The Princeton Junction Neighborhood Coalition’s May 17 meeting was billed as a “critique” of the Hillier West Windsor redevelopment plan, but it turned out to be more of a critique of the charrette process than a specific review of the current plan for the 350-acre site.##M:[more]##
“I have great admiration for Bob Hillier and his work,” says Stephanos Polyzoides, a Los Angeles-based architect and co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national coalition of architects and planners committed to reducing suburban sprawl and revitalizing urban areas. But the charrette process that Polyzoides described is different in style than that used by Hillier in the West Windsor planning, and the results of the process, as described by Polyzoides, are substantially different than what many in West Windsor seem to be expecting.
In terms of the process, Polyzoides says that his firm typically conducts charrettes over a five to seven-day period, preceded by a month or more of research by the experts who familiarize themselves with the issues and then a month or more of fine-tuning the plan “to work on the 15 percent of the issues” that people couldn’t immediately agree on.
During the intense discussions in the five to seven-day period, the experts in traffic, retail, and finance are active participants, presenting the possible consequences for suggestions made by participants. “You have to work these things against each other,” says Polyzoides, who noted that the drawings representing the plan are often made on the spot, in front of the charrette participants. “You can’t just bring in 300 to 400 people and give them pencils and tell them to start drawing.”
In the Hillier charrette process in West Windsor, traffic and retail consultants made presentations at the beginning, but were not part of subsequent public discussions. “The charrette process has to be open and transparent,” says the architect, a 1969 Princeton University graduate (and roommate of West Windsor-Plainsboro News publisher Richard K. Rein). “Every question raised has to be addressed — not necessarily answered, but addressed.”
As he and his firm practice the charrette process, the cost might be on the order of $500,”000, says Polyzoides. Hillier’s contract with West Windsor, in comparison, was for $330,”000.
But Polyzoides was bullish on the charrette process and its results. “The only way to resolve some issues is to get everyone in a room, close the doors, and go at it,” he says. “First you can find out what people truly agree on. I have seen only one project fail and it had to do with a community that was radicalized by eminent domain” controversies.
Polyzoides emphasized that the charrette process would provide the vision for the future but not the silver bullet to bring it all about. When a member of the audience expressed the hope that the current planning would create a plan that would make West Windsor great for his children and grandchildren, Polyzoides responded by saying he had “bad news. You need to first come up with a great plan, but then you have to be at every public meeting for the next 20 years. There is no automatic pilot for implementing these plans.”
While master planning and zoning could help avoid some of the blight that has been associated with urban and suburban areas in the past, Polyzoides says, “none of this takes the place of oversight of public officials. The public process has to go on and on and on.”
Polyzoides suggested that fears could be allayed by beginning the process talking about vision rather than numbers. “Urbanism is a field of infinite possibilities,” he says. “It begins with values. When fear disappears you discover that people have real interests and that these interests can find their way into the design.”
In the case of West Windsor, he said, “at some point you have to bite the bullet — you have to decide if you want urbanity or if you don’t.” And if the town moves toward new urbanism, Polyzoides added, it needs designers who are “urbanists, not suburbanists.”
But, in what might be a troubling sign for redevelopment proponents in the township, a substantial portion of the audience at Princeton Junction Neighborhood Coalition was thoroughly suburban.
Jim Burke of Ellsworth Drive asked the architect if he thought that covenants could be imposed upon the housing units to assure that they don’t turn into slums over the years. “I moved to West Windsor to get away from poor people,” Burke told a reporter after the meeting.
Polyzoides contended that in some cities, transit oriented development had led to an escalation in housing values.
Another member of the audience, Virginia Manzari of Princeton Junction, wondered if the retail component of the redevelopment area could thrive as the Hillier plan promised. Citing the traffic already present in the train station area and predicting that more traffic would result from the redevelopment, she says “I would avoid this place like the plague.”
But Polyzoides urged the audience to see the possibilities of the new urbanism rather than the failures of the old approach. “For 50 years we have been building suburbia and Route 1,” he says. “What we have not done is to create integrated places.”
