Urban Design, Growth Management and the Four Goals

This urban design report is one of three foundations for the larger Growth Management Study which describes the interaction of three sets of issues:

Economic development – how much new employment and population growth there may be over the next twenty years.
Traffic and transit – how residents and workers will travel to and around Stamford.
Urban design – where Stamford should grow and what should new development look like.

In order to understand the consequences of growth, the Growth Management Study modeled three futures – slow, trend and high growth — and for each of these possible futures, policy recommendations are made. In the context of Growth Management, Urban Design is not so much an aesthetic exercise as a strategic land use policy intimately related to the Four Goals of the City-wide Policies Report. Stamford can only solve its traffic problems and protect Neighborhood Quality of Life by accommodating a diverse range of housing and commercial developments in configurations and locations that support transit.

Thus, the urban design recommendations in this report, and as summarized in the City Beautiful and Downtown sections of the City-wide Policies Report, are important because they ensure that these new developments will reinforce and improve the physical quality of the neighborhoods. The urban design recommendations are also important because they model future development in the Downtown which, by virtue of its ample capacity and accessibility to transit, is the centerpiece of any “smart growth” management plan. In order to support Stamford’s goals for economic and social Diversity, the urban design study identifies and models a complete range of development sites, both in the downtown, and in the industrial districts.

Finally, the Urban Design report includes recommendations for increased access to well-designed parks and open spaces. It is important to note that design is itself a tool for controlling growth as two countervailing forces are at work: on the one hand, the Urban Design Study supports growth by illustrating the ways in which future growth can be accommodated in Stamford. On the other hand, the ambitious agenda described here for controlling growth in terms of location, configuration and appearance, all act to slow growth by increasing development costs.