Architect urges urban planners to rethink ‘sprawl development’

Friday, February 10, 2012

RATHER than expand territories by building exclusive communities in the suburbs, a US-based architect is pushing for development that allows homeowners to be nearer to the city centers.

Senen Antonio, partner and director of business development of Duany Planter-Zyberk (DPZ) and Co., in a forum organized by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc., said today’s urban planners have succumbed to “a disease called sprawl.”

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He explained that sprawl development means segregated and single use of land that tends to favor vehicles instead of pedestrians. (See related stories in A2 and A11.)

In such developments, Antonio said roads are planned to make sure cars can pass smoothly, without taking into consideration the distance pedestrians have to walk to get to a destination.

Antonio, considered a leader in the new urbanism movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment, said the sprawl development is a very inefficient way to develop land. He noted such developments make citizens travel more by car, thereby adding to transportation expenses and more carbon emissions.

He, instead, said building traditional neighborhood developments is the smarter way to go.

His firm advocates designing compact communities that are pedestrian-friendly and mixed-use. The design philosophy makes sure that a community has residential, civic and retail offerings that are all within walking distance. These also protect historically and culturally significant areas.

Antonio said the residential area is for a wide range of incomes and not just for the elite or middle class, to promote cohesiveness. Enclosing communities, he said, promotes discrimination because everyone in the community is the same and anyone different is an outsider.

“It creates a caste system of sorts,” he said.

Antonio criticized how gated communities are being named, saying it almost sounds like a joke for a residential community to sound like a place in Europe when it is in the middle of the tropics. “They say nothing about the actual place. It’s all fake, manufactured,” he noted.

He also assured that traditional neighborhood development is cheaper than suburban sprawl because it makes use of lesser land.

But even if Cebu seems headed in a sprawl development, Antonio said all is not lost as their firm has been able to “repair” some towns that grew in a similar direction.

Architect Melva Java, a reactor to Antonio’s presentation, said Cebu is not beyond repair yet. She noted that traditional neighborhoods still exist in some Cebu towns, which grew according to plans set in place by Spanish colonial authorities.

She hopes the New Urbanism movement brings a renewed appreciation for what old Cebu used to do in terms of urban planning and eliminate the need to copy what foreign cities have been doing.