Taking Inspiration From the Southeast: "Agrihoods" and Building for All Generations with Brian Wright
This is part of a nine-part series where three students ask three questions to architects, planners, and figures at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU 32).
This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Wright is the founding Principal at Town Planning and Urban Design Collaborative, an award-winning and nationally-renowned planning and urban design firm specializing in the planning, coding, entitlement, and implementation of public and private projects across North America.
AG: First, do you mind just introducing yourself, and then saying a little bit about what your firm does?
BW: Sure. I’m Brian Wright, and I’m Principal of Town Planning and Urban Design Collaborative located in Franklin, Tennessee. We are a consulting firm. We do planning for cities and counties all around the country, doing form-based coding, comprehensive plans, downtowns—anything where they want to build walkable, mixed-use, compact places, all the principles of new urbanism. We also do work for private developers who want to create new urbanist communities, or infill projects, or greenfields. Everything has to follow the principles of new urbanism.
AG: I saw on a couple of your projects the term “agrihood,” do you mind going into that concept?
BW: We’ve been getting a lot of work recently doing these agrihoods. It’s really a combination of agriculture and neighborhood. The idea is to create open spaces interwoven between villages, hamlets, [and] walkable neighborhoods, where we have productive agriculture. The term “agrihood” is sometimes used as a marketing tool, where a sales office will have a little gardening box next to it. That’s a bit superficial. What we’re really doing is trying to incorporate agriculture in a meaningful way, on a large scale.
One of our projects is a 200-acre agrihood. Fifty percent of the land is going to be in conservation. The majority of that conservation land will be productive agriculture. It's going to be a regional food hub as well, so farmers from the region can bring their produce there and process it in the village. Then produce that’s coming in will be sold in the markets, and the restaurants, and then distributed around the region as well. We have a nonprofit that’s interested in taking as much of the land as we’ll let them farm. They have a ‘sell one, give one’ kind of a thing—like Tom’s shoes, but for produce—so they give away food.
And we’ll have agriculture at all scales. We’ll have the larger-scaled regional, like community-supported agriculture (CSA). Then we’ll have smaller, five, ten-acre plots. We’ll also have incubator farms, so if people want to get into organic farming, but don’t want to buy hundreds of acres to do it, they could learn. Then we’ll have community gardens. We’ll also have foraging forests, so there will be mushrooms and stuff you can go pick. And we’ll have edible landscaping throughout the neighborhood.
And on each individual lot, instead of “Do you want to have brick or siding,” or “What countertops do you want,” we’ll have “Do you want to have the garden box, or not?” And then we’ll have the community farmer, who will be responsible for overseeing all the different operations, but also the homeowners can hire someone to do their landscape. Maybe you want to plant it and harvest it, but you don’t want to tend it and pick the bugs off.
Another initiative, as part of wanting to have “free-range” children, would include the neighborhood children. Kids can run around and have fun while also learning work ethic. The idea would be to let them do some chores in the community gardens so they could learn how to use their muscles and sweat and do hard stuff.
So that’s the agrihood. We’re doing it at all scales. Sometimes it’s a small, community garden at the small-scale in an urban infill setting. Or this 200-acre project. We’re also doing a 300,000 acre project in Florida—so it’s a much larger scale—and that can really have a regional impact on food production, and food systems, and all that.
AG: I saw you work with cities on their codes, particularly form-based codes. Do you mind talking about that?
BW: We do lots of zoning ordinances. For the longest time zoning codes have been really focused on separating one use from the next. Now, the modern thinking is that you want to really focus on form or character. Instead of saying “This is a residential district and this is a commercial district,” you can say, “The character of this district is XYZ—this feels more urban, this feels more rural, this feels more something in between—” and so you write the standards to create that character, and the use becomes much less important.
Think about a historic downtown. Any building that’s there has probably been a hundred different things over the years. It didn’t matter, as long as the buildings were compatible and the form worked out. Unless you were producing some poisonous chemicals or noxious use or whatever, it didn’t matter. You didn’t need to separate it. Now we’ve gotten this idea that we need to separate things. So the idea of form-based, or what we call character-based, coding kind of takes you back to really try[ing] to create a place that people love; a lovable community so [residents] take care of it and it stands the test of time.
AG: A lot of the projects you’ve done are in Southern cities. What has pulled you to these? And what about their character makes them a good fit for your projects?
BW: I guess one of the things is probably because we are located in the Southeast, and I’m from Alabama originally and all that. But I think the ideas about walkable neighborhoods, new urbanism, and smart growth really originated in the Southeast. It started in the Panhandle of Florida, with the Seasides, the sort of resort communities. And then Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland was the first full-time, year-round community that had these same principles, but it wasn’t a resort.
And these [ideas] sort of stayed in this region and spread from there. So many people in the south vacation in the Panhandle, in Florida, so they’re familiar with the ideas about how we can make a new neighborhood that feels like the historic ones that are walkable. And so it kind of went from there. The posters that you saw there, a lot of them were focused in the Southeast, but we actually do a lot of work in New England as well.
And there, it's like they have this tradition of old urbanism, that they seem to really want to continue. And so they’re inspired [by] what they have before. Whereas in the south, there are great small towns and things, but I also think a lot of it is sort of like ‘we need new places, new neighborhoods that aren’t just commodity-based developments for international track builders. [Instead] it’s, “‘We want to have a new neighborhood that people can live in in all stages of life–from when they’re young, maybe they live in a tiny house or an apartment above an old shop, or whatever.” As they get older and gain wealth, they can move to a larger house on a larger lot, then they move back into the town center, so they don’t have to move neighborhoods every time their preferences or lifestyle needs change.
Adeleine Geitner is a rising senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.