He's called a visionary now. But in the mid-1960s he was just a kid on a bike, stopping to take a look at the scenery.
His family had moved to Palo Alto a few years before, and in that brief time he watched the orchards of northern California begin to disappear. Stopping his bike on a ridge above the valley one day - the asphalt and tract homes and smog laid out before him - he had his first epiphany about the pitfalls of suburban sprawl.Peter Calthorpe grew up to be an architect. Since then, he has become famous for his vision of the "placeless" place America has become and has made headlines for turning worn-out shopping malls into walkable communities. Newsweek magazine named him one of the nation's top 25 innovators.
This month he comes to Utah to help us look into the future.
Calthorpe has been hired by a public-private partnership called Envision Utah, a group made up of 100 Utah movers and shakers who want to help Utahns come to a consensus about how the state should grow.
Growth is inevitable, says Calthorpe. "You have to turn it into a positive thing." The trick, he says, is realizing that there are choices.
Calthorpe's mission is to take the population, density, transportation, air and water data predictions amassed by the State Office of Planning and Budget - what is known as the "baseline projection" - and help us come up with three or four different growth scenarios.
We could, for example, choose to build more highways, or we could choose to build more mass transit. We could choose to keep building the standard subdivision or choose to allow more density in some areas so that we could preserve open space in other areas. Calthorpe's job is to help us see what the Greater Wasatch Front will look and feel like based on the choices we make.
"He won't choose our alternatives for us," explains Robert Grow, chairman of Envision Utah. "He's sort of like an orchestra leader."
"Very few places (in America) are grappling with growth in a serious way," says Calthorpe. Washington, Oregon and Maryland have each adopted state laws calling for a regional plan to coordinate growth. Few places, he says, have a grass-roots, civic effort to plan for growth, and few civic groups are trying to orchestrate planning on a regional level. Utah, it turns out, is doing something bold.
"You're a little ahead of the curve," says Calthorpe.
What he wants Utahns to see, he says, is that growth without conscious decisions looks one way and growth that comes from conscious choices can look like something else.
Unintended consequences have always been a theme of Calthorpe's ideology.
Calthorpe is one of a handful of architects and planners who five years ago founded the Congress of New Urbanism. At its most basic, "new urbanism" says this: Unintended consequences of certain zoning, design and public policy decisions have created places that are not really communities.
It's the details that have done us in, they say - suburbia's cul-de-sacs, the garage doors that have replaced front porches, the lack of village greens, the architecture without details (because who can see details when you're driving at 60 mph?).
What we need, say the new urbanists, are towns rather than the kinds of suburbs we've let happen. We need places where children and the elderly can get around, where people walk and socialize.
Suburban sprawl wouldn't have happened without the automobile, nor without two major federal subsidies, says Calthorpe. One was the Federal Highway Bill, which begat the freeway system and its cousins, the major arterials. The other subsidy was the single-home mortgage deduction.
In many ways, there is no turning back, of course. "We cannot return wholesale to the form and scale of the pre-World War II American town, just as we cannot sustain the Ozzie-and-Harriet world of the '50s and '60s," wrote Calthorpe in an article in the Whole Earth Review. We'll still need and want cars. Mom-and-pop stores won't replace chain stores and big-box stores. "And unfortunately, varied, craftsman-like architecture built in small incre-ments is largely a thing of the past."
Still, he argues, we do have some choices. We can still strive for real neighborhoods.
"To Asa, who always reminds me what neighborhoods are for," Calthorpe wrote in the dedication of his book "The Next American Metropolis." Asa is Calthorpe's 15-year-old son.
Calthorpe will be bringing suitcases but no agenda to Utah, he says. Although he believes in "new urbanism" and although he has designed thousands of acres of planned communities in other states - communities full of mixed-uses, mass transit, walkable streets, open space - Calthorpe's role in Utah will be simply to "frame questions about urban growth," he says.
He will be joined by partner John A. Fregonese, a former Portland planner who helped orchestrate that city's Metro 2040 Growth Concept. Fregonese is "the nuts-and-bolts guy," says Envision Utah's Robert Grow. "Peter's a visionary."
Calthorpe, 48, graduated from Antioch College and studied architecture at Yale. Like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, he says, he got his architect's license without ever graduating from architecture school.
His resume includes a National American Institute of Architects Design Award and three national HUD awards.