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JOHN BROWN is the editor of theslowhome.com and the founder of the Slow Home Movement. He is a registered architect, real estate broker and Professor of Architecture at the University of Calgary.
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The Mixed-Use Mixed Message
Jul 01, 2008
By Lynn Vannucci From the San Francisco Chronicle
Whimsical. It was the least loaded word I'd heard critics muster for "Old Downtown" Windsor, which is not old in any sense of the word; it is the brand-new brainchild of its developer, Orrin Thiessen, and it has whimsy to spare.
Located 60 miles north of San Francisco off Hwy. 101, Windsor is a town of some 22,000 residents. Its downtown core, which dated from the 1870s, had deteriorated in the last century into a motley collection of scarred buildings riddled with gang activity. "It looked like it belonged in Bosnia," one long time resident told me.
In 2001, Thiessen came along. He demolished the rotted buildings and began construction of Windsor Town Green Village, a project that was nothing less than the re-imagining of a community. If the resulting faux Victorian facades and cartoon color scheme don't put you in mind of Disneyland, you had a deprived childhood.
It is this architectural naivete - and its accompanying artifice - that galvanizes Windsor's critics, but there is something else about the town that is absolutely cutting edge. Town Green Village is a mixed-use development. Mixed-use development, experts are telling us, is one of the foremost tools we have in mitigating the climate-change crisis. Windsor's detractors often overlook this critical point. That could be because mixed-use developers are often short of the point themselves. Read the rest of the article.
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We believe that our homes and neighborhoods should be healthy, vibrant places that uplift the spirit and gracefully fit our needs. We call for an end to poor construction, bad design, misleading marketing, unfair lending practices and environmental neglect in the housing industry. We acknowledge our collective responsibility to create CLOSE, SIMPLE, LIGHT places to live that leave a positive legacy for future generations.
SLOW HOME is an international movement devoted to bringing good design into real life. It takes its name from the slow food movement which arose as a reaction to the processed food industry. The sprawl of cookie cutter housing that surrounds us is like fast food - standardized, homogenous, and wasteful. It contributes to a too fast life that is bad for us, our cities, and the environment. In the same way that slow food raises awareness of the food we eat and how these choices affect our lives, Slow Home provides design focused information to empower each of us to take more control of our homes and improve the quality of where and how we live.
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