A New Look for New S.D. Neighborhoods : Living: Planner Peter Calthorpe will focus on designing pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use communities close to mass-transit systems.

SAN DIEGO —  If planning guru Peter Calthorpe has his way, San Diego will undergo a significant transformation during the 1990s.

Calthorpe believes in pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use communities close to mass-transit systems as an antidote to auto-oriented suburban sprawl.

Last month, the city awarded him a $90,000 contract to write transit-oriented urban design guidelines to develop communities and to make over existing urban areas.

“We want to design communities where people can walk around the block comfortably,” said San Diego City Architect Mike Stepner, “where you can send your 10-year-old to the store for a loaf of bread, where mass-transit service is adequate.”

Slim and boyish-looking, Calthorpe, 42, is extremely likable and charismatic, capable of clearly explaining his ideas--which aren’t all new. Urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and Leon Krier wrote about many of them during the 1960s and 1970s.

Calthorpe studied architecture at Yale but never earned an architecture degree. Early in his career, he became known as a specialist in solar-heating methods, but moved into community planning through his association with San Francisco Bay Area architect Sim Van Der Ryn from 1978 to 1983.

In 1983, Calthorpe formed his own company, but 1991 clearly marks a turning point.

In Sacramento, the first new community to be built to Calthorpe’s specifications, a $500-million, 3,300-home development known as Laguna West, broke ground last month. Articles espousing his philosophies have appeared in newspapers, magazines and design journals. In the past 18 months, his San Francisco office has grown from two to 10 employees to serve a client roster that includes developers and the cities of Sacramento, Portland, Milwaukee and San Diego.

Calthorpe’s mixed-use community centers have been dubbed “pedestrian pockets.” At the heart of these pockets are a transit station and public park. Within easy walking distance is a commercial district of modest-scaled buildings strung along narrow streets that encourage slower driving and make pedestrians feel comfortable. The buildings mix ground-floor retail uses with second- and third-level offices and apartments or townhomes. Nearby are single-family homes on small lots.

These mixed-use cores are surrounded by secondary neighborhoods of single-family homes on larger lots within a mile of the core--still within walking or biking distance of vital services.

In San Diego, the idea that efficient mass transit should serve as the basis for development became a higher priority during the late 1980s, when planner Paul Curcio (no longer with the city) spearheaded a “mobility planning program” aimed at reducing car travel and increasing mass transit.

“There are a lot of things coming together that are making it the ideal time to do this,” said Stepner, explaining Calthorpe’s role. “One is state air quality requirements--they are mandating that we find ways of getting around without driving a single-occupant automobile, that we do things closer to home, within walking distance, that we take mass transit.”

The city has given Calthorpe a year to prepare general transit-oriented development guidelines, and to make more detailed recommendations for eight communities. Among these are University City-Golden Triangle, Mission Valley, Southeast San Diego and Carmel Valley (the master planned community east of Del Mar formerly known as North City West).

In preliminary visits to target areas, Calthorpe has observed numerous urban design flaws.

“In a way, part of my strength is being a neutral character from out of town,” he said. “I don’t know local politics, so I come at things from a fairly neutral point of view.

“University City is a classic example of auto-oriented planning. What I found interesting is that there’s a pedestrian overlay. You take a typical auto sprawl system, with a network of arterials (major streets) and segregated land uses, and overlay pedestrian overpasses that dump people into parking lots. What you really need is closer integration of uses; attention to the pedestrian environment is going to be necessary.

“There is a typical neighborhood retailing center with a grocery store that had a pedestrian path leading to its backside, but you couldn’t get to the pedestrian system from the condos next door without going out the driveway and doubling around.

“I see Mission Valley as a classic case of 1970s and 1980s planning methodology. Every use is isolated and connected to the arterial network, but not to mass transit or adjacent uses. But there is enough vacant ground to be able to create new connections.”

Some San Diego developers are skeptical of Calthorpe’s ideas--for one thing, they say his alternative modes of development aren’t palatable to lenders or home buyers. But Calthorpe believes the affordability and convenience of the homes in his pedestrian pockets will attract a variety of buyers. One of his ideas is a small-lot single-family home with a granny flat that can be rented to subsidize a homeowner’s loan payments.

Calthorpe has a knack for exciting audiences about his ideas, as he proved during a lecture in Balboa Park in early May.

“He had that effect on me,” confessed San Diego real estate developer Rick Aschenbrenner, a member of a subcommittee appointed by the city to review Calthorpe’s guidelines as they evolve.

“Calthorpe’s ideas are very good. From a developer’s point of view, I see a fresh approach to land planning. His accommodation of public transit is definitely the wave of the future.

“But land planning goes through fashions. There was a time when cul de sacs were fashionable (Calthorpe believes they inhibit pedestrian movement through neighborhoods). His disciples and admirers should remember that developers, above all, have to be market-responsive. At the same time that development needs to be pedestrian-friendly and transit-oriented, it must also be auto-friendly.”

Calthorpe prefers not to think of his ideas as cutting edge. He believes he is only advocating a return to ways of life many of us remember with warm nostalgia from the 1950s.

“A lot of people consider this stuff to be at the utopian fringe,” said Calthorpe, who reluctantly divulged that he lives on a boat in Sausalito--he doesn’t want people to perceive him as some kind of fringe dweller. “I think what we’re really trying to do here is get at the mainstream.

“The roots of my ideas aren’t so much in the utopian 1960s as in our 1950s childhoods--neighborhoods where we were free to ride our bikes around, where there weren’t six-lane arterials carving our neighborhoods apart, where we could go downtown on our own and go to the store or the movies; where there was still open space nearby and the streets were tree-lined and beautiful.”

Calthorpe’s first draft of his transit-oriented development guidelines is due in October.