Achieving Climax Slowly

Howard Blackson, writing for PlaceShakers, on the emerging trend of gradual build-out:

The latest design trend appears to be designing a place to be realized in very gradual stages. Not in terms of planning for phases of development pods, built-out in a predetermined sequence, but about individual lots changing — evolving — over time. Very rarely now are we designing to build immediately for a project’s absolute highest and best use or, as Nathan Norris calls it, its “climax condition.” This new incrementalism focuses on how lots change — how they’re built upon and reconfigured over time before, ahem, reaching their climax.

As with New Urbanism, New Incrementalism isn’t so much new as it is old ideas newly calibrated. Incremental growth is the process most places went through until the last century. It is a more cautious approach that isn’t fraught with the same perils of massive speculation and exorbitant capital outlay that is typical of our now conventional development pattern.