Abstract
Site Design for Multifamily Housing: Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods provides practical guidance for planners, developers, and designers to create livable, connected multifamily housing developments and neighborhoods. While livability is one of the core values of sustainability (Berke et al. 2006), it has been hampered in many US communities due to lacking connectivity and increasing autodependency. Today, a disproportionate number of residents in the suburbs depend on automobile even for local daily trips to schools, shops, services, and recreational facilities. The authors address that the site design for multifamily housing promoting connectivity and accessibility is critical, especially in the suburbs, because denser development and multifamily housing are important components of compact and walkable development that enhances community livability.
The main component of this book is ten key site design criteria including pedestrian network, street network, access points, edges, parking, street design, building massing and orientation, open space and landscape design, bicycles, and relationships. The criteria are comprehensive for increasing connectivity and accessibility in and around a multifamily housing development but not mutually exclusive. The recommendations in each site design element consider physical aspects (e.g., efficiency and attractiveness) as well as social aspects (e.g., safety and social relations).
The first nine site design elements address how to increase connectivity within the development and to surrounding developments through an effective design of walking, biking, and driving paths, parking, building structure, and open space. In particular, the authors emphasize how to make a multifamily development more connected to external streets and nearby developments. The last element, relationship, focuses on the site design methods to engage with specific surrounding uses including commercial areas, single-family homes and other multifamily developments, and open space. Each site design criterion is accompanied by its definition, examples of existing conditions that are missing the site design element, and recommendations that reflect the site design element.
The section of site design criteria is followed by exemplary suburban multifamily developments that integrated the site design criteria. The book also includes a section of how exiting projects might be retrofitted to incorporate the site design criteria. These examples allow readers to have an opportunity to apply the site design elements to practical cases. The final two sections consist of a project checklist that can be used during project development and municipal codes from five progressive cities in Oregon, California, and North Carolina that have embraced the site design elements.
This book may be used as a desktop reference for planners, developers, designers, and even residents and as a textbook for a site design class. Not only does this book illustrate practical cases and give ideas of an effective site design for multifamily developments by using numerous maps and photos, but it also connects the site design elements to city codes. This book is clearly written and is easy to follow with an instruction to use the site design criteria and visual images.
What the book lacks is the backgrounds of how the progressive cities began to adopt their codes. Additionally, it does not discuss financial viability for the proposed improvements or the strategies to adopt such codes. A brief discussion on financial reality or strategies to adopt codes that enhance livability will help understand how planners and local officers can play a role in adopting such codes. Also, a discussion on the relationship of site design with urban planning and architectural design may be useful. Finally, as housing development is so different politically, socioeconomically, and culturally across regions, including additional examples of multifamily housing development from the midwestern and the eastern regions will be helpful.