The Pedestrian Pocket: Reorienting Radburn

Abstract

The Pedestrian Pocket is a model for suburban development that seeks to modify settlement patterns in urban fringe areas, from blanketing low-density sprawl to networks of villages. Pedestrian Pockets are dense, interactive, walkable communities that provide a range of community service and employment and that are interconnected by public transit. A critical component of the idea is a network of private and public open space that connects home to civic center. This paper examines the Pedestrian Pocket from the point of view of open space, proposing that its concept of dwellings within a common landscape is a view borrowed from Radburn and the Garden Cities and is antithetical to the contemporary American subdivision. In this vision, the ordering of the public landscape structures the community and provides the foundations of community life.