11 Gray: Splitting lots and multiplication of smaller-scale individual buildings
To bring life to the neighborhood, it is essential that it can be a place where people live and work, where two essential parts of people’s lives can be brought together. There is a major shift in the way people live and work; every day sees more people working out of their homes. The separation between commercial and residential, made in modern zoning ordinances, drains the vitality from a city. When living and working intermingle, a place becomes more real.
Further, in order to encourage true belonging, there must be an opportunity for people to own their own houses and workshops and offices, and therefore for a progressive process of property subdivision by unfolding and transformation. […]
In parallel with this process, provisions are in place for the existing property and vehicular infrastructure to be reconfigured, allowing a more livable environment to form. Re-parceling properties, in accordance with new zoning, will produce a lively, varied, and well-adapted whole.
The most critical thing in the growth of the gray areas of our four color map is that development becomes individualized. Buildings and building projects are getting smaller, not larger. Instead of massive parking garages and condominiums which overwhelm the neighborhood’s human character, on the contrary, steps are being taken, day by day, year by year, to reduce the scale and grain of construction, to make the neighborhood therefore more of a place which people can belong to, more of a place where each person’s individual stamp is there, in the houses, in the offices, in the apartments, on the sidewalks, pavements, gardens, and fences.
When everyone builds his own home or business, in whatever way suits his life, then there is a chance of the neighborhood being a living place where each inhabitant, each family, and each business has an environment that belongs to them.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/9 The reconstruction of an urban neighborhood#