Author: Mallory Baches

Beaufort was fortunate to have national known author, James Howard Kunstler, in town to speak recently.  If you missed him, you owe it to yourself to spend some time looking over his writings and messages.  Jim has been speaking and writing about the American condition since the early 90s with his book, The Geography of Nowhere, talking about the placeless building of the suburban condition and everyday American lives.  His later book, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.”  This work correctly anticipated the meltdown and great recession, of which we are are still in the midst.

In cities and small towns throughout America, we find telling characteristics unique to each region and gain insight into its history, art and daily life.  The dwellings, civic parks, architecture and design speak directly of the people who influenced and added charm to the province.  The most recent Civitas writing introduced the deep seeded notion of community.  From this springboard of ideas, we ask what brings people together and creates community?

The past eight Civitas writings have focused on creating and designing great places. We have discussed streets, agriculture, designing in context, and the public and private realms, all of which must be carefully thought out to make a village, town or city great. What we have not discussed too much is what makes the heart of great places: community.

The CNU Carolinas is proud to announce it’s 2011 Lecture Series.  The goal of the series is to...

The fabric of our communities is diverse. It is made up of many different components, including diverse people and their various lifestyles. One of the challenges we face is that we must understand how the sum of all these parts works together before changes can be made. Understanding how something fits into a larger whole is called “Context,” and context-based design and planning is key to retaining and growing a community’s sense of self and place.

The holiday season brings our streets to life. Many Beaufort Christmas traditions are based outdoors, and specifically on the street: Night on the Town, caroling, parades with Santa, embellishing the street lights with festive décor. People all over the county, the country and the world wrap their homes, yards, porches and roofs with light and holiday decorations. What do all of these traditions have in common? They are focused around the street. The street is the most basic element of the public realm that everyone encounters on a daily basis.

An Interview with architect/urbanist Dhiru Thadani As a world-traveling architect with an artist’s eye, it took only minutes after arriving in Beaufort for Dhiru Thadani to identify two key aspects of the city’s past – and its potential future. “You don’t have very good cell service, and the town is filled with beautiful, historic homes,” he said in an interview shortly before presenting his thoughts on growth and planning to 70 or so people at Beaufort City Hall Nov. 10. “If you can bring better and faster technology, young people will want to come here.

A New Urbanist Approach When planners and politicians sit down to talk “community planning,” it sometimes ends up an exercise in Sim City simpleness: Build this here, put the roads there, throw in a park or two and hope for the best. What’s missing? The people. As Beaufort’s leaders reach to blend the “hardware” of bricks and mortar with the “software” of people, finding ways to connect the two becomes the fulcrum of debate. Architect and urbanist Dhiru Thadani spoke about this frequent disconnect when he visited Beaufort recently. “We must rethink how we view ‘urban living.’ We don’t have to accept sprawl and suburbs. There are better choices, but we have to find ways to show these ways are better when the population has, for generations, considered a house in the suburbs as the real goal,” he said.

Great places, cities and towns are composed of many different pieces.  These pieces can be divided into two main parts; the Res Publica (the Public Realm) and the Res Privata (the Private Realm).  One without the other is a failed place, but with both, a place may become great.  Those parts, combined harmoniously create Civitas or the Complete City. The Res Publica is the realm which we all share together. It is much of what we draw our collective identify from.  This public realm is composed of our streets, parks, squares and civic buildings.  These items are the backbone of our community, our collective institutions.  The streets need to be beautiful and enjoyable to be in, not just singular transport tubes.  The parks, squares and other open spaces should provide a great variety of places for people to enjoy and socialize in. 

Is this the future of planning & settlement in the Lowcountry? As one walks, cycles, kayaks, boats, or drives throughout the Lowcountry Region of the Southeast, complementary natural landscapes and settlement patterns combine to form an inimitable experience.  Traditional settlement patterns such as Historic Beaufort, Historic Charleston, Historic Rockville, Historic Bluffton, and Historic Savannah attract locals and visitors, alike, because they are places worth caring about.  In fact, most of the places in the Lowcountry that people care about are those that emanate a “historic” or traditional settlement pattern of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.