UDF: Town Centers and Urban Villages

Seattle has successfully used an “Urban Village” strategy to focus growth into distinct, densifying nodes that are distributed throughout the city and act as neighborhood business districts and activity nexuses, serving wide swathes of adjacent lower density single family neighborhoods. We will explore a series of these Town Center developments and discuss their successes and failures and dig into the similarities and differences between these growing nodes in Seattle and the greater Puget Sound Region.

Presented by AIA Seattle’s Urban Design Forum

An urban village can be described as a more diverse part of an urban area comprising of denser residential and mixed-use zoning, with a higher priority given to transit and pedestrianization.

A town center is characterized as being the commercial or retail core of a neighborhood or town.

These terms can be quite analogous. However, sometimes an urban village is seen as more organic in its development and phasing, whilst a town center can be viewed as more master planned and orchestrated from a single or group of cooperating developers.

Seattle has successfully used an “Urban Village” strategy to focus growth into distinct, densifying nodes that are distributed throughout the city and act as neighborhood business districts and activity nexuses, serving wide swathes of adjacent lower density single family neighborhoods.

A similar strategy is being employed in numerous suburban areas outside of Seattle proper, providing many of the amenities of urban living in outlying areas without the burden of urban property prices. This multi-nodal approach to urbanism also aims to alleviate pricing, population, and congestion pressures from Seattle’s immediate downtown area. Local examples of such areas may include the downtowns of Bothell and Redmond, and the Seattle neighborhoods of Lake City and Columbia City.

We will explore a series of these Town Center developments and discuss their successes and failures and dig into the similarities and differences between these growing nodes in Seattle and the greater Puget Sound Region.

Panelists

• Don Vehige, AIA, Planner, Architect, Landscape Architect, GGLO
• Lyle Bicknell, Urban Designer, City of Seattle OPCD

Registration encouraged. This event is free to attend.

Program Questions?
Contact Connor Descheemaker, Membership & Volunteer Manager at AIA Seattle