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I .7 LINK WORK TO HOME SUBURBS ARE NO LONGER JUST BEDROOM communities; the dispersal of employ- 1 ment out of the central cities has been going on for a generation. (As the writer William H. Whyte demonstrated two decades ago, big corporations leaving the city tend to relocate with- in afew miles of the chief executive's house.) But the result-the oxymoronic "office pazks" consist- ing of indistinguishable glass cubes amid a token fuu of grass and a giant pazking lot-is just a higher class of sprawl than the gas stations and fried-chicken places that would have been built there instead. If companies don't want to be downtown, they should at least attempt to integrate their of- tices-or factories, for that matter-into commu- nities. Nobody wants to live next to a steel mill, naturally. But in Laguna West, outside Sacramen- to, people aze happy to live within aquarter-mile of an Apple Computer plant, which provides 1,200 white-collar and assembly-line jobs. Apple agreed to locate there after the community was already planned; developer Phil Angelides says the com- pany liked the idea that executives and workers could afford to live in the same community. Playa Pinta, anew-urbanist community being planned for Los Angeles, has been mentioned as a possible home for the DreamWorks SKG multimedia com- pany. It could be an updated-and very upscale- version of the company town, which in this case will comprise 13,000 houses and apartments, shops, a park, promenades and jogging trails along the last tidal marsh in the city. Calthorpe believes that more businesses will move to new- urbanist projects as they grow disillusioned with the traffic and isolation of their office parks. "The idea is not necessarily to live in MAKE A TOWN CENTER Every town needs a center: a plaza, 1 ~ s uare or green that is a geographi- q cal reference point and a focus of civfe life -even if that just means a place to push a stroller or throw a Frisbee. Shop- ping malls are a poor substitute; the area they serve is too diffuse, and in any case their civic function is incidental to their real purpose-making money. Develop- ers often provide some parkland in their subdivisions, but it's usually on leftover parcels that wouldn't be built on anyway, by the edge of the highway or adjoining another subdivision. 52 :~~~NSW);Eli nl.ar 15- 1995 Mbdng Income levels in a neighborhood is a new- urbanist credo, and nobody does that better than Planner Oscar Newman.~lis scattered- site low-income housing for Yonkers, N.Y., is a model of its kind. But Newman Is no fan of the new urbanists. "Instead of saying, `This is what's wrong [with suburbs]; they should ask, `Why de people feel ft's worth ft to live there?, " the same development you work in," he says; "there are a lot of criteria for where you choose your house. But if people can walk to a park, to midday shopping, restaurants and day care, it's better for the people working there." SHRINK PARKING LOTS PARKING IS ONE OF SUBURBIA'S HIGHEST 1 ~ achievements. Only in the United States does the humblest copy-shop or pizzeria boast as much space for cars as the average city hall. But it is also a curse; the vast acreage given over to asphalt is useless for any other purpose, and goes unused more than half the time anyway. Most plan- ners regard parking as a prerequisite for economic growth, like water. But downtown Portland, Ore., which strictly regulates pazking, has been thriving with essentially the same space for cars as it had 20 years ago. Developers often build more pazking than they actually need; ahalf--empty lot is presumed to reassure prospective tenants that they'll never run out of space for their cars. Yet a bank, a movie theater and a church are all full at different times. One simple improvement towns can make is to look for ways to shaze and pool parking space among different users. The ideal-although expensive-solution to the pazking problem is for cars to vanish underground when they get where they're going. A shopping center surrounded by acres of striped asphalt, whether it's empty or full, might as well put up a moat against pedestrians.. Large parking lots should be situated behind buildings whenever possible-something most suburban zoning codes don't currently allow-and divided by streets, sidewalks or structures into smaller segments of around three acres or less. On-street parking in residential neighborhoods is con- troversial. Some planners favor it, because it creates a "buffer" between pedestrians and traffic, but others consider it a danger to children running out between the cars. FREDERICK CIfARI.I:S A di}~erent approach