Editor's Note: Denver’s New Urbanism

Published March 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 3

by Tim Covi

Where I grew up, there was hardly a crane in the sky. When you did see one, it usually had a wrecking ball attached. The city was an architectural mausoleum. Nothing new ever happened. Invariably time would pass, the wrecking crane would depart and a new parking lot would spring up as if born from a magic well of tar and concrete boiling below the quiet streets of the Queen City on the Lake. That was progress.

So you can imagine my shock when I moved to Colorado 14 years ago. Cranes everywhere. Buildings shooting up like geysers. I liked driving through Denver just to have the sense of something happening. At that time, Lodo was just a developer’s dream; people still slept in the loading docks at the Post Office building on Wynkoop; Platte Street was home to vacant buildings and café drifters, El Chapultepec had yet to be engulfed by frat-addled nightclubs and bougie bars, and things like Stapleton were a distant future.

And the suburbs blew up, too. Tan and beige boxes have oozed out onto every prairie from Monument Pass to Fort Collins. By 2030, metro Denver’s projected population will be roughly 3.8 million, a growth of almost 1 million people within the next 20 years. And of course, if we don’t want our brown cloud to smear away our mountain views entirely, that growth has to be managed.

City planners, community members, zoning experts, politicians and developers have all had a voice and perspective in crafting methods to manage the growth. Enacted in March 2002, Blueprint Denver, for instance, created a comprehensive plan to address growth and development. Key components were designing multipurpose streets, “mixed-use” neighborhoods with shopping corridors; and incorporating green design into new buildings.

Building on the principles of Blueprint Denver, the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) crafted Metro Vision 2035. Enacted in 2007, “Metro Vision concentrates development in a defined 750-squaremile urban growth boundary and identifies guidelines for nearly 70 high-density, mixed-use developments in the region, many around transit centers,” According to Metrodenver.org.

High density and mixed use sound like great ideas, and places like Lowry, Stapleton and Belmar are some of the largest scale projects. They have some obvious benefits, and some room to improve (see pages 4 and 5).

In keeping with the plan-focused city, this February Denver adopted its first comprehensive overhaul of city zoning codes since 1956. Aside from the details of what you can and can’t do on a remodel, the new code identifies areas for specific kinds of growth, from high to low density and from commercial districts to mixed-use developments.

This issue of the Denver VOICE looks at how more than a decade of planning and development is affecting Denver, from the community identity of neighborhoods like Five Points, to the architectural identity of the city as a whole. We also look at innovative ways to create community, whether it be in the context of the  expansive suburbs or the urban core.

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