On a gray, rather British looking Saturday afternoon, architect David Oliver is standing in the middle of Princeton Avenue in Salt Lake City.

Standing in the middle of the road is the kind of thing they do in Poundbury, England, where Oliver spends a great deal of his time. Oliver is a consultant architect to Prince Charles, who, as the Duke of Cornwall, is the sponsor of Poundbury — a "new urbanism" village in southwest England.

In Poundbury, as in other towns designed to follow the philosophy of new urbanism, walkers are more important than cars. In Poundbury, the streets are narrow and are designed with lots of bends, so cars drive slowly, when they drive at all.

The architect, a down-to-earth man who has an opinion and a story for every occasion, is in Utah this week as the guest of a St. George developer named Shandon Gubler. Gubler has purchased 700 acres in Ivins, where he wants to develop a new urbanism village, and he has hired Prince Charles's architect to give him advice.

But first, Oliver is visiting Salt Lake City, taking a tour of the good, the bad and the ugly of Utah architecture. Utah architect Brad Houston, who is also working with Gubler on the Ivins project, is Oliver's guide.

So, here we are, in the middle of Princeton Avenue, talking about cars, or as Oliver refers to them, "those things."

"What we have at Poundbury is a very intense use of land and a close proximity of people to their daily needs, so they can avoid the use of those things," says Oliver, nodding to Houston's SUV.

Oliver thinks Princeton Avenue is lovely. Quite British actually. But, even with its tree-lined streets and charming houses, it's still not the kind of neighborhood where you've got a market or a place to work within a quarter-mile walk, which is always Oliver's goal in the new urbanism villages he designs. The trick, he says, is a high density population in a small space, surrounded by open space.

Typical suburbs, in both America and the United Kingdom, are sprawling affairs that serve only one function. "All you do is live there," says Oliver, "because that's what it's zoned for. Then you get in your car and go to the zone for shopping or the zone for working or the zone for kicking things."

New urbanism is not a new idea to Utah. In fact one of new urbanism's American gurus, Peter Calthorpe, was hired in the late 1990s to help Envision Utah come up with "growth scenarios" for the Wasatch Front. As a result, places like Sandy are talking about new urbanism these days.

New urbanism's credo is that the unintended consequences of certain zoning, design and public policy decisions in the past several decades have created places that are not really communities. We've put garages instead of porches in front of the house, for example, which means that neighbors become isolated from one another. At Poundbury the garages are always around back, in well-designed "mews courts." And even front lawns have been eliminated, so that when people exit their houses they enter public space.

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Typical suburban neighborhoods also segregate people by income, says Oliver. But at Poundbury, subsidized housing sits next to affluent housing. "And you can't tell which is which."

The typical suburb is a "soulless development," says Oliver. "Gob-ons we call them. The cheapest, nastiest box you can get your hands on." It only costs about 10 percent more to build a development with quality materials and quality design, he says, if it's done right, and, done right, the houses don't need to be so big, he says. "And the developers have found that they sell faster and they sell themselves."

Prince Charles has championed new urbanism, and has been a vocal critic of both urban sprawl and current architecture. Some people have in turn criticized the prince. But Oliver thinks the prince is very knowledgeable about planning and design. And he's a regular bloke, too. "If you could get him down to the pub, you wouldn't know him from the rest of us."


E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com

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