Orlando Sentinel: Let a Development Renaissance Begin

September 14, 2020

The Orlando Sentinel recently published the following article by guest columnist Bruce Stephenson, Professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College.

Voters Rejected Sprawl, Now Let a Development Renaissance Begin

On August 18th voters in the Orange and Seminole county commission races sent a decisive bi-partisan message: limit urban sprawl and preserve the environment.  This common-sense logic has a host of benefits — protecting the supply of water and agricultural land, while eliminating the onerous expenditure of extending roads and utilities.  Limiting sprawl has costs. With less land open to development, the price of housing will increase. The solution is to use land more efficiently and ensure that the auto is an option and not a necessity.  Alarmists claim this tact will abolish the suburbs, but the opposite is true.  Winter Park, the region’s definitive suburb, was designed before the automobile, and it is a prototype for applying “the arts of civilization” to channel the “flood of urbanization into humane form.”

The great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote these words describing his plan for Riverside, Illinois: the iconic Chicago suburb that inspired Winter Park.  Both communities are centered on a train station in a park, and Winter Park’s 1883 plan had concentric circles radiating from the train station that denote five-minute walks. The town developed at a pedestrian scale and in a context sensitive manner. A variety of building types, heights, and design approaches were employed, while civic institutions occupied key locations.  Aligned on Park Avenue, the compact downtown paralleled nature’s beauty and was highlighted by Rollins College. 

Built on the lines of an Italian Renaissance village, the aesthetic campus reveals how quality urbanism can define a suburban setting.  The Italian Renaissance celebrated a new more engaged urban culture where citizens spent much of their free time in public plazas and markets.  The Florentine architect Alberti believed public spaces helped divert young people from “the mischievousness and folly natural to their age,” and the Rollins campus is a testament to this tradition.  Loggias, a staple of Florentine architecture, are paramount. Covered walkways link the campus, while classrooms and dorms are set on quadrangles and small courtyards to capture breezes and foster air circulation.  Intimate greens and small squares offer places of repose to activate thought and offer an escape the swirl of campus life.  “Breezy and cool” was how Rollins President Hamilton Holt described his 1927 plan to create the nation’s first “open-air college.”

Now imagine if the Rollins campus was vacant land, and the outcry that would ensue if Holt’s Renaissance village was proposed for the site.  Visceral reactions against development are not irrational in a region swimming in a sea of pavement and suffering the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation. Yet progress has been made.  Orlando is now populated with Main Street neighborhoods, and Baldwin Park and Creative Village exemplify the type of infill development the future demands.  Orange, Osceola, and Seminole counties have united to provide affordable housing in league with transit, while bike networks crisscross the region.

The path to the future voters endorsed is taking form.  Fortunately, history can guide us to a place where our common humanity outweighs irrational fear.  Then, a renaissance will ensue.

Bruce Stephenson is a contributing author to Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)