The Village Plan

One cookie commercial always makes me smile. A happy woman savors a nibble while the announcer intones that these cookies are "almost like home." The muncher closes her eyes and sees herself sitting at a big country table as her grandmother takes fresh cookies out of the oven. "But wait," she yells as the vision passes. "I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up in a city." To which the announcer reminds, "Well, we said it was almost like home."

I always smile because that reminds me of Phoenix's urban village plan-not the cookies, the almost like home part. Say the word village slowly, and I'll just bet you conjure images of tidy homes on lovely streets with friendly neighbors who know the names of all the children and pets. I bet you say that word and equate it with security and belonging-and maybe even some grandmotherly type who shares cookies fresh from the oven.

You certainly can't say the word village and imagine a sprawling city of 375 square miles or traffic jams or crime or anything else nasty.

And that's why Phoenix continues its march into bigness-the ninth largest city today and destined to rank even higher-with a plan for growth that emphasizes something that sounds almost like home.

The village plan isn't unique. It's simple-but Phoenicians have embraced it as a comforting way to cope.

Historical maps on Phoenix growth resemble an insidious blob spreading across the landscape. In 1940, the city was only nine and six-tenths square miles with a cozy population of just over 65,000. It doubled in size within the next decade, but we're still talking about baby numbers. What happened next was unexpected, unplanned, and, for many, unbelievable: by 1960, Phoenix had mushroomed to 188 square miles with a population of 439,000-an increase of 1000 percent in land size and a quadrupling of the population in just ten years; over the next twenty years, the city doubled again in both size and population.

How do you cope with such growth and still maintain any semblance of neighborhoods, any sense that we're all in this together, any feeling of identity?

Of the nine villages in Phoenix, Encanto contains most of the city's older and more stylish homes, a big attraction today for young professionals eager to purchase quality property with high resale value. Jerry Jacka photos How do you maintain any quality of life when you're governed by the bulldozer? At first, it was thought that by laud-ing the virtues of the city as a whole everyone would eventually acclimate to the situation. But that's hard to do in a city that encompasses as much geo-graphic and economic diversity as Phoenix: what does the low density, almost exclusively residential area known as the Paradise Valley section have in common with the rural and industrial part of town known as South Phoenix? Do residents of the spanking new Deer Valley area on the northwest side have the same needs as those who live in the city's original neighborhoods around Encanto Park in downtown? Does blue-collar Maryvale on the west side care about the same problems as the upper middle-class Camelback sec-tion on the east side?

Declaring we're all one big family, hang our differences, wasn't cutting it and everyone at City Hall knew it. They also knew the folks were getting restless with the laissez-faire attitude toward urban development-Mr. Developer wants to put 2000 houses on an old citrus ranch, and that's fine with city leaders. Maybe if we planned some of these things out a little bit, this growth would be tolerable, the citizens said.

And so the search for a plan began. It was painful. Urban specialists came to town to remind us what we already knew-continued haphazard sprawl would be our ruin. A dozen studies were commissioned to give us ideas on how to accommodate both growth and the needs of current residents. And after all the specialists had filed their reports and gone home, the Phoenix Planning Commission in the mid-1970s turned to some hometown experts-citizens interested in what would become of Phoenix.

More than 200 people, meeting for more than a year, helped develop a simple yet doable plan: instead of trying to meld everyone into the same Phoenix pot, why not capitalize on the very differences and indentities that already existed? And why not handle growth the same way small towns do it-the business section is always in the middle, where it's convenient for everyone, and housing is built around that? It was an easy pattern to understand and sell because it was so familiar.

The Village Plan

But in big Phoenix, there wasn't just one “Main Street” of businesses, there were dozens, all in the form of wellstocked shopping centers. As would be expected, people shopped in the centers closest to their homes, just as the nearest park was where their kids played softball. So the obvious pattern that emerged was to designate those shopping centers as the “core” of the village -the Main Street, as it were. That's where future commerce would be built, where “high intensity” activity would be focused. From there, residential densities would gradually diminishthe high density apartments and townhomes would be concentrated closest to the core, the large acreage single-family homes farthest away.The idea satisfied the major concerns: how to accept the growth that shows no signs of letup, but still lessen the impact of bigness on people's lives. As urban planners would later explain in their antiseptic way, “These villages would help satisfy the psychological need to belong to an identifiable community with a sense of control over its environment.” Of course, those same urban planners originally wanted to call this land-use plan the “node” plan. Node may be technically correct in planning lingo, but it certainly doesn't have any sexiness. Can you imagine the cocktail chatter: “What node do you live in?” “Oh, node 412.” So much for almost-like-home identity. The name changed after a journalist-modesty prevents specifying -suggested node was about the dumbest word she ever heard. When challenged for an alternative, she thought of cookies and grandmas and suggested the word village. It fit so well it instantly stuck.

In 1979, the village plan was adopted by the Phoenix City Council, which then appointed citizen groups in the nine identified villages to advise the council on zoning and redevelopment projects. Although the village committees don't always prevail in their opposition to a particular project, the current council has given its voice more weight, and developers acknowledge they are an important factor in the scheme of things.

As the city plan notes, “The goal of each village is to offer a unique choice of life-style in which residents may live, work, and enjoy leisure-time activities within close proximity.” So if you're a Yuppie (young urban professional), you might choose to live in the Encanto Village, which borders the city's major cultural facilities and includes the only antique housing to be found in Phoenix. But if you're a hightech person, you could choose to live in the Deer Valley Village, which counts some of the nation's major electronics firms as neighbors. If mountain climbing is your thing, there are several villages to choose from, all bordering the city's impressive Phoenix Mountains Preserve. If you're interested in planting fields of cotton or raising horses, the South Phoenix Village is a likely place to hang your spurs. As Phoenix Planning Director Richard Counts likes to put it, villages are the way to have the best of both worlds: “This is the way we can compete with smaller towns. We'll provide the big city cultural scene, big city athletics, the finest in recreation facilities, and a variety of shops and restaurants-all the things people congregate in cities forbut the villages are well suited to combat the feeling of being lost in a sea of sameness; they give a sense of neighborhood and belonging.” When you think about it, it sounds almost like home.