Guide Appendix
-Arlington, Virginia
-San Jose, California
-Eugene, Oregon
-Huntersville, North Carolina
-Asheville, North Carolina
Events
Webinar: The Future of the Suburban City
Webinar: The Future of the Suburban City
Thursday, 28 April 2016 - 1:15pm
April 28, 2016 – 1:15 to 2:15 PM ET
Places that grew up based on the automobile and the single-family home need to dramatically change and evolve. But suburban cities have some advantages over denser cities in an era of climate change, and many suburban cities are already making strides in increasing their resilience.
On April 28, join the Security and Sustainability Forum and Island Press for a webinar about the promise and challenges of the suburban city. Panelists include Grady Gammage, Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and author of The Future of the Suburban City: Lessons from Sustaining Phoenix, and Nico Larco, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon and author of Site Design for Mulitfamily Housing. Take a fresh look with Grady and Nico at what it means to be sustainable and examine issues facing most suburban cities around water supply, heat, transportation, housing, density, urban form, jobs, economics, and politics.
