Dan Anderton on Community Design, Planning, and Landscape Architecture

Senior Associate Dan Anderton describes how to design a vibrant community through the consideration of structure density, access to transportation, landscaping, environmental impacts, and diverse architectural design elements.
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Whenever we design a community or look at a community, we want it to become a place that's memorable. A place that will allow for people to feel like they are home. Making a memorable community is critical in the sense that you want to have a great transportation system. You want to have it so it's easy to get in and out of, and to drive to and drive from. You want it to have a sense of place, to have a place that's memorable. It needs to have community parks. It needs to have a place for gathering and socialization, but it also has to have places that can be private and secluded. It needs to take into impact the land use. And land uses are such that you have any kind of density from low density all the way up to high density. So, I pride myself in the fact that we can design a community that allows for any of those types of densities. We've referred to it as a density because that's how many units or how much commercial, or how much office can fit onto a space. The other concern we have when making a memorable place or space is that whole idea of the environmental impacts. The process we go through looks at the environment. It looks at saving tree areas. It looks at saving stream valleys, and it looks at buffering those so that you have those types of environmental impacts saved. We look at landscaping, landscape architecture, because that is part of the theming of the place. We need that community to have its own theme so it becomes more memorable. Two other elements that are important in the design of a community is to create a diversity in architecture. Everybody is probably been in to a subdivision that is stagnant because everything looks the same. What we really want to do is to make it so there's diversity, and so we can take the density that's being created, the different types of houses, and mix them together. I like the idea of creating a neighborhood, I like the idea of creating a neighborhood, and each neighborhood becomes its own entity within a larger community. And in that neighborhood, we can put each type of house or unit. Going from the center point or the neighborhood park in the middle, we can build out with heavier density, and that's usually like a multi-family or single-family attached type units or townhouses. And then as we go out, we go to lesser density, which puts in larger townhouses. And then it goes to small single-family detached houses and then to larger single family detached houses. That also makes it possible so that we can create a streetscape that will relate to the house size. So, the house has become farther apart, the streets become a little bit wider, the pedestrian ways become wider. Speaking of pedestrian ways, we really try and make it so that there is a network that allows for pedestrians. Streets need to allow for bikes. There needs to be both pedestrian and vehicular, but there also needs to be bike traffic and multimodal traffic. All of those things put together create an environment or a community that is, again, memorable. It's one that somebody wants to be there, they want to live there. And so it also makes it so that it's more desirable from a marketing point of view. It's also more desirable from a developer and a builder point of view.