Host: Duo Dickinson

Available as a podcast: soundcloud.com/wpkn895/home-page-radio-walkable-home

In the last few years, we have all heard the word “walkable” used to market homes in cities and towns. It has become a marketing buzzword, used to sell in-town living.

But “walkable” used to be the norm in cities and towns. Cars changed that. The Connecticut Turnpike, I-95, opened in 1958, and within a decade its final extension through to Rhode Island and the building of I-91 completely changed Connecticut’s cities. The huge ribbons of concrete and steel cut through these towns, often wrecking neighborhoods. These roads acted as walls, cutting off neighborhoods and ending any connection to the water that created the cities in the first place. This highway invasion changed every city in America, and the Baby Boomers extended the Greatest Generation’s love of suburbia and car-based living in Connecticut by abandoning downtown living.

Connecticut’s cities were becoming those places that were not worth arriving at. But in the last decade, there is a new beginning of a dramatic change in how cities are used. Connecticut’s cities and real estate developers are realizing that the appeal of living in a place that is truly “walkable” has real value – to both retiring Baby Boomers who do not want to mow lawns, and their offspring, the Millenials do not want to even own a car, let alone a home.

What is the future of living, at HOME, in downtown America? Three thought leaders will be online for this hour:

Robert Orr is an architect and a renowned town-planner with more than forty years national and international experience. With projects at Seaside, and the New Hartford Library, Camp Anne and commercial, institutional and community projects, as well as custom residential homes, Orr’s role as urban designer has a depth of perspective few others can offer. Robert Orr has been honored with many design awards and featured in hundreds of publications at home and abroad.

John Massengale has won awards for architecture, urbanism, architectural history, and historic preservation, from organizations and publications ranging from Progressive Architecture and Metropolitan Home, to the National Book Award Foundation (with the first architectural history book to win a National Book Award), to several chapters of the American Institute of Architects, and the Walton Family Foundation. He has served on the Boards of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the Institute for Classical Art & Architecture (ICAA), and Federated Conservationists of Westchester County (FCWC), and was the founding Chair of both CNU NYC and CNU New York (the state chapter). Massengale has taught at the ICAA, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Miami and is a licensed architect in New York State.

Steve Mouzon opened his own architecture firm in 1991 and produces a number of town-building tools and services. Mouzon Design’s Premium Tools Collection is a subscription service to robust new place-making tools that heretofore were unaffordable when commissioned by a single development. A Living Tradition is a framework for a new type of pattern book that is principle-based instead of taste-based, and therefore contributes to the creation of new living traditions. Steve is also a principal of the New Urban Guild in Miami. The New Urban Guild is a group of architects, designers, and other New Urbanists dedicated to the study and the design of true traditional buildings and places native to and inspired by the regions in which they are built.