Planning a new neighborhood for a growing small town community requires understanding two phases: planning for growth and planning for the site. For worthwhile growth, the added community must be a positive asset to the existing town. As described in the “Growing Problem” article, the new neighborhood will need to be complete and balanced with a variety of uses. The next step is designing the specific site to be developed. In small towns, the landscape is a very important element in defining the allure and desirability of the place. The neighborhood should be planned to emphasize and enhance the natural characteristics of the site. I like to use the highlight of the landscape as the key landmark of the neighborhood.
There are many different components to be developed in the new small town neighborhood. I will touch on a few of them, but further information can be found in my book, “Preparing for Small Town Growth.” As mentioned above, I believe the first design move is found in the existing landscape. This is derived from the rural ideal of a small town. If I were designing a new urban city neighborhood, I may start differently. It is critical that the designer understand the metadata of the place they are expanding and (hopefully) enhancing. Using landscape as the primary guide, the variety of uses may be established around a community core and surrounding neighborhood.
Streets
Navigating within a mixed-use neighborhood is extremely vital to the neighborhood’s success. This is the role of the street. Traditional neighborhoods relied on grid patterns and multitudes of connections. Contemporary neighborhoods utilize a hierarchy of paths and a minimum of connections. I propose that small town growth may benefit most from a concept called “shared streets” (shown in the adjacent graphic). 
This is a means to reduce wasteful impervious pavement and create narrower streets on a connected grid. One of the advantages of the cul-de-sac is the privacy from frequent automobile traffic. Yet the advantage of the traditional grid is the connectivity of the street pattern. The shared street can mix the best of both worlds. The shared street is a place that most automobile drivers will not recognize to be a through street, although local drivers will know that they have the option to navigate the street. The reason that it is called a “shared street” is because it feels comfortable and scaled to the pedestrian, yet is suitable for infrequent use by automobiles. This has been successful throughout Europe, although many of the designs incorporate solid barriers, such as brick planters that cars must navigate around. In many North American states, there is significant snowfall and a necessity for street plowing in the winters. The proposed design incorporates a meandering paved path to provide the illusion of a pedestrian street; in actuality, the non-paved areas are made from a product called “grasspave” that has the benefit of grass but the strength to support automobiles. The result is a street that can be plowed, driven on, and played in. The ends of the shared streets will not connect to the collector roads with paved surfaces, but instead with the grasspave product. This paving differentiation will divert any non-local traffic to the larger paved roads in order to preserve residential privacies. The shared street is not a replacement for all streets; rather, it is just a refinement of the paths that were once broken by lollipop cul-de-sacs. The narrow shared street is an excellent solution to minimize impervious pavement that significantly adds to water pollution. It is also an effective means to slow and reduce traffic for residential privacy while continuing the grid network and allowing pedestrians, as well as automobiles, to remain connected to their neighbors. The lowered public cost of pavement, and increased value of property on narrow streets are just bonus benefits to living in a better neighborhood.
Additional Components
Streets are just one of the many elements of a successful small town neighborhood. Other elements include: the community size, layout, housing types, core businesses, drainage patterns, park system, technology system, material characteristics, financial feasibility, effective construction phasing, and many more. Please feel free to contact the author to learn more about planning America’s future.