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:: - s HIDE THE GARAGE Most suburban houses give the ap- 6pearancethat they are first of all places to park, turning to the world the blank and desolate face of a garage door. Neigh- borhoods look more pleasant when ga- rages are put behind the houses, accessi- ble by side yards or by alleys. • .~ MIX HOUSING TYPES OF ALL THE WAYS TO IMPROVE THE SOCIAL AND PHYSICAL organization of the suburbs, none would be as subversive as breaking the monopoly of single-family detached homes: that endless alternation of "Crestwoods" and °Auroras" intended to foster the illusion of preference in buyers' choosing between four bedrooms and three bedrooms plus a den. Homogeneity is the very essence of the suburbs. Attached houses, rental units, shops or businesses-anything that might attract traffic and its attendant evil, a decline in property values-are banned. This is a fairly new phenomenon in human history. For most of the last 9,000 years, most people inhabited villages, where by definition nothing was very far from anything'else. As late as the 1940s, for that matter, Memphis, Tenn., developer Henry Turley grew up in the kind of haphazard city neighborhood that is the despair of sensible planners: a jumble of stores, shacks, flats, walk- ups and decaying mansions, all suffused with the vivid street life neighbors made for themselves in the era before air conditioning lured them indoors. It is, of course, beyond the power of zoning to bring back those days, even if we wanted them back, but it may be possible to recapture some of the energy and spirit that character- ized American civic life before television clamped its monopoly on public discourse and entertainment. So in 1987, when Turley bought a 135-acre vacant plot on an island in the Mississippi five minutes from downtown Memphis, he embarked on a radically different kind of development, which began not by asking "What vill the county let me build?" or "What will the banks finance?" but 'What kind of place do people want to live in?" The result was Harbor Town, intended to be "a slice of the avorld-the more complete and varied the better." There are louses ranging in price from Sll4,000 to 5425,000, which contrasts with a typical subdivision in Phoenix, Ariz., for example, where the seven basic models run the gamut from 5271,990 to 5316,990. There are town houses and apartments, and shops being planned. Devel- apershad tried mixing housing types in the "planned communities" of the 1970s, but in those each use was isolated in its ownthousand- acre quadrant; in Harbor Town they are all within a few blocks of each other. Turley seems to have decreed that instead of golf, the leading recreational activity would be chatting with neighbors while watching the sun set over the river, so he set the houses close together and built cozy village squares. The houses themselves are an eye-popping collection of styles, including Charlestown provin- cial, Cape Cod and Bauhaus modern, but they have an underlying unity based on materials (mostly clapboard or wood siding) and the ubiquitous new-urbanist amenity, porches. Turley expects to make money on the project, when it's completed in 1997, but he also has a higher aim. "Democracy assumes-demands-that we know, un- derstand and respect our fellow citizens," he says. "How can we appreciate them if we never see them?" PLANT TREES CURBSIDE Nothing humanizes a street more than 8a row of trees shading the sidewalk. But they must be broad-leafed shade trees such as sycamores or chestnuts, not the dinky globular things like flowering pears that developers favor in parking lots. And they should be planted out at the curbline, where they will grow out to form a canopy over the roadway. Why don't more places have such an obvious amenity already? Because traffic engineers worry that people might drive into them. Strolling under a canopy of spring blossoms 50 NEWSWF.EK MAY I I ,, 5• 995 IOHN HUMBLE Multicar garages turn an unwelcoming face to the street I11ANF: (:1 K)K~I.1•:N II•:~~IIF: