In May the Urban Land Institute published Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages. The book is a coffeetable-style journey through many of America’s recent suburban town centers. To browse the book, visit the ULI Bookstore here.

I am happy to say that I contributed two of the case studies that appear in the book. One is The Glen, in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and the other is Crocker Park in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.

Suburbs need town centers. They need places for people to gather, linger, live, work, and of course shop and dine. Ideally they are linked by transit to the rest of the metro area. The mixed use town centers featured in this ULI book, and numerous other town centers, are part of a trend across the country to provide new and exciting destinations as enclosed malls fall out of favor. The good news is these town centers are succeeding. They don’t necessarily have all the things I listed above, but they are attractive, well branded, well maintained and managed, and in many cases have become regional destinations.

A few things to remember about these new mixed-use town centers. They are very expensive to pull off, and often subsidized, which is not a bad thing. Often what they are replacing is a greyfield or brownfield, or simply an underutilized site. As well, despite being very walkable and well-designed within their borders, they are often hard to reach on foot, by bike or by transit.

Mixed-use town centers are typically retail driven, and are in prime suburban locations, often where a traditional regional mall could have been located. In other words, they can’t work everywhere. Indeed, that is what a development like Victoria Gardens (located in Rancho Cucamonga, California) is - a regional mall with department store anchors in a pleasant, walkable, village-like setting. (A mix of uses is planned, but wasn’t built when I visited.) Those like Excelsior and Grand in suburban Minneapolis have a much greater amount of housing as a component, but the retail had to be there to begin with in order to get premium pricing on the residential units. A lot of suburbs want a fancy town center like those featured by ULI, but do not have the resources nor the market demand to make them work out.

I was able to visit my two case studies, and I liked what I saw. Crocker Park is really nice, with apartments above retail, some good restaurants, a multiplex theater, very good events programming and an oversized chess set. I wish the Dick’s Sporting Goods store, being a terminating vista, was instead city hall or a library, but you can’t have everything, right?

The Glen is a former naval air station, and they even saved the old hangar and control tower building, which visually anchors and distinguishes the project. The Glen town center is surrounded by attractive residential infill as well as an adjacent park and lake, which complement the project well.

I would be remiss if I didn’t credit the municipalities for allowing these mixed-use projects to exist in the first place. Most of these mixed-use centers would previously have been illegal according to zoning in their respective cities, so kudos to enlightened planners and elected officials for allowing new zoning codes and changes, not to mention assisting with public financing for these projects.

My favorite urban and suburban places are typically older downtowns, town centers or village cores; those that have evolved over time. Naperville, Illinois, Claremont, California and of course Country Club Plaza in Kansas City are just three of numerous older suburban downtowns that come to mind. The new mixed-use town centers, especially those featured in the new ULI book including Crocker Park, The Glen, Excelsior and Grand and the East 29th Avenue in Denver are beautiful, well designed places. One hopes that they can evolve well in to villages for the ages that are known more for their gathering places than just their shopping options.

Check out a recent article of mine in the April issue of Urban Land, entitled Getting Around in the Heart of Texas. It discusses tollways, transit-oriented development, bridges, and even logistics hubs. There is a lot going on in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with regard to transportation. I hope you find it interesting.

In the course of researching this article, I stopped at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Las Colinas was started in the 1980s as a master planned mixed use area with office, hotels and residential. It is built on a lake and canal system, so it has this vague Venice/Japanese theme, weirldy cool. But the wild part of it is the people mover system, which is an elevated mini-monorail designed to link the major destinations at Las Colinas.

Granted I was there on a weekend, so it was already pretty quiet, but Las Colinas sure had this feel of a good idea gone awry. The thing is, if the monorail can be linked in to the light rail station planned nearby, suddenly the whole thing has new life and a multimodal link is formed. I hope it works!

Last week my son Ellis started daycare at Jardin Magico, a bilingual daycare located near our house in Minneapolis. They teach kids in English and Spanish, serve organic foods, use cloth diapers and make sure kids get time outdoors every day. Perhaps best of all, we can get there by bike. I got the bike bug last year after visiting and biking around the Netherlands, and I am happy to be able to use my bike for everyday needs at home. I’m not the only one - every day there are are several bikes parked outside the daycare, with parents dropping off or picking up their kids.

The short bike commute to Ellis’s daycare is not pretty. In fact, it is a lesson in urban history and fraught with plenty of obstacles. I ride out my alley, up one street, into a driveway and on to a sidewalk, turn right, slow down to watch for trains, then stop at Hiawatha Avenue, a big highway that runs parallel to the light rail line. It is busy and imposing. At least you can push a button and get a walk signal, but is is not a comfortable crossing and there certainly isn’t a formal place for bikes. Once across it is again up on the safety of the sidewalks, if you can call them that, for they are a combination of crumbling concrete and asphalt adjacent to a former mill that is destined to become a nice TOD if the Gods cooperate. Then I cross four sets of active freight rail tracks and if traffic is light, I then descend down in to the street and continue the next two short blocks to the daycare, aware the entire way that cars coming from every direction may not see me. And all this towing kid in a trailer. It isn’t far, but it cuts through a swath of old and new (and future) Minneapolis. Nonetheless, it is the journey that counts, right? And beleive it or not, it is easier than driving!

Changing gears (no pun intended) from Minneapolis to Indianapolis - My friend and colleague Adam Arvidson, a Minneapolis-based landscape architect and writer, recently wrote in Metropolis Magazine about the new urban bike trail in Indianapolis. Read his article here. It seems as though the fair city of the famous car race is leading the pack in terms of urban biking. I’m sure the Dutch aren’t envious…yet, but be sure to bring your bike next time you are visit Indy.

Improved bike lanes and bike access in our cities is one of many keys to their livability and sustainability. It can’t just be recreation trails, either, although that is certainly important, as we Minneapolitans know. The entire city needs to be accessible on foot, by bike and by transit. The new path in Indianapolis will certainly be one to watch as it evolves and connects more of the city together.

Of all the talk lately in the mainstream media about how to be more “green,” the discussion is typically about how we live, not where we live. Rising gas prices have “fueled” the discussion of green even more, and thankfully today’s New York Times contains an Op-Ed by Paul Krugman called “Stranded in Suburbia” that finally brings the topic of “where” we live in to the discussion in to the mainstream media.

Everywhere you look, there is talk of green. My local paper, the Star Tribune, published a special section recently on how to be more “green.” It discussed the usual suspects of recycling, installing energy-efficient light bulbs, building or remodeling with energy-efficient materials (bamboo and cork are all the rage), and buying a hybrid car. Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, as chair of the National Governors Association, has made clean energy his main topic. Of course, we are all familiar with the writings of Thomas Friedman and the Nobel Prize-winning efforts on the part of Al Gore to raise awareness of climate change.

But rarely, from my local paper on up to Friedman and Gore, does where we live garner a mention. Yet it must. True, our buildings are responsible for the greatest amount of carbon dioxide emissions, but transportation is close behind. Most Americans depend on an automobile for nearly all needs, and that not only creates CO2 emissions but also makes gas price increases more painful because they must drive. New York City doesn’t have the lowest per capita energy consumption because New Yorkers recycle and drive hybrids, but rather because of urban density and transit. Urban dwellers are more energy efficient because they occupy smaller spaces and because they meet more of their needs without an automobile.

Geography is destiny. True, we need to be a whole lot more energy efficient with our building practices in this country, but all the green buildings in the world solves only half the problem if they are accessible only by car. It is a mixed blessing that high gas prices are finally prompting this discussion, but Paul Krugman is helping us finally get there.

As Doug Farr notes in his recent book, Sustainable Urbanism, getting urban design right in order to mitigate climate change is this generation’s moon shot. It involves both how and where. The planning and development industry knows this, and knows how to get it done. But, as Krugman points out, it will take an educated public to accept higher density and push for increased transit funding, and simply more sidewalks. This may be our moon shot, but luckily it doesn’t involve rocket science to get us there.

Three years ago the talk at dinner parties was how much people made on their condominiums. Now it is the price of gas. We’ve had it good for so long, and now people are getting nervous when they have to spend upwards of $100 to fill their tank. All of this emphasizes the need for an improved transportion bill by congress next year.

Unfortunately, the discussion revolves around how to get the price of gas back down. Even our presidential candidates float the idea of a federal “gas tax holiday” for the summer, a ridiculous notion considering our literally crumbling and underfunded road system. Congratulations to Senator Obama for taking a stand against it. Still, there is no high level discussion of the future of transportation funding.

Luckily, there are several groups trying to push for a more enlightened federal reauthorization, which is due to occur next year. A recent article in the Washington Post by Judith Rodin sheds light on the issue. It was reprinted in my local paper, the Star Tribune. Link to it here.

Rodin discusses the lack of transportation funding, even for existing roads and transit, but also points to the Center for Housing Policy report that indicates working families spend nearly as much or more for transportation as they do for housing. For a link to a previous Joe Urban entry that discusses this study, click here.

We need to worry less about the price and source of more oil and more about simply reducing our dependence on it. As individuals we need to find ways to drive less, and entities all the way up to the federal government need to be on board in this effort. The last thing we need is a gas tax holiday. A progressive federal highway bill is imperative.