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Overall, colleges, even outside of major cities, are highly dense, both structurally and in terms of population. They are also places where people primarily walk to get from building to building, possibly using a campus shuttle to a lesser extent as well depending upon how bad the weather is. At my own campus, unless you built up a high level of seniority within the dorms, you had to park your car in lots so remote from your dorm it was a 20-minute walk to get to it, making it a major hassle unless you wanted to go on a long-term trip over the weekend.
That said, virtually every campus I have ever been on which is not within a city proper is like a nightmare of postwar design. Roads are long and winding, and never set on a grid. Both dorms and classrooms are given wide setbacks from the street. Sometimes there are huge residential towers, but even these are isolated, in a "towers in the park" model. It's like traveling back in time to the haute urban design of the 1960s.
Obviously you can't raze whole campuses and start over again from scratch. But it strikes me that campuses are the one place in the U.S. where designing a pedestrian-only urban environment is possible without actually crimping the lifestyle of anyone.
Or maybe they are, and I'm just experiencing the worst. Surprise me.
To me it's just ugly undesirable exurban sprawl when there are plenty of good examples of nice exurban sprawl to be had. But whatever, it's apparently New Urbanism, whatever that is. Another example, would be Disney Land City (aka Celebration), FL. Again... not really seeing New Urbanism meaning anything there, either.
I went to Davis, which is outside the "city" limits. It's very not dense for a college campus, and certainly not set on a grid. And why would it be? Vehicular traffic is very restricted, so there's no need for roads for cars. A bicycle helps as it's impossible to get from on edge of campus to the other by any other means, unless you're a faster runner, in the ten minutes between classes. The on campus housing is all tower in the park style... not very towering, however. Increasingly, it is off-campus because there's really no room for it on-campus anymore.
UC Davis West Village is another example, although maybe nott what you're thinking of. At build-out it will have ~1000 units (2/3 apartments, 1/3 single family homes) and 45,000 square feet of commercial space. But it won't be built on a grid (one enterance; bicycles and pedestrians, of course, will have cutouts and there is an existing bicycle over-pass to campus) and will be typical not-towering tower in the park with lots of setbacks.
One reason for the road design is that back in the 70's until fairly recently traditional grid street design fell out of favor because of the supposedly "sterile" look and winding streets were "in".
Many colleges have become more car-centric due to the rise of both commuter and non-traditional (read older) students.
My college doubled in size in 15 years; it bought on some strip malls on the edge of campus and replaced them with "new urbanist" dorms and assorted cold stone and subway and whatever else on the main level.
Because the retarded zoning laws don't allow for anything but auto-centered development, anywhere. From which no one is safe, not even high schools or college campuses. Doesn't matter if you're already drowning in a sea of student debt, struggling to make ends meet by working PT at Starbucks while attending classes full-time. We're going to make it extra hard on you by burdening you with the steep expenses of car ownership, though we know you can't afford it. Welcome to modern serfdom.
New Urbanist is one of those retarded catch all phrases that means absolute bunk.
...
To me it's just ugly undesirable exurban sprawl when there are plenty of good examples of nice exurban sprawl to be had. But whatever, it's apparently New Urbanism, whatever that is. Another example, would be Disney Land City (aka Celebration), FL. Again... not really seeing New Urbanism meaning anything there, either.
Maybe I misused the term. My basic point was modern innovations in urban design could take campuses away from the silly "garden" (or, at more downscale ones "strip mall") model to an urban one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Malloric
I went to Davis, which is outside the "city" limits. It's very not dense for a college campus, and certainly not set on a grid. And why would it be? Vehicular traffic is very restricted, so there's no need for roads for cars. A bicycle helps as it's impossible to get from on edge of campus to the other by any other means, unless you're a faster runner, in the ten minutes between classes. The on campus housing is all tower in the park style... not very towering, however. Increasingly, it is off-campus because there's really no room for it on-campus anymore.
It's true a strict grid isn't needed - European-style irregular streets would be fine too. But I don't see any reason, fundamentally, why a campus couldn't be a tight network of buildings linked by mainly pedestrian "alleys" (perhaps wide enough that an emergency vehicle could get through in a pinch).
Also, if campuses were built in a dense, urban fashion, there wouldn't be a problem with off-campus housing, because you could fit 2-3 times more campus onto the same building footprint.
Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person
One reason for the road design is that back in the 70's until fairly recently traditional grid street design fell out of favor because of the supposedly "sterile" look and winding streets were "in".
True. It's the same reason why we're saddled with so much brutalist crap on campuses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person
Many colleges have become more car-centric due to the rise of both commuter and non-traditional (read older) students.
I didn't see much of this when I went to college, but that was over a decade ago. Looking on Google however, it looks like the commuter lots are still placed pretty friggin far from any of the classrooms (like 10-25 minute walk, depending upon where you are.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cisco kid
Because the retarded zoning laws don't allow for anything but auto-centered development, anywhere. From which no one is safe, not even high schools or college campuses. Doesn't matter if you're already drowning in a sea of student debt, struggling to make ends meet by working PT at Starbucks while attending classes full-time. We're going to make it extra hard on you by burdening you with the steep expenses of car ownership, though we know you can't afford it. Welcome to modern serfdom.
I disagree college forces you to have a car. It was pretty useless, as I said, to have a car as an on-campus student at my school when I was in college (1997-2001), because the lots were far away from the dorms, and you could only park at one. Plus the public busses were free during the school year, and there was a campus shuttle.
My point is despite having a car generally not being very advantageous at many universities, and campus being an environment where nearly everyone walks from place building to building (I'm counting both students and employees here) campuses are built as if they are parks with buildings interspaced instead of what they really are - mixed use live/work communities of an urban nature.
Both to account for commuting students and because there was an idea that colleges were supposed to be pastoral "groves of academe" instead of cooped up in relatively-tall buildings, so they built them like malls, generally low-rise and spread out, with a lot of landscaping. This makes them fairly pleasant to traverse but it can take forever. I haven't seen every school but don't see very many that have separate parking lots in front of each building--they use the mall model of a big parking lot around the campus, and in the best case scenarios, the transit center goes to the edge of the actual campus and not just a drop-off point at the outer edge of the parking lot.
In some ways, though, they are already built that way--on-campus dorms in most universities are designed around walkability, and at least at the colleges I have attended, a student bus pass (or healthy student discount for public transit) was included with tuition, while parking in student lots cost money. In fact, it was the free parking pass I got in grad school that really got me back into taking public transit everywhere, as I had when I was an undergrad (and didn't have a license.)
So, in a lot of ways, your mission is already accomplished (a lot of the basic lessons of walkability and mixed use are just re-learning of skills college students pick up) but they generally need big parking lots because most people have cars and are used to using them to get around.
I went to college long enough ago (C/0 '77) that campus buses were unknown except at the largest colleges like Penn State. Public transit was unavailable except in cities such as Pittsburgh. Add to those the fact that even 40 years ago colleges started to push most students off-campus after Sophomore year then cars make more sense, although where I went campus was very walkable (except for the hills). The Freshman dorm (where about 80% of that class had to live) was privately owned and a mile off campus with the walk going through an industrial area (truck depot and glass plant). The college was then, and still is, about 35% commuters.
A note on zoning: in general local, state and federal agencies are usually exempt from local zoning codes.
Last edited by North Beach Person; 06-08-2012 at 07:04 PM..
Reason: punctuation
I disagree college forces you to have a car. It was pretty useless, as I said, to have a car as an on-campus student at my school when I was in college (1997-2001), because the lots were far away from the dorms, and you could only park at one. Plus the public busses were free during the school year, and there was a campus shuttle.
Which is at odds with what you were saying in the OP.
So, in a lot of ways, your mission is already accomplished (a lot of the basic lessons of walkability and mixed use are just re-learning of skills college students pick up) but they generally need big parking lots because most people have cars and are used to using them to get around.
I agree that most of it has been accomplished. The ringing parking is honestly the best solution. On my own campus most parking was at the edge of the campus, with only campus employees able to park in the few spaces adjacent to buildings.
I just feel like they could have gone the extra mile, and for example:
1. Eschewed towers (which are ridiculously high-density for the settings of most colleges) and used more 3-6 story buildings which were placed more densely.
2. Made buildings setback from paths much more limited, so that they sat directly on "alleys" or at most were pushed back a few feet. As a result, classroom buildings could be set much closer together, and walking commutes shortened.
3. Kept green space to easily usable "parks" - perhaps with a New England "village green" model. In my experience, it's really only the green space directly around the campus centers which is used by students for recreation. The rest is just seen as an impediment to be trudged past.
4. Experimented more with "live/study" models. Although dorms are usually placed near the classroom buildings, they're seldom interwoven as they would be in a real mixed-use neighborhood. Hell, experimenting with dorms on the upper floors, and classrooms below, would be interesting as well.
At minimum, such a system would lead to much shorter walking commutes for students. It would also allow for a denser campus, which would save the university money in terms of having to acquire new land. Given what I know about urban design, and what students found desirable versus undesirable about on-campus housing when I was in school, I think most students would like such a system more as well. And I think paradoxically it would be much easier for schools to police bad behavior if campuses were set up in such a "neighborhood" format.
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