Savannah GA

[Joe_Schmoe]

I recently took a trip to Savannah GA. It is a highly walkable town (at least the famous touristy part). Anyone interested in brilliant urban planning should visit. It is a living textbook. Here are some pics:

Downtown main street.

Terminal view of important civic structure.

Active and lively waterfront.

Savannah was one of the few places not decimated by the Civil War so it still retains most of its Federal architecture. Like a sweltering Beacon Hill.

Custom house made from Quincy granite.

But the real show-stoppers are the parks which beautifully illustrate how to incorporate parks into an urban environment.

The parks are then surrounded by public buildings like churches, post offices, libraries, museums, banks and the like.

Modernism is present. Both the tasteful variety...

And the obnoxious variety (oh wait, I mean the "unapologetic" variety) that makes everything in its vicinity worse. Like a guest to a party that just wants to argue politics.

 

[czsz]

at least the famous touristy part

I've always wondered what the rest of Savannah looked like. Indistinguishable from sprawly Atlanta?

 

[BarbaricManchurian]

from looking on Google Earth, the touristy part of Savannah is tiny compared to the rest of the city and surrounded by expressways and bland, low-density suburbia

 

[BostonUrbEx]

Looks really sleepy and quiet. Where are the people?

 

[bdurden]

I've always wondered what the rest of Savannah looked like. Indistinguishable from sprawly Atlanta?

There are neighborhoods in the vicinity of the core that highly worth a visit for architecture buffs, and have a lot to offer in the way of craftsman style and Victorian.

The Bonaventure Cemetery and vicinity south of downtown is also a must see. There is a Victorian district west of downtown, a bit rundown but stack full of Southern Victorians, slowly it's gentrifying.

Then there is the drive between Savannah and Charleston (stay off the highway), about an hour and half of low country, make a pit stop in the sleepy town of Beaufort for great seafood and picture perfect scenery.

 

[Patrick]

interesting photos. It seems like this city, if your facts are correct, predates zoning, and probably predates much urban planning. The city looks to be organized around physical design principles (many small towns have a central town green surrounded by civic structures), which I think would be a great way to continue to approach things. However, these days people are less concerned with designing cities on a grand scale or from a bird's eye view, and are more concerned with the "process" of planning, and making sure everyone's ideas are incorporated. This is for good reason, because of the urban planning blunders of the past, but it has also led to skepticism of the role of planner as expert that I think has the potential to detract from the beauty of a place. Savannah as pictured is a marvelous town. Thanks.

 

[gooseberry]

Urban planning goes back thousands of years, so it doesn't pre-date urban planning and Savannah was very deliberately planned out. They knew how to plan cities back then better than we do now.

 

[Patrick]

I should have said it predates a lot of "modern" urban planning--i.e., comprehensive planning--the practice of which isn't that old at all (maybe 100 years).

 

[Ron Newman]

Washington DC was comprehensively planned (by L'Enfant) and is considerably older.

 

[statler]

"Modern planning" is usually shorthand for (or confused with) Euclidean Zoning

 

[GW2500]

Savanah is great. I went when I was 18, so I didn't really care about urban fabric/ street life and all the finer things, and it was August , hot as hell, and I still had a good time. They do need to get over the civil war, no it wasn't the war of northern agresion and your cause was morally wrong, besides that a must see for southern cities and like someone else said check out Beauford too.

 

[Patrick]

Washington DC was comprehensively planned (by L'Enfant) and is considerably older.

I should have remembered that the people on this forum are very "into" this stuff, which means they know more about it than average. Being more specific, let me explain what I meant. City planning, it is true, goes back thousands of years, at least in a general, conceptual sense. Romans built dead-end streets to funnel intruding armies into. L'enfant laid out the plan for DC in 1791, also true. But it wasn't until the 19th and 20th centuries that practically everywhere experienced the need for central planning. Rapid urbanization and related health issues prompted a reassessment of urban development, leading to various theories emerging about how to best address the future of cities. The City Beautiful movement arose at the end of the 19th century, and included the period in which Daniel Burnham (who also remade L'Enfant's largely unimplemented plan for DC) made perhaps the single most influential city planning document--the Chicago Plan. Soon after, zoning became a widespread practice, and many states mandate that zoning coincide with general goals set forth in comprehensive planning documents. Savanah, it appears, was built before what we now consider "urban planning" developed. That's all I meant.

 

[Patrick]

"PARK: I think that planning as a profession started some hundred years ago"

http://www.planetizen.com/node/46586

I guess I was referring to the profession rather than the fact of planning.