By Dom Nozzi

March 11, 2013

As I often point out, reducing sizes of spaces is one our most essential tasks (at least in the walkable town centers of our city), which means I regularly want to refer to the need to achieve or protect human scale. I guess a reason I like “human-scaled” is that I commonly point out that we have ruined ourselves by designing to make cars happy, rather than meatmarket people. “Human-scaled” ties into that. I strive to be clear about what I mean by “human-scale” by talking about what I consider to be appropriate building heights, size of setbacks, and number of travel lanes (or width of street) in various contexts.

In my view, anything more than 5 stories exceeds human-scale (Paris does quite well at 5 stories, and we can get a LOT of density at that height). In my opinion, when we talk about a town center (where I believe human-scale is essential), two or three lanes of street width SHOULD be the limit. I believe places like Hong Kong, Manhattan, and the Champs-Elysees are wonderful DESPITE their over-sized buildings and over-sized streets, not because of such features.

I LOVE the concept of the transect partly because it provides design choice for the entire continuum of lifestyle choices. There are many different preferences for what people seek out in how their environment or neighborhood is designed. However, while I am a strong advocate of providing several different “transect zones” for different lifestyle preferences, I also am a strong advocate of insisting that WITHIN a transect zone, we stick with the theme and avoid transect violations. There should not, in other words, be a design continuum WITHIN a transect zone. My personal preference is to live in and celebrate the compact, walkable transect zone, so I tend to talk about that design almost exclusively. And I insist on certain design elements within that zone. I oppose things I view as violations of such a transect.

One of my best friends in Boulder regularly tells me not to ever mention to any of my friends or family (or on my Facebook posts) any good things about Boulder Colorado because she is very worried that too many people will want to move to Boulder. I usually respond by telling her that Boulder can benefit from having a lot more people move here. One important thing Boulder needs, I tell her, is to increase the low, suburban densities we have in places that need to be more compact and walkable.

Despite my frequent comments along those lines, she continues to believe (like most in Boulder) that the most important way to keep or improve quality of life in Boulder is to STOP LOCAL POPULATION GROWTH.

By contrast, one of my most important agenda items for the city is to REMOVE EXCESSIVE OPEN SPACE (mostly for cars) so that the city has more intimate, human-scaled spacing. Examples of excessive open space: big streetside parking lots, big roadway dimensions, big building setbacks, and big private yards.

Tags » Building Height

Human Scale in Urban Design