The capital city is brimming with grand ideas about how to grow the city’s core and push back against sprawl. So why hasn’t anything happened yet?

Springfield is bursting with new urbanists.

While the phrase “new urbanism,” coined in the 1980s, often frightens people who think that new urbanism entails mandating an organic arugula garden on every rooftop or forcing folks to trade in their cars for a pair of Crocs, the concept is much more simple than that. New urbanism is a planning principle whose goal is to recapture a sense of neighborhood, the feeling that existed in communities before people swapped their front porches in the city’s core for oversized garage doors on its outermost edges.

New urbanists — the most vocal of whom include the national advocacy group Congress for New Urbanism, or CNU (see page 13) — call for restoring urban centers through filling in vacant lots and buildings and by reconfiguring suburbs to offer neighborhoods that offer a range of housing options, are close to jobs and, most importantly, are walkable.

Central Springfield is primed for new urbanist growth, notes architect and CNU- Illinois chairman John Peter Barie. “If you go to areas outside the downtown core, you’ve got block after block that are undeveloped, empty, underdeveloped, underutilized, abandoned buildings,” says Barie, an architect from Aurora who toured Springfield’s architecture last summer.

It’s not from a lack of effort or imagination, that’s for sure. Over the past several years, when given an opportunity to map a vision for Springfield’s future, capital city residents have offered up a multitude of ideas that incorporate new urbanist principles of walkable neighborhoods and mixeduse developments.

Urbanism was particularly prevalent in the recommendations of the Regional/Urban Design Team charged in 2002 with developing a plan to spark development downtown.

In addition to proposing “more residential uses, enhanced retail opportunities, improved cultural venues and reuse of many existing buildings,” the R/UDAT called for the construction of new parking garages, not solely to accommodate more cars, but “to allow a greening of the Capitol Complex.”

Following R/UDAT, in 2007 architecture students from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, under the supervision of professor Robert I. Selby, dreamt up a number of developments for downtown for the American Institute of Architects 150 Springfield project.

The document the students produced, Blueprint for Springfield: Designing the Future of Historic Downtown of Illinois’ Capital City, focused on “principles for livable communities.” Among these principles were promoting a downtown neighborhood that allows residents to walk to shops, jobs and cultural and entertainment venues, encouraging mixed-use development, providing a variety of residential offerings, varying transportation options, and protecting environmental resources” —

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