Density and Urbanity

"Does 'new urbanism' say that we have to fight suburban sprawl by putting 400-foot buildings everywhere in San Francisco?" - Sue Hestor

Hestor is commenting on 555 Washington, a tower proposed for SF's Pyramid block that's up for reconsideration by the city's Planning Commission on 18 March. She has a point - a crucial one in my estimation. For too long, Smart Growth advocates have invoked sprawl at the urban edge to justify girth at the edges of the CBD. That gave us Rincon in SF, an area rife with mediocrity (some of it designed by Heller Manus, the architects of 555 Washington). Now the pressure to bulk up is shifting north, threatening the mostly lowrise area that borders the Pyramid block. To his credit, Chronicle critic John King sees the tower as a reason to first revisit the planning assumptions that have governed the area since the 1980s. That would give SF the opportunity to rethink how it approaches density, hopefully connecting it to urbanity and not assuming that density is urbanity by definition, as Smart Growth advocates tend to do. Berkeley has the same pressing need to revisit this issue. (Hestor was quoted by Tim Redmond on 11 February 2010 in an online San Francisco Bay Guardian post kindly sent me by Kenneth Caldwell.)