Arts Center Helps Costa Mesa Paint Picture of Urban Village of Future

During a two-day conference here last week, a group of out-of-town urban planners set out to reach a nearby shopping center they could see from their hotel.

They soon found that there was no easy way to walk the short distance to the beckoning shops.

“You can’t get there from here,” one of them joked.

Their experience was an example of what people don’t like about the new clusters of office buildings and malls popping up in suburban communities in and around Orange County, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington and even Cleveland.

While they have different characteristics, these urban villages tend to have a number of annoyances in common. Such as traffic jams.

Tysons Corner, for example, was designed inefficiently, so that many of its office workers can’t walk from their office to a restaurant. Instead, they must drive, adding to the traffic crunch, which peaks not at rush hour but at lunch time.

Lack of Cultural Amenities

In addition, the generic glass office towers that have popped up in these urban centers are considered--with a few exceptions--architecturally undistinguished.

And if these new developments are to be the downtowns of the future, as their supporters claim, where are the cultural amenities--the museums, art galleries and the like?

The opening of a Nordstrom department store at one of two Tysons Corner malls, joked one consultant at last week’s Urban Land Institute conference here, “was the cultural event of the year.”

Yet like it or not--and many of the people who must commute to them do not--Tysons Corner and its cousins from Costa Mesa to Atlanta are here to stay, according to one expert on the way cities grow.

“The early 20th Century gave us the office building. The 1950s gave us suburban malls,” said Truman Hartshorn, a professor of geography at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who spoke at the Urban Land Institute conference.

Learning From Mistakes

The new suburban downtowns will be “the hallmark of the 20th Century,” said Hartshorn, author of a geography textbook called “Interpreting the City.”

The newer suburban downtowns are already learning from the older ones’ mistakes.

At Fairfax Center, a new urban village a few miles from Tysons Corner, Fairfax County planning officials insisted on closely scrutinizing the entire development plan for the area and got the developer to pay for road improvements next to the development.

In Costa Mesa, the Performing Arts Center near South Coast Plaza lends a cultural cachet to the adjacent shopping mall.

“The Performing Arts Center has added a lot to Costa Mesa,” said Christopher B. Leinberger, a managing partner at the real estate consulting firm of Robert Charles Lesser & Co. and author of an influential Atlantic article on urban villages, who also spoke at the conference. “Costa Mesa can begin to paint a picture of a really urban, vital place,” he said.

While urban villages were a hot topic at the Urban Land Institute conference, which drew 90 planners, developers and academics, “the public still doesn’t understand them very well,” Hartshorn said.

Most of them are so new--products of a 1980s office boom that gravitated to suburban malls or airports--that people at the conference couldn’t even decide what to call them. Among the choices: suburban activity centers, urban villages, suburban downtowns.

Whatever they are called, it is clear that many city planners and developers didn’t really anticipate their phenomenal growth and the kind of traffic problems they have caused.

In northern Virginia, for instance, planners thought places such as Tysons Corner and its environs would be mostly suburbs of single-family homes, and residents would need roads that led into nearby Washington to get to work.

With few exceptions, the major local highways radiate out from Washington. But growing numbers of people now work in Fairfax County and need roads that take them across the county to jobs in suburban office parks.

Traffic Problems

The resulting traffic snarls, similar to those experienced in urban villages across the country, have given the community a black eye.

The answer to the traffic problem, according to Hartshorn and other experts, lies in denser development, not less development. In other words, even more buildings should be built.

That may not be a particularly popular solution with commuters stuck in traffic jams around these centers. But it could work, insists Hartshorn, if apartment buildings and condominiums are built near offices, eliminating the need for people to drive long distances.

“Critics have got to start taking a second look at these centers,” said Hartshorn, “because suburban downtowns will be our legacy to the next century.”