Declining Volunteerism and the Case for Connectivity through Mixed-Use Density

By John Rufo

We were intrigued by a story in CityLab by Linda Poon last week where the cause and effect of a national decline in the rate of volunteerism was connected to lower rates of home ownership and higher levels of economic stress. Decline in volunteering rates however fell more steeply in rural and suburban areas than in urban areas, suggesting that higher levels of economic distress and social isolation may be more common outside of urban areas. Robert Grimm director of the Do Good Institute says the Social Capital Index measures how “connected a community is” by looking at such data points as “how often residents volunteer in a given year, the number of civic and social organizations per 1,000 people, and how much members trust one another”. In urban areas, where decline in volunteer rates was evident, lower homeownership rates were a common theme. “You can imagine that if you buy a home in a community, you tend to be more anchored to it, and be in it long-term,” says Grimm. “Historically, those kinds of behaviors have led people to be more engaged.”

As architects and planners we asked ourselves what steps should the design and development community be taking to foster community building and engagement? As we strive to solve the housing crisis, how is community connectivity impacted by more rental housing and less home ownership? The inevitability of increased density and a lower rate of home ownership that is the natural result of development in urban areas, does not have to lead to less connectivity.  

Civic spaces transformed for teaching, learning, shopping and connecting

Advocating for good mixed-use design is one important ingredient in pushing back against disconnected communities. Thoughtful mixed-use planning emphasizes synergy between commercial and residential uses. Successful mixed-use developers will tell you that amenitizing a project with commercial tenants that residents want to be near is a no-brainer. Likewise, retail tenants, restaurants included, want to know how many “roof tops” (read “dwelling units where people sleep”) are in walking or easy commuting distance from the project. While initially the goal of the developer is getting deals done and securing a financial return on the investment, today’s enlightened developers will tell you that the over-arching mechanism making all this possible is integration and connectivity to the larger community.

Well-designed edges fronting on green space and the Time Out Market at 401 Park Drive Boston

In our experience community connectivity is strengthened when the citizens of a neighborhood can take symbolic ownership of the public realm, even when it is owned and programmed by a private developer. Spaces that invite you in, provide synergy with ground floor businesses and allow for art and engaging programming will ultimately be identified as a key part of the neighborhood. Historically these spaces have played host to speeches, community action, recreation and moments of serendipitous connections. Today they might play the same role or be a place for an outdoor yoga class, a kid’s fair or a farmer’s market. Programming flexibility is key as are well designed edges that people want to occupy.

Davis Square, Somerville + Depot Square, Upper Falls Newton - Small urban spaces programmed for community events, art and leisure

While not all projects can satisfy every community’s wish list for favorite tenants and project design, if a development team listens long enough and carefully enough to a community, it can glean the general ethos of a neighborhood and use this as a litmus test for programming and design decisions in an effort to find common ground. At Form + Place our strategy for community building is to creatively engage all voices to find an optimal balance between certainty and flexibility in the development process.

Mixed-use development and careful neighborhood visioning can also yield another critical tool in combating social isolation as evidenced in phenomena like declining volunteer rates.  Projects developed in urban areas with good access to public transportation can cut down on commuting time of residents. “Commuting time is also connected to how people give,” says Linda Poon of City Lab. “The longer it takes people to get to work, the less time they spend on their community and civic obligations.”

It’s interesting to think about this aspect of connectivity in conjunction with the gig economy. “When fewer people engage with each other, that’s where you’re going to have a greater level of social isolation and lower levels of trust in each other” Says Grimm. This may be why co-working and retail co-working have been such popular trends of late. While more of today’s workers may be sole practitioners or connected to very small organizations with little or no workspace footprint, people still want to be around other people. Retail co-working – the use of restaurant spaces that are inactive during the day as co-working space - is a fascinating answer to the isolation problem. A restaurant space by its very nature creates an ambiance of social interaction. Allowing that space to be utilized as a workplace in off hours is a kind of sustainable response to the need for connection and neighborhood resource utilization.

Spacious – The Milling Room – Upper West Side New York – Open daily 8:30 to 5:00

Each city, each town, each neighborhood is different and the attributes that define their character are varied in nature and ever changing. With so much in flux it’s a wonder we can ever feel that a particular project got it right or that an effort to move the needle will bear fruit. But we think that the need for flexibility can be one of the great catalyzing qualities of a development project. Knowing that some tenants will turn over, that economies will change, that fads and styles are ever evolving, and that community consensus will shift, necessitates and inspires us to begin with dialogue and pledge our selves to a continuing conversation.

Newton to Implement Design Guidelines to Help Permit Complex Mixed-use Developments

By Michael A. Wang

The City of Newton, Massachusetts is in the process of simultaneously permitting two large-scale redevelopment projects – Northland Newton and Riverside Station – both of which consist of more than one million square feet, including a variety of commercial uses and a significant amount of multi-family residential product. The projects have interesting similarities in that they are both sited in “gateway” locations along the Rt. 128 corridor and rely on a compact urban approach to development which, in addition to density, focuses on creating a new public realm of streetscapes and open spaces.

Northland Site along the Needham Street Corridor + Riverside Station Site adjacent to Route 128

Recent local community visioning efforts for both areas have helped to identify similar overarching goals for redevelopment that include preferred land use, environmental health and transportation issues. Each site, however, also presents unique qualities that need to be thoughtfully addressed. The Northland project bridges between the Needham Street commercial corridor and the Newton Upper Falls Village, and includes the historic Saco Mill Building, which the development team has chosen to embrace. Mark Development’s Riverside project, while in a more isolated context, will include the redesign of a highway interchange and the integration of an MBTA terminus station, along with its associated parking and multi-modal requirements.

Needham Street Area Vision Plan

The City of Newton, and their Planning & Development Department, has been forward-thinking in its approach to the approvals process for these complex redevelopment projects. One of the greatest challenges in permitting these types of projects is ensuring that the initial master plan vision for the site is consistently executed over the many years that neighborhood developments of this scale may be phased. Newton’s strategy for addressing this challenge has been to create a new set of Design Guidelines that will help the City evaluate each successive building permit application to determine if the evolving “sum of the parts” continues to work towards the original vision.

Form + Place, a Newton-based architecture and planning firm, which is an Urban Design On-Call Consultant for the City, has been working closely with the Planning & Development Department, as well as the projects’ proponents, to craft a Design Guidelines tool. The Guidelines, as currently developed for the Northland project, are structured to address architectural design and place-making issues at a range of scales, including at the District Level, the Block Level and the Building Level. Among the specific areas of focus, the Guidelines establish expectations for how the project will connect to its surrounding context, how public space will be designed and integrated, and how the finer grain details of streetscape design and building architecture will all work together to help realize a cohesive vision.

Newton’s Design Guidelines reference a range of contexts and architectural vernaculars

Unique place-making precedents from Storrs, Ct and South Boston waterfront

The intent of the Design Guidelines approach is to allow for Site Plan approval to occur without the complete details of the development’s design having been finalized. The framework is intended to give the City necessary assurances that the final execution of the project will be of the highest quality, while giving the developer some flexibility to respond to evolving market conditions over an extended period of time that may, for example, change the desired mix of uses. While approval will ultimately come from Newton’s Commissioner of Inspectional Services, “consistency” recommendations will be provided by Staff, Peer Reviewers, the Urban Design Commission and the Land Use Committee of the City Council using a new Design Guidelines Evaluation Template.

Having helped author a wide range of zoning mechanisms - including hybrid form-based codes, overlay districts and new mixed-use districts - for communities throughout the northeast corridor, Form + Place’s interest in facilitating context-appropriate redevelopment continues to be founded in the belief that form-making and place-making must be wholly integrated, and in touch with current economic development realities. At the root of Form + Place’s collaborative approach to community building is a fundamental understanding of how to find common ground between the development world and community goals that have been articulated in local area visions.

Integrated Form-Making: Crafting Buildings and Places with the Client and Community

By John Rufo

Whether in the adaptive reuse of an existing structure or ground-up development, built form often draws from its immediate context for initial design cues. The neighborhood that a project is designed for need not dictate style, material, or even scale, but ultimately the building and place it creates are always in dialogue with their surroundings. The process of design is not simply a straight line from context analysis to the realization of built form. Rather, it tends to be an exploration that pulls in many voices, influences and opinions. The process therefore needs to be crafted to weigh and integrate many ideas about space, form, place, materiality, function, time, etc… and the definition of “the design team” needs to include architects, developers, community stakeholders and proponents of the public realm. In the end all aspects of building design, from conceptual site planning to architectural detailing should reinforce a building’s form and help it become an integral part of its neighborhood.

1.      Reading the Neighborhood: Context as Precedent and Context as Place

What defines a neighborhood? Ask 100 people, you’ll get 100 answers. Is it a historic ethnicity? The combination of residential and commercial streets? A system of open spaces? The fabulous café on the corner that everybody knows? The scale of the buildings? The quality of the sidewalks? Yes… it’s everything. The neighborhood is always the place of the project, but should it be the precedent for form making? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. A project might have a very similar scale to adjacent buildings. Then again, it may be much larger or much smaller than nearby buildings. The design team can address this type of issue with massing elements that respond by breaking down the larger forms or accentuating the smaller ones. Similarly, the design team might feel the materials of a building need to be quite similar to the surrounding facades. Or they might decide it’s important to use a distinctly different palette of materials and a different overall style. The questions are many, and while the answers may not be directly drawn from the context, they certainly will impact the reading of place.

 2. Reading the Client: Instincts and Goals

As long as we have been in this business (+/- 30 years), it is still impressive to realize just how well our clients understand the context of the project and how much they’ve thought about just the right response to it. Because of this the owner of a project often exerts as much will on the form making as the architect. And, while most clients don’t read the context as trained designers, they sense the life of the neighborhood, they always know where they stand in the marketplace, and they’ve begun an internal intuitive response to it that is, in most instances, laser focused. Most of our projects, whether commercial or residential, typically feature some amount of retail / commercial space at the ground floor. Our clients tend to identify creating good sight lines to merchandise and creating flexibility of commercial leases as one of the important design goals. This immediately begins to influence initial ideas of form, transparency, solidity and visibility. Our clients, having read the context, understand through instinct and study what the most important view corridors are and how they’d like the building to present itself in those corridors.

3. Synthesizing Goals into Form: A Balancing Act

Our job as designers is to read this analysis, balance it with our own instincts and explore the architectural impact of the resulting forms as the design process advances. For instance, if our client defines visibility as the most important issue, then should all ground floor facades be simple glass curtain walls that maximize transparency? Or in a certain context is it also important to integrate an architectural language of more traditional forms, such as masonry piers that frame storefronts in order to bring a variety of scales and material palettes to the immediate public realm? This might also create a certain kind of curb appeal, which may have a less measurable but still important impact on the quality of place, encouraging more people to stay longer, adding again to the sense of vitality and interest in the neighborhood. In this way a balanced dialogue within the design team might be the best tool for creating rich and diverse forms as well as inspired places.

4. The Devil is in the Details… and the Teamwork

So how does that teamwork thing really work? Well… a project of any significant scale probably has a roster of team members that includes the client, architect, civil engineer, landscape architect, MEP engineer, structural engineer, lighting designer, etc. That’s a lot of opinions to weigh and take feedback from. Form-making in the conceptual phase may be mostly aspirational but is informed by a knowledge base of various design and performance requirements. As the project goes into documents and “becomes real” the performance criteria for aspects of the building such as the exterior wall systems, insulation values, light emittance, and others shape how the building is detailed. The interior has the same kinds of issue to wrestle with as structural systems, HVAC systems, life safety features and the quality of the architectural environment are coordinated to support the design vision and create a “code worthy” building. In the end, team synthesis is critical in the coordination of building systems that ultimately create the final built form.

The Visioning Process: Collaboration is Crucial to Success

By John Rufo

As a core tenet of our design practice we step back on a regular basis to assess the processes we employ to plan and design projects for our clients. From the outset, on any project, it is critical to create a vision that guides the project through its various design stages. What the public typically sees coming from the architects is an illustrated vision in the form of a master plan and renderings, but each project gets to that point through an integrated process that we’ve come to call Collaborative Visioning. In this process one can identify 4 key steps that take our clients and us through an open exploration - from goals to vision.

1.      Establishing a Foundation

Establishing the foundational underpinnings of any project is a twofold process that allows us to both understand our client’s goals and to gain an understanding of the project context. By the time our clients contact us about a potential new project, they’ve usually studied it exhaustively, so our first job is empathetic listening and careful documentation of goals and aspirations for the project. Sometimes ideas are very concrete and other times they can be quite amorphous in nature. On a parallel track to this task is the gathering of site data and impressions of the project context that will drive aspects of site development, as well as ideas about the experiential goals of the project.

Establishing Goals + Site Visit

 2. Translation of Program

Most clients come to us with a proposed set of uses for the project. It’s our job to work with the client to inventory these program pieces and sponsor an inquiry aimed at heightening the potential relationships between these uses. For instance, why is one kind of tenant a logical co-tenant with another? Sometimes the most critical synergies are not contained wholly within the building program. Sometimes they are the activities that are catalyzed on site by the interaction of various parts of the project and the context that it is set in. In fact this is the hallmark of the most successful development projects and something we relish at Form + Place. So, one of the most important questions we reach for is how the interaction between uses and site propel the simple statement of program to become a framework for developing an authentic experience of place.

Places the Engage Context

3. Diagramming

Diagramming is the first step in intuiting a reasoned response to the goal of creating an authentic experience of place. While the diagram itself, often a few squiggly lines and notes with a “fat marker” on trace, may seem to be very removed from an actual experience of place, it articulates the bones of potential form- and place-making strategies that inform the very real development of plan and massing. We tend to go back to the diagram again and again in the course of the visioning process to see if the evolution of the idea is living up to the energy and richness latent in the original sketch. We look for things like porosity, transparency, hierarchy and connectivity in the diagram that hint at how specific areas of the plan might develop into great public space or where to site the more iconic architectural elements of the design.

University Mall - Initial Site Response Diagrams

Riverwalk - Site Movement Diagrams

Riverwalk - Site Movement Diagram Transitioning to Site Plan

4.      Visioning

Ultimately the goal is always to define a project that can be understood spatially as well as aspirationally. The initial massing gestures need to transform into true architectural form-making, and the void spaces in the diagram need to take on real aspects of authentic place-making. The challenge is that creating a vision is an early step in the entire development process and often little is known about the building systems or the engineering behind the open spaces and landscape features. Therefore, the vision as illustrated is making certain leaps between what can be and what should be.

Translating Initial Site Impressions into Ideas about Place-Making

Bird's Eye Aerial - Telling the Story of the Larger Plan

Eye Level Vignette - Telling the Story of the Pedestrian

Bird's Eye + Eye Level Vignette

Meriden TOD Master Plan Initial Site Diagram

Meriden TOD Development Visioning

Belchertown State School Diagramming + Planning

Belchertown State School Bird's Eye Aerial

Six-Unit Renovation Provides Appropriately Priced Housing Options in Cambridge

By Meaghan Markiewicz

Clary Street Renovation under construction

In Cambridge, MA the median 1-bedroom rent price was $2,470 in 2017 – placing it as the most expensive city in Massachusetts,* double the nation’s average according to apartments list.com.** In a city such as Cambridge, with local amenities, public transportation, walkable streets and many other things desired by urban dwellers, it comes as no surprise the housing market is climbing through the roof. Renters often will need to search exhaustively and are still forced to sacrifice some standard of living unless they are willing and able to pay top dollar for new, renovated top of the line housing. As designers, we are often caught in the middle between high end projects and those subject to significant value engineering efforts. At Form + Place, we have found that proactive problem solving techniques and the collaboration of the design team can drastically change the outcome of a development. One of our recently completed projects on Clary Street in Cambridge represents how a relatively small project in the tight Cambridge housing market can do its part to provide high quality housing options at manageable rents.

Renovated kitchen and porch view

Clary Street is a 6-unit full interior residential renovation project located just outside Inman Square. Each of the 3-bedroom unit layouts was reconfigured, increasing the overall efficiency of the interior spaces. In addition, all new appliances and fixtures were provided in the kitchens and baths as well as laundry in every unit. New technology such as Navien tankless water heaters, Nest thermostats and Latch door hardware provide tenants with innovative systems which increase energy efficiency and allow for convenient access through smart devices. To complete the units, finishes throughout were upgraded, providing a clean and open atmosphere for the tenants. These market rate units are significantly lower than the average rents in this market – setting this development apart from other projects.

Reconfigured units

In order to deliver units that have the look, feel and amenities of a higher-end project but on a limited construction budget, it took a collaborative team approach to design and execute. The developer, Capstone Communities LLC, has experience with and is focused on providing high quality projects throughout all their developments which include market rate, mixed-income and affordable housing. Reflecting on the project, Jason from Capstone Communities stated, “I am proud that we have put together a team that can provide high quality housing at a price point that is appropriate and desirable for those in the Cambridge area.” One Way Development, the minority-owned and operated construction contractor on the job managed a tight budget and aggressive schedule while maintaining high standards for craftsmanship and detailing. With open communication between the design team which included the structural engineer, Siegel Associates – issues were addressed and problems were solved efficiently to produce quality living spaces. Form + Place, Capstone Communities LLC and One Way Development will continue to look to replicate the Clary street model for delivering market rate housing at reasonable prices, especially as the shortage of housing options multiplies every year.

Completed units

References:

*     Boston Metro Report: March 2019, Crystal Chen, 2019-03-06, https://www.zumper.com/blog/2019/03/boston-metro-report-march-2019/

**      Apartment List National Rent Report, Chris Salviati, 2019-07-01, https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data/