In 2009, Denver will be hosting the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national gathering of planners, architects, developers and others that are involved in creating new urbanist developments. As part of that event, the local CNU 2009 Host Committee is creating a “Regional Projects Book” to be published in conjunction with the 2009 Congress. Attendees of the conference will receive the book, and it will also be available for purchase by the general public. The book will highlight urban projects and issues of urbanism in Colorado.
Denver is the first city to ever host a Congress for the second time, and having CNU return here is a great opportunity for us to showcase our urban accomplishments. You can help by submitting or informally nominating projects that you think may be of merit. Please read the attached Call for Submittals for information on how to do that.
I nominate stapleton because i live there and it's amazing what has been done with the airport and surrounding boundries.
outstanding 3:26 but wouldn't that be a "sub" urban award?
Isn't Stapleton the largest new urbanist project in the country?
stapleton is an excellent example of what a suberb should be- it isnt sprawl, it improved and built on a bad part of town, and it is relatively close to the city.
er….Stapleton IS in the city. It's projects like it which have helped Denver grow in population for the first time in decades.
Stapleton is NOT urban. It has the same density of most new suburbs, there are no alternative transportation links beyond buses, and most disappointingly like everywhere else in suburbia, commercial activity is isolated from the residential and housed in big boxes. The only thing that Stapleton has done differently is to put disparate types of architecture right next to each other. In what urban environment would you find a Tudor style house next to a mission style villa next to townhomes that are trying to fit into DC next to an Ohio farm house? NONE.
And just because it is in Denver doesn't make it urban either. How about Green Acres, or Montbello, or the Denver Tech Center? Are those neighborhoods urban? Stapleton is a successful sub-development and it’s great that it is in Denver and not Douglas County somewhere, but it is NOT urban.
it's 3:26 if you consider stapleton to be a sub then michael jackson is normal…
Hey if martha stewart is getting involved won't make stapleton urban I don't know what will!!!
Actually, most of the city of denver is a collection of suburbs… err.. streetcar suburbs. No shame in that. Except today we have a lame bus system servicing us these neighborhoods instead of the convenience of a streetcar. Stapleton has nice qualities that may help it grow more urban in an organic way, maybe in the future… like a streetcar suburb. But the retail aspect of it is a collection of disparate, whory big box outlets like walmart, home deep hole, and north field.. they are contained contained in a vague attempt to keep the grid, and the sidewalks are a little better than the typical ped gestures in such places, but truly auto-centric suburban. Yes, I realize those shops are there to raise income and so we are told will be replaced in the future.. regardless of excuse.. still an autocentric "power center" (what ever the correct term is these days). So we can believe and hope in the future that the people in stapleton won't be lame when RTD whats to put a light rail station there.. or when they want to implement TOD zoning and limit parking.
Ditto to 12:34 and 8:24
Like many "new urban" projects it doesn't seal the deal…front porches are one thing, connectivity and walk ability is another. Admittedly it's evolving, but in the end it's still a planned community and if you're expecting the corner coffee shop, hair salon, wine store, sandwhich place it's not planned for. If you live in the middle, keep your car. Everyone says well it's only a few more minutes by car, but isn't that missing the point of the "more urb" concept?
Seemingly great for kids, the schools appear to be good. At the same time there are parks and pools all over town, not just an invention out there as some seem to believe. There is nice front porch interaction among neighbors, but the central park is mostly empty in the evenings. In the end the sprinklers are still running all over the place in the middle of the day and AC units are humming away on cool evenings.
Yep, still growing, the trees will look great in 30-50 years, the builder price increases keep the resale value up, and maybe they'll plan some flexibility back in, but not sure it's worth living in the middle of the growing pains.
Stapleton is more a condensed suburb than any kind of "new urban" neighborhood. Take a typical suburban house, stick a vestigial porch on the front and jam it onto a smaller lot. Done. It still has a broken, arbitrarily twisty grid, retail is segregated into huge big box strip malls, etc.
What makes our urban neighborhoods great is that they are unplanned. First they were farms, then the farmers sold off the farmland to individual builders (usually keeping the big corner farmhouses intact). Then the streetcar lines came out and little pockets of retail developed at the main stops, little parks got added, random houses got demolished and replaced, etc. It's organic. No huge development planned by a single company can hope to mimic that, and most don't even try.
For a perfect example, look at how disjointed and fake the Elitch's development is compared to the rest of Highlands. It's like somebody dug up a little slice of Broomfield and helicoptered it into the city. All those cheap yellow pressboard houses turning their back on the rest of the neighborhood. Terrible.
I don't mind the power centers. They'll be redeveloped over time and the developers needed a cash cow to pay for the residential. If a couple of temporary strip malls are the price we have to pay for the rest of the project, well, I can live with that.
My big disappointment with Stapleton is simply that it's not dense enough. Even by new urbanist standards it's pretty sparse. Too many detached houses, not enough anything else.
Overall I agree with the majority here: Stapleton is a fine model if the question is "how can we do suburbs right", but if you're talking about in-the-city urban development, we can do a lot better (and we have).
That having been said, Stapleton *is* the 800 pound gorilla of Colorado new urbanism. You can't have a conversation about NU in CO and not bring it up.
Anyway, here are a couple of suggestions:
* All the TODs planned around FasTracks stations.
* Wolff-Lyon's 8th and Pearl project in Boulder. It's small, but it's really, really good. Won a CNU Charter Award at some point, IIRC.
ya'll trippin stapleton is a great urban developement for denver, maybe not for san fran, chi, ny or even detroit, but for denver, yep, but keep in mind one of the reasons it couldn't get any denser was because of highway traffic(I-70 & 225) and no plans for widening the hi-ways, fast tracks wasn't voted for then. I know this because i am an ex residence of parkhill. The plan was for 50 thousand residence to move in stapleton, so if that hasn't changed it will be pretty dence on a 7 sq. mile piece of land. The area at one point was even considering being another city. Also the bigger picture for denver is to build up the density around dt. not the "hoods".
In defense of Highlands Garden Village: all of the houses along 36th Ave. and along Wolff St. face the older houses across the street, and their garages are in back the way they should be-go to Broomfield some time and you'll see snout houses with massive garage doors facing the street. They may be cheap construction, but overall Perry Rose did an excellent job of fitting a tiny bit of New Urbanism into an existing streetcar suburb. Less successful is the design of the retail component along 38th (too much parking, and the building with the Starbucks is just plain ugly), but it provides two things a lot of us wanted in this part of town: a natural foods grocery store and a good health club. And they're preserving the Elitch Theater, and the carousel building is still there, functioning as an events space.
Stapleton: I'd defend Forest City up to a point, and I'd also say they've done a far better job than the Lowry Redevelopment Authority-Lowry just turns me off. Forest City started with the so-called Green Book developed through community input, which called for the density they're building. Unfortunately the design of the retail components are mediocre (except 29th Avenue neighborhood center) and are not going to age well. I don't mean the actual buildings, but the unfortunate layout-it's a long walk between Target and Macy's, and you take your life in your hand when you cross that street with the roundabout. The growth of the housing component has been based on market forces, and what has sold best so far are the single family homes. Most Americans like living in these, despite the love planners have of multi-family dwellings (read Witold Rybczynski's Last Harvest, now in paper, which traces the development of a New Urbanist subdivision in rural Pennsylvania). I think Forest City devotes too much of the land to commercial-all the land around the old parking garage, for instance-but the Green Book called for having a lot of employment opportunities at the site. For anyone who doesn't realize it, there is a light rail station planned, just west of Central Park Blvd. along the rail line, and Forest City plans a TOD there. What will really be the test of Forest City's efforts: when they start building houses north of I-70. Will the market follow them? Sandwiched in between the old part of Commerce City and Montebello? We'll see. But I don't think it's fair to expect Stapleton to be developed to a density that is far greater than the surrounding established residential areas (except for the TOD). It's just not how the majority of people want to live.
Interesting to see all of the discussion, at the very least it is proof that there is a lot of interest in the city. I live at Stapleton and it sounds like I'll be the AIA Denver rep to the CAB pretty soon.
My blog comment is about the CNU 2009. In addition to this event, we have a Colorado chapter starting up for CNU. Get my contact info of our website if anyone is interested in joining.