A Real Eco-Trip : Development: Joseph Smyth designs carless, environmentally oriented communities. His influence has been felt in the Ahmanson Ranch project.

Joseph Smyth, a planner in Thousand Oaks who designs untraditional housing developments, used to chauffeur his clients around in a Cadillac he leased for $550 a month.

The car was large, luxurious and completely at odds with his work. Smyth is a fervent advocate of “eco-cities,” communities whose designs are based on environmental principles. And the No. 1 principle of an eco-city is the elimination of automobiles.

Smyth’s teen-age son, Jody, pointed out that the car was inconsistent with the cause. So last year, Smyth gave up the Cadillac for a pink-and-green mountain bike.

He now pedals to work and walks to nearby shops. When he needs to go longer distances, he hitches rides with friends. About once a month, Smyth rents a car. A compact, not a Cadillac.

“I’m saving $500 a month and I’m feeling a whole lot better,” Smyth said.

Now, he wants to persuade the 687,000 other people in Ventura County to do the same.

Smyth, 50, the son of a Texas architect, envisions a carless society--or one that, at least, has a lot fewer cars.

In 1986, he established a planning business in Thousand Oaks to pursue that vision.

“I settled in Ventura County where there was a lot of open space left,” said Smyth, whose Texas accent has been softened by years of living on the East Coast. “I looked around and decided this was the place that I want to design and build eco-cities.”

Two years ago he founded the Citizen Planners Project of Ventura County, a nonprofit organization that has been quietly drafting what it considers environmentally sound guidelines for development.

Last year, Citizen Planners published its first report, which outlined eight “ecological planning principles for sustainable living in Ventura County.” Organizers plan to refine those principles and drum up public support for a new development code, which they will urge city and county governments to adopt.

“This is very sweeping. It includes everything from social systems to preserving the natural environment,” said Jeannette Scovill, one of the leaders of the group.

Those principles include preserving open space by clustering buildings on a small portion of a development, preserving farmland, and emphasizing such technologies as fiber optics, clean energy and mass transit.

Citizen Planners has “opened up the possibility for people to think of themselves as planners,” Scovill said. “A lot of citizens think this stuff is too complicated for us to understand.”

Citizen Planners was born, appropriately enough, out of a popular workshop Smyth gave during the Earth Day 1990 celebrations in Thousand Oaks.

Scovill and others kept the ideas flowing with a series of meetings across Ventura County that led to the creation of the planning principles.

Many volunteers work with Citizen Planners, but Smyth is the organization’s creative force.

“He’s a very unusual guy. He has a certain zeal and enthusiasm which not many of us have. For that alone, he is enormously effective,” said Donald Brackenbush, president of the Ahmanson Land Co., which is developing the controversial Ahmanson Ranch project in southeastern Ventura County. His company has also been the major benefactor of Citizen Planners, donating $30,000 to the group.

“He’s an absolute visionary,” said Peter McCrea, whose family is developing a 300-acre ranch in northern Thousand Oaks.

Others might choose a different word to describe Smyth. Dreamer , perhaps.

So far, dreams are all that Smyth has to show for his ambitious designs. None has ever been translated into bricks and mortar. They exist only in the dozens of sketches, slides and reports that clutter work tables in his office.

Smyth admits that the idea of carless communities is a tough sell in Southern California, where the very social fabric is knitted with strands of asphalt.

The idea of eco-cities is not new. Designers such as Paolo Soleri, whom Smyth admires, have long advocated the concept of clustering, or developing only small portions of available land.

Smyth, however, does not go to Soleri’s extremes, in which residents are “beehived” in a few huge, densely populated buildings.

In Smyth’s ideal eco-city, only about 10% of the available land is developed. The rest remains as permanent open space or parkland.

It poses a direct challenge to the American Dream, as it leaves little room for the traditional, single-family tract home. Instead, residents would live in townhouses and condominiums in buildings four or five stories tall.

The model is more European than American, Smyth said. But he believes the automobile’s failings, smog and congestion, for example, have made Americans more willing to accept a new American Dream.

“The single-family tract house is not the essence of the American Dream. It is only a current form, which can change without altering or compromising the essence of the Dream,” Smyth wrote in a recent scholarly paper. “The essence of the American Dream has never changed: open space, freedom, opportunity for personal expression and a place we can call our own.”

Smyth’s eco-cities put many people on a small amount of land. The sites become villages that support their own markets, general stores, shops, community centers and other amenities. Residents don’t need cars to get around. And each owns a share of the open space that surrounds the community.

But the idea works only if automobile use is cut drastically.

By eliminating streets, parking lots and other car-related infrastructure, a developer can cut costs by 30% to 40%, Smyth said.

“The way to have affordable housing is not to cut down the size of a 2-by-4. The way to have affordable housing is to eliminate the automobile,” Smyth said.

But turning his vision into reality is a complex proposition, as his experience with the McCrea Ranch illustrates.

The McCrea family hired Smyth to design a community for the 300-acre ranch, on the northern edge of Thousand Oaks. Peter McCrea’s 83-year-old mother still lives there in a century-old farmhouse.

Smyth’s proposal was an eco-city showcase.

“It was one of the most beautiful projects you would ever, ever see,” McCrea said.

It also ran up against obstacles that proved insurmountable.

Smyth’s design called for a village of 300 residential units. All but 30 of them were condominiums and townhouses in four-story buildings. Smyth designed a town hall, a general store and market, offices and several other amenities around a pedestrian-only village center.

Under his plan, 12% of the 300-acre ranch would have been developed. The rest would remain as farmland and open space.

McCrea said one obstacle was city regulations. Thousand Oaks planners loved the design, McCrea said, but he realized it conflicted with regulations geared to single-family homes.

For instance, McCrea anticipated a fight over parking. Smyth had designed streets with curbside parking, but city regulations require off-street lots. Those would have pressed developers to pave over much more land than they wanted.

“They don’t mean to make it hard for what we want to do,” McCrea said. “They haven’t seen enough of what we want to do to know what . . . is required to do it.”

A bigger obstacle was financing. When California’s housing market plummeted, McCrea could find no banks or developers willing to back such a unique project.

“The way they limit their risk is they do what worked last year,” he said.

McCrea eventually abandoned Smyth’s innovative design for a more traditional one. The new design retains much of the village concepts of the original, but covers 20% of the land rather than 13%. Instead of a handful of single-family homes, the new plan calls for 170 of them and only 100 townhomes. The new design is in preliminary discussions with Thousand Oaks planners.

“I felt I would rather have a compromise that was headed in the right direction than cling to a dream that I thought would never happen,” McCrea said.

It is with the Ahmanson Ranch project that Smyth and Citizen Planners believe they have made the greatest impact.

Many environmentalists have blasted the proposed 8,700-person mini-city because of the traffic and air pollution it would bring.

But Smyth said the Ahmanson plan, although not ideal, uses some eco-city concepts.

Dwellings are mostly clustered around a town center in the midst of an expanse of open space. Plans include a fiber-optic telecommunications network that could encourage some people to work at home while remaining linked to the office.

Brackenbush of Ahmanson Land said Citizen Planners did have an effect on the design, although he noted that as many as 10 different planners have made contributions.

Citizen Planners, Brackenbush said, “is a very serious movement. It is not a flash in the pan. Ventura County is a very important area to carry it forward because there is so much vacant land here.”

Meanwhile, Smyth is pushing his most ambitious proposal to date.

He wants to tear down the ailing Anaheim Plaza, a shopping mall about a mile from Disneyland that is owned by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and replace it with an “urban village.”

His $500-million master plan would create 1,438 residences, a hotel and numerous shops around a 16-acre park.

By cutting back on parking structures, Smyth said, developers could afford to build a light-rail system that would link the community with downtown Anaheim and Disneyland.

The Anaheim project probably will never be built, but it has become a showcase design for the kind of eco-city Smyth dreams will blossom across the Los Angeles Basin.

It has been featured in magazines, discussed on cable TV and scrutinized by college students.

Last week, a planning class at UCLA invited Smyth to explain his design for the Anaheim mall.

Even though he only has a mountain bike, Smyth had no problem getting from Thousand Oaks to the campus in Westwood.

He asked one of his employees to give him a ride.