All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
choose the winner? Indeed, the only collectivity that has shown any wisdom in this corrupt and depressing process has been the public in its decisive rejection of the mediocre work of our mediocre public servants and private entrepreneurs.
The answer to terror is neither muscle-flexing nor the oblivious politburo style of the LMDC and the Port Authority, with their spurious and short-sighted “practicalities.” The real reply is an excess of democracy: flamboyant participation. It’s more than improbable (and happily so) that the public, especially with the experience of tragedy so near, will agree unanimously on a solution. But the conversation would be guaranteed to yield a more forceful and inventive solution than anything we have seen thus far. The process of arriving at the decision would be its own memorial.
2003
21
No Island Is an Island
The barrier islands off the Carolina coast are at once fragile and protective. Home to an amazing diversity of environments, ranging from ocean to dunes to maritime forests to salt and freshwater wetlands, these islands serve as habitat for a stunning range of ecosystems and a singular variety of species. Their beauty is compelling. And susceptible. Hurricane Hugo—which ravaged the coast in 1989—was an equal-opportunity destroyer, devastating both human and natural habitats with sublime thoroughness. Both, however, have revived themselves remarkably. The islands teem with alligators and deer, sawgrass, pine, and palmetto. And the houses that crowd the coast have also returned, jostling for views along the strand.
Resistance to this overbuilding of the islands is longstanding and based in several arguments. Critics challenge the crazy economics of insurance and public subsidy, the ravaging of pristine landscapes, the privatization of an asset that might be carefully shared, and the propriety of settlements in areas that participate with such regularity in a cycle of destruction and rebirth. These are the same arguments reflected in current debates about the suppression of fires in the national forests in the face of the otherwise natural rhythm of burning and renewal.
Solutions to the question of development of the barrier islands range from the default—the kind of rampant growth that has fouled places like Hilton Head—to their preservation as purely natural habitats. Each of these extremes has an ethical vector, an argument about the highest and best use of a scarce resource. And each represents a proposition about the meaning of our inhabitation on the land. The natural environment is the ultimate utopia, a realm characterized by the moral indifference of its laws and the totality of its system. This view is representative of environmental thinking in general, the idea that our moral position in the world derives—in great measure—from the way in which we define our relationship to the sum of forces in the cosmos and from our willingness to subsume our Promethean impulses to a more humble and collaborative view. This consciousness has begun to produce new patterns of architecture and settlement, and this “green” impulse is legible in a variety of incarnations along the islands. One of the more remarkable of these is Dewees Island, just north of Charleston, a place that proposes a kind of “third way,” intermediate between development and preservation. The project is the brainchild of John Knott, a charismatic builder who, uniquely, gives the lie to the idea that “enlightened developer” is an oxymoron. Over the past ten years, he has transformed Dewees into a model for the possibility of building communities with a light lie on the land, simultaneously evoking both the promise and difficulties of constructing truly sustainable settlements.
Like other gated communities, Dewees is enabled by a series of restrictions and by a population that shares in their intent. Construction is confined to 4 percent of the island’s footprint, leaving the rest in its natural state. Each of the 150 lots in the site plan is governed by a code that allows no more than 7,500 square feet to be developed (including the footprint of the house, driveway, septics, cisterns, and so on) and caps the total size of houses at 5,000 square feet. The code sets out a long series of extremely sensible environmental parameters for construction, and designs are vetted for conformity by a compliance committee. No cars are permitted on the island (a ferry shuttles residents and guests back and forth), and the main medium of transportation is golf carts, restricted to a top speed of 17mph. Roads are graded sand, and existing flora and fauna are rigorously protected. To reinforce the vibe, the development assumes a gently didactic role, abounding with small cautionary and explanatory labels (“boardwalks protect our dunes”).
The results are very different from the typical coastal pattern. Houses are pulled back from the shoreline and roadways and are largely concealed by native trees, despite the height generated by the need to raise each structure 15 to 20 feet above sea level. The experience of the island thus centers predominantly on its natural features, which are scrupulously protected. Dewees’s architecture is largely Low Country generic in flavor, and modest, rather than distinguished, in character. (Notable exceptions are a pair of lovely houses built by Charleston architect Whitney Powers.)
The island’s harmonies are also produced by the homogeneity of its inhabitants, people of means with a prior commitment to at least basic principles of sustainability. Successful communities always grow from such shared interests, and the question to be asked about enclaves like Dewees is not one about shared values but about those excluded. Knott is dismissive of cavils about the lack of social diversity in the midst of the stunning biodiversity, and he is probably right. A tiny resort island cannot be expected to do the work of transforming an entire culture predicated on distinctions of wealth and class. And working on environmental amelioration is everybody’s business.
My own initial skepticism about Knott’s project dissipated after watching an encounter between him and two bubbas on the Dewees ferry. One of them approached Knott to ask if he could help out a friend of his, the coach for a local baseball club who was planning to move to greener economic pastures in Florida. The coach’s day job was laying out golf courses, and the man proposed to Knott that Dewees would be well served by the construction of a few putting greens to give the men of the island an alternative to fishing and “watching the women swim.” Although the Dewees ethos precludes a golf course (the landscape equivalent of an SUV), Knott heard the man out and suggested that he would be happy to talk to his friend if he understood that he’d have to build his green using native species, grown without fertilizer. When the man and his colleague registered perplexity at the latter requirement, Knott explained with exactitude, and without a hint of condescension, the negative effects of fertilizer on the environment. The men were clearly convinced, and Knott (whose early Jesuit education reappears in both his environmental fervor and his love of argument) had started another pair on the road to conversion.
But the real proof of Knott’s commitment to social as well as environmental justice is made clear in his current project for the transformation of the city of North Charleston. The development, called Noisette after an eighteenth-century French botanist banished from Charleston proper for his marriage to a Haitian woman, encompasses both the abandoned Charleston Navy Yard and a series of neighborhoods whose population is 68 percent African-American and largely poor. Knott has partnered with the North Charleston municipality, and planning encompasses 3,000 acres at an estimated eventual cost of over $1 billion. This is projected to yield 10,000 new and rehabilitated housing units, 3 to 5 million square feet of commercial space, the renewal of thirteen schools, several new museums, and the creation of a large environmental reserve.
Evidence of the seriousness of the commitment is already visible at a variety of scales. Work has been completed on the conversion of a tiny house to a high green standard to serve as an educational center and model for work to come. Tax-increment financing is in place for major infrastructural improvements throughout the site. A nonprofit sustainability institute has been created. A waterfront park is under construction. The city has overlaid a special environmental district on the whole area, and Mayor Keith Summey has called for Noisette to be “a national benchmark for smart growth.” Most remarkably, the city has promulgated and publicized a “pledge” that commits it “to practice ‘no tolerance’ for gentrification.”
The fascination of Noisette springs both from these sterling intentions and from the amazing character and pattern of the site itself. In relatively small compass, Noisette holds one of the most concentrated collections of model communities I have ever encountered, places created with deep deliberation on the relationship of architectural