What a Century-Old Planned Community Can Teach Us About Growth

A couple of weeks ago I knocked a big item off my nerdy urban planner bucket list when I finally paid a visit to the 1920s planned community of Venice, Fla., on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota.

And I came away with a surprising insight: The famous plan by John Nolen is fine, but the way the city has unexpectedly evolved over the last century — disrupted by bankruptcies, the Depression and a period of forgetting all about Nolen and the town’s history — has actually made it a richer experience and a more interesting place. The Nolen plan provided a strong and enduring foundation for a town that evolved, at least partly, in an unexpected way.

It helped me remember that the best places are those that evolve and reinvent themselves over time — a lesson that’s extremely important as we try to figure out the role of places, communities and downtowns in the wake of the pandemic.

Venice — at least the part of it near the beach — is an affluent community catering mostly to an older crowd. (Walking from my motel near the beach to the downtown a half-mile away, I swear I was the youngest person around.) But to urban planners and designers — especially those associated with the neotraditional town planning movement known as New Urbanism — it is one of the most famous and important town plans in American history.

Trained as a landscape architect at Harvard, John Nolen was one of the most important urban planners in the early 20th century — perhaps the first consulting urban planner with a wide-ranging practice. Based in Cambridge, Mass., he not only did a lot of work in Florida during the boom of the 1920s but he also did two city plans for San Diego, where there’s a bar named after him. Nolen had a formalistic approach to urban design (you can see that in the image of the town plan below), and he fell out of favor in the mid-20th century when a more informal suburban approach advocated by such rivals as Clarence Stein became popular.

Eventually Nolen’s reputation was revived by the New Urbanists, who began to point to the Venice plan in particular as a model for the kind of towns they wanted to build. In particular, the Andrés Duany/Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk firm used Venice as a model for their 1980s plan for Seaside, the famous beach community in the Florida panhandle 500 miles to the northwest. Though Seaside is smaller and hugs the ocean more than Venice, the influences are obvious if you look at Seaside’s plan.

But like so many Florida communities that got laid out in the 1920s — and unlike Seaside — Venice never really got finished as planned. And this means that parts of it evolved very differently from what Nolen envisioned.

Nolen was originally hired to lay out Venice by Fred Albee, an orthopedic surgeon who was engaged in land speculation in Florida but was willing to invest in a high-quality design. Albee subsequently sold the property to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, possibly the most important labor union in the country at the time. The Brotherhood kept Nolen on at Albee’s request.
In 1925 and 1926, the Brotherhood invested significant up-front money in roads and infrastructure according to the Nolen plan. But according to Venice’s resident historian, Harry Klinkhamer, the Brotherhood was looking for a quick buck through land sales and, unfortunately, the Florida real estate boom ended in 1926, just as they were getting ready to sell the lots. This led to bankruptcy, Albee getting much of his property back and general disruption, which shaped the future course of Venice in profound ways.

Much of Venice actually was built as Nolen planned, with what is today a quaint downtown with many restaurants and lots of Italianate houses built according to Nolen’s design guidelines.

But during the Depression, adherence to the Nolen plan began to dissipate, and nobody much paid attention to Nolen for the next 40 or so years. This meant the architecture in Venice got what you might call “adulterated.” In particular, the Northern Italian motif was replaced by a lot of midcentury modern architecture.

Eventually, thanks in large part to Seaside and architect Duany’s very popular New Urbanist road show, people began to pay attention to — and value — the original Nolen plan again. And by the way, architectural adulteration didn’t happen in Seaside, mostly because it was so small and was built out during boom times, which made it the perfect “fake” setting for the movie The Truman Show.
But what’s interesting about Venice is that even as the folks there embraced and even enshrined the Nolen tradition, they didn’t reject the adulterated parts of their city. Indeed, they celebrate the midcentury modern tradition too — as evidenced by the Venice Museum’s recent exhibit of midcentury modern, which sat alongside permanent exhibits about the Nolen plan and story.

The thing I really walked away from Venice with was an old-fashioned idea about planning from the era of architects and landscape architects like Nolen and Daniel Burnham, who prepared the famous 1909 Chicago plan: Sometimes it’s more valuable to lay down the pattern of public streets and public spaces upfront rather than trying to micromanage private development as today’s planners so often try to do.

Weirdly, the evolution in Venice reminded me of a similar evolution in a very different 20th-century city: Tel Aviv.

I’m familiar with Tel Aviv because my daughter lived there for three years and my son-in-law grew up there. It’s a large, bustling, modern city that’s not much like Venice at all (a half million people live in Tel Aviv compared to 28,000 in Venice), but there are some striking familiarities.

Like Venice, Tel Aviv was laid out by a famous urban planner, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist who brought some ideas over from biology to urban planning. It’s located at a picturesque spot where the Yarkon River flows into the Mediterranean. Geddes did his plan at almost exactly the same time as Nolen, finishing it in 1925, and like Nolen he had a very specific idea of what the resulting private development should look like. In particular, he envisioned a city of duplex-style residential structures.

But then something happened that Geddes couldn’t have predicted: The Nazis took over Germany and many Jewish Bauhaus architects moved to Tel Aviv.

The result was a very different city than Geddes envisioned, placed on Geddes’ street grid and plan for public spaces. Both Bauhaus and Art Deco buildings popped up everywhere, obviously at a much different scale than Geddes imagined. But it works wonderfully.

Venice, of course, didn’t wind up at a different scale like Tel Aviv did. It’s still mostly single-family homes and small-scale hotels and commercial buildings, which is unquestionably part of its charm. But it’s important to bear in mind that cities aren’t fixed, they’re never done, and they’re always evolving — even if they are very carefully planned at the beginning. Just look at Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia (essentially a New Urbanist town center) or the Irvine Business Complexin Orange County, Calif., (originally an industrial district, then an office district, now adding a lot of housing).

This is especially important to bear in mind as we try to figure out what to do with our suddenly obsolete office districts. In a recent article inGoverning, Sarah Rosen Wartell of the Urban Institute reminded us that unexpected change can be an opportunity for cities to reinvent themselves for the better. It was true in Venice and Tel Aviv in the ’30s, and it’s true for all places today.

This article is republished from The Future of Where, the author’s Substack newsletter. Read the original here.

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Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.