Upraising Golf Carts in Peachtree City
Jeff Sauser
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Contents
Opening 5
Part 0 - Strategy 7
Part 1 - Network 15
Part 2 - Urban 27
Part 3 - Identity 41
Part 4 - Architecture 63
Closing 90
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Opening
Born and raised in DeKalb County, Georgia, I am the spawn of
sprawl: I played in the woods along power easements, I learned
to drive on 5-lane highways, and I went on my first date in the
middle of a vast, amorphous strip mall. My native environment
is paved, curvilinear, under-designed, and perpetually on the
verge of neglect. And yet I can’t help but feel attached to it.
Humans naturally and powerfully attach to the place from which
they came and, sure enough, whenever I’m driving past Toco Hills
shopping center I truly feel in touch with my heritage.
None of this means I find DeKalb County’s predominate urban
aesthetic attractive or desirable. Especially after 4 years in
architecture and planning school, I thoroughly understand the
evils inherent in my native landscape. But does that mean I’d
like to see everything pretty much I ever knew before college
bulldozed?
I’m living proof there is something intrinsically positive about
that place – and any place – because as long as people are from a
place it is important and instrumental at least to its natives.
Thus, to destroy it and/or render it entirely unrecognizable in
one callous swoop unethically eradicates an entire population’s
heritage.
Instead, before calling in the earthmovers, the designer must
discern and preserve the elements that hold the essence of
the place. There are certain aspects of Toco Hills that could
change without severing my innate ties to the place and there
are certain aspects that, if changed, would render the place
entirely unrecognizable to me, thereby dashing my roots. The
tough question is this: what exactly are those aspects that
maintain the personal connection in the sprawling, suburban
context and how, if at all, can they be preserved while still
realizing the realistic goals of an urban design revision?
Peachtree City has stumbled upon just such a quandary: how can
you culturally and economically revitalize a strip mall without
destroying its essence? Is it possible to distill and upraise
that essence while simultaneously solving the practical problems
at hand?
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Part 0 - Strategy
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Critical Position
i. Image/metaphor of the city:
Shopping mall vs. promenade
city = site of consumption + site of presentation
identity = nature of consumption + nature of presentation
shopping mall = commodity consumption + commoditity
presentation
promenade = cultural consumption + cultural presentation
(these are never mutually exclusive)
ii. Method: Processes <--> artifacts
Processes are informed by artifacts
Processes operate on artifacts
Processes defer to artifacts
iii. Attitude: Ethical incrementalist
Ethically regulate the balance between process inuence
and artifact preservation
Operate incrementally to ensure steps taken are less
irrevocable if proven awed
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Problem
Peachtree City’s village centers are
failing. The golf cart will save them.
Peachtree City’s founders envisioned the village centers
as the city’s distinctive community foci. Instead, they
have devolved over the years into generic strip malls in
need of social and economic rejuvenation.
Locally popular and infrastructurally expanding, the golf
cart path network is the best mechanism with which to
reconjure the city’s originally envisioned essence.
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Network
Augment the network to integrate
and accentuate village centers
Peachtree City’s golf cart network currently bypasses the
village centers. The network should be adjusted to focus on
the village centers instead of areas between them.
Golf cart thoroughfares should flank major roads across the
hinterland but be diverted and channeled through village
centers.
The golf cart network needs some hierarchically primary
throroughfares to more expediently and intelligably cohere
the village centers.
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Urban
Channel golf cart paths through village
centers to locally integrate village
centers within local transport network.
The village centers are traditionally characterized by the
general urbanistic relationship between strip mall and
major road and their specic footprints’ geometries.
The current urban design paradigm recommends disrupting
the strip-road visual connection with new buildings and
generically flattening the existing, irregular strip
footprint.
Instead, the strip-road relationship should be maintained
by a visually permeable civic? channel and the strip’s
distinctive shape should be made permanent by a geometrically
adherent cart path.
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Identity
Use urban design to establish
relationships that generate identity
Instead of imposing a generic identity without imagination,
impose a wilder, equally irreverent identity with some legs.
Or, establish physical conditions for an authentic identity
to naturally emerge on its own, modestly framed by (rather
than obtrusively determined by) the urban design framework.
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Architecture
Within the proposed urban framework,
use architecture to negotiate,
mediate, and/or prod oppositional
relationships
The proposed civic expanse spatially mitigating between
the outsider car zone and the insider golf cart zone shall
be architecturally articulated in ways that engage the
relationship between the opposing modes and populations.
Ideally, this architecture emerges from real interactivity
over time. However, in the absence of actual input, the
architecture is here invented as if sprung from reality.
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Part 1 - Network
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One City
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Two Overlapping Worlds
Regional Layer Local Layer
Outsiders Users Insiders
Shopping Centers Focus Village Centers
Cars Transport Carts and Walking
Regional to Global Economics Local to Regional
Isolated Society Interactive
Generic Culture Local
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Car Network
Visitor’s domain:
industrial parks, highways, and regional strip malls.
Visitor’s transport system:
road hierarchy (highways, arterials,collectors, etc.).
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Integration Analysis
Half-mile reach:
hierarchically supreme arterials are very integrated and
connective, serving regional strip malls better than village
centers.
Two direction changes:
arterials are highly intuitive, naturally leading to strip
malls and each other.
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Cart Network
Citizen’s domain:
village centers, residential neighborhoods, open space,
lakes, and community facilities (schools, churches, etc.)
Citizen’s transport system:
golf cart path network (local streets and multi-use trails).
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Integration Analysis
Half-mile reach:
the city’s most connective regions skirt the village centers
instead of overlapping them.
Two direction changes:
the network has no dominant routes intuitively leading to
the village centers.
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Augmented Cart Network
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Augmentations
Add global corridors:
an expedient path along car highways and a scenic route
along the waterfront.
Improve peripheral connectivity:
add many small links to substantially increase access to
major routes and, subsequently, village centers.
Channel corridors through village centers:
divert major paths past village centers’ shops and civic
spaces to ensure community exposure and integration.
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New Cart Path Routes
Scenic route:
golf cart right of ways inserted between backyards and
lakefronts.
Expedient route:
golf cart lanes added along highway right of ways and
separated from trac by planted buers.
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Integration Analysis
Half-mile reach:
the new cart path routes become the city’s most integrated
and connective, transmitting followers directly to village
centers.
Two direction changes:
the new routes also become the city’s most intiutive,
naturally leading cart traffic to village centers.
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Part 2 - Urban
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Peachtree City, Georgia
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Restructuring
Existing urban structure:
car infrastrcture dominates the center; golf carts are
relegated to the posterior fringes.
Revised urban structure:
carts run along the retail face’s concretized geometric
inections. A civic? zone will architecturally articulate
the village’s selected or emergent identity and mediate the
locally integrated cart side with the regionally accessible
car side.
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Aberdeen
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Village Center
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Glenloch
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Village Center
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Braelinn
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Village Center
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Kedron
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Village Center
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Part 3 - Identity
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Glenloch, Strip Mall
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Emergent Identity
Sprung from reality:
Ideally, a community’s identity emerges from actual
conditions in the actual world over time. The relationships
established and provoked by structuring architectural
impositions determine the place’s gradually articulated
and clarified formal and anthropological characteristics.
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Matrix of Contrived New Identities
Sprung from Imagination:
When reality is removed from the equation, imposed identities
become inherently contrived. Instead of emerging from actual
social activity, they must be conjured by a designer.
Typically, the resultant concepts are often banal, market-
serving redressings. To make things interesting, why can’t
the pretense be a bit wilder? If neither the generically
cliche nor the flamboyantly ironic are authentic, the most
provocative proposition might as well win out.
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Glenloch, Topiary
Topiary shroud:
the topiary masks village center’s activities from
outsiders’ view. Car-bound visitors consider the centers
post-sprawlingly bucolic. Only if they traverse the invasive
jungle will they discover the centroid’s locally oriented
shops and puttering natives.
Green reclaimation:
invasive topiary covers and consumes the economically
failing village center’s empty box stores and under-utilized
parking lot. Only surviving shops are pruned - the rest of
the strip mall is made jungle.
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Glenloch, Scotland
Tartan gift wrap:
ludicrously playing up a Scottish heritage
implied by its name, Glenloch plasters itself
with a distinctive tartan motif. Visitors are
drawn to the apparent cultural destination and
patronize its features like shuffling tourists.
Parking area reduction:
404 car parking spaces were erased to create the center’s
signature plaid expanse. To demonstrate one aspect of
golf carts’ space economy, 404 cart parking spaces
intersperse with the tartan’s warp and weft.
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Glenloch, Contrada
Sienese spectacle:
transforming the civic? expanse into a cheap Piazza del
Campo, visitors are attracted by the brightly lit and
intensely bizzare Golf Cart Palio. Locals gather around the
track to cheer on their villages’ racing representatives
while tourists peruse shops purchasing overpriced flags
and other Peachtree City Contrade paraphernalia.
Inter-village competition:
each represented by a costumed driver in the race, vil-
lages compete for civic glory and the chance to take home
the Palio Cup.
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Glenloch, Hamsterdam
Addictive urbanism:
the village center hosts an illicit marketplace run by
locals that ecnomically feeds on visitors’ substance-
susceptabilities. Vacant shops and box outlets convert
into drug dens habitually populated by non-locals who find
themselves irrecoverably drawn to the center’s bustling,
physiologically addicting commercial activity.
Red-light district:
after some legal revisions, the village center becomes the
region’s Amsterdam. Dealers may work within its bounds
and users are left alone as long as they don’t stray into
the neighborhoods. Mobile public service service stations
keep things clean and safe, providing needle exchanges,
prophylactics, medicine, food, and the like.
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Part 4 - Architecture
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West Cart
Entry
Strip
Lot
East
Cart
Entry
Parking
Glenloch
Existing Conditions
At present, Glenloch is mostly asphalt. Retail vacancies
(including the anchor tenant) ensure the vast parking lot
is usually almost empty. Golf carts enter the center from
the back alongside dumpsters and must vie with cars while
navigating the lot, often parking between dwarfing SUVs.
Because the car is so much provided for and accommodated
than the golf cart, most people - even locals - prefer
to drive to Glenloch. Though many of its establishments
are popular and locally run, Glenloch’s architecture is
ordinary and doesn’t attract casual attention, forcing
businesses to rely on word-of-mouth to attract new patrons.
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Full page photo
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West Cart
Entry
Strip
Lot
East
Cart
Entry
Parking
Glenloch, Topiary
Recommended Improvements
The new Glenloch is distinguished by a vast Hedera topiary
where hundreds of parking spaces used to fallow. Reminiscent
of neglected woods overgrown with kudzu, this environment
is anything but out of control: the tree-covering ivy
figures are pruned into locally determined shapes and the
space amongst and beneath them is filled with walking
trails and play equipment. Golf carts enter the center
along landscaped paths no longer exposed to dumpsters and
pass through along a new car-free strip flanked on one side
by shop fronts and on the other by soft cart parking spots.
Cars are banished to the center’s unaltered fringes amongst
the outparcels. Car-based visitors may enter the topiary
via mysterious paths which circuitously lead to the strip
and its shops.
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Full page render
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West Cart Entry
Existing Conditions
Service drive Cart path leads
Cart path flanked
severs cart path closely past
by pavement
too broadly dumpsters
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West Cart Entry
Recommended Improvements
Partition and
Narrowed service Landscaping along plants block
drive assuages cart path softens dumpster view and
traffic hazard traversal odor from
cart path
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East Cart Entry
Existing Conditions
Cart path empties
Service drive Cart path leads
into parking
dwarfs cart path, closely
lot without
inviting hazard past dumpsters
continuation
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East Cart Entry
Recommended Improvements
Diverted service Continuous path Partition blocks
drive separates smooths cart dumpster view from
cart from truck access into center cart path
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Strip
Existing Conditions
Car driving
Pedestrians and Surface area surface is
cars dangerously predominated by impervious, adding
share spatially large car parking to regional storm
ambiguous tarmac spaces on asphalt water run-off
problems
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Strip
Recommended Improvements
Carts park on Cart driving
Strip limited
wear-resistant, surfaces made of
to spatially
white-striped pervious concrete,
organized carts
Perfo© Terra-Grid© reducing storm
and pedestrians
tiles in turf water run-off
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Lot
Existing Conditions
Asphalt and Parking lots are
its particular hard, polluted,
oil stains are Endless rows of
hot, and generally
the center’s cars are visually
not fun or
dominate feature, monotonous
conducive to
characterizing its leisure
identity
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Lot
Recommended Improvements
As the new
dominate feature, Diverse foliage Play structures
the topiary provides a and other leisure
jungle defines visually dynamic infrastructure
the center and and heterogenous populate the
its associated vista topiary’s interior
community.
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Car Park
Existing Conditions
Carts park in
big spaces Barren view from
alongside cars, parked car to
a potentially strip mall
dangerous mix
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Car Park
Recommended Improvements
Though
experientially
changed, this
After moving cart The view from portion of the
parking along parked car village center is
strip, the rest of to strip is not physically
the parking lot interestingly altered.
can serve cars interrupted by
exclusively topiary jungle
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Glenloch, Topiary
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Illustrative Plan
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Closing
The urban designer’s fundamental and persistent paradox involves
the negotiation between his/her impulse to project his/her
ideologies and the responsibility to respect those on the
ground before, during, and after the designer’s active role has
passed. Ideally, the world would organize itself in ways that
interestingly and functionally suffice. Of course, in reality,
designers are needed to impose necessary systems of order in
the many cases that such things don’t simply work themselves
out. But with the urban designer’s power comes a responsibility
to do right by the people his/her work affects. Incrementalist
processes and modest design ambitions are effective resistance
measures against obtrusive over-determination.
True incrementalism can only manifest one step at a time. Phasing
plans that include a build-out scenario might be incrementally
implemented but they are conceived all at once, rendering them
anything but incrementalist in nature. An actually incremental
plan would pause at phase one, observe the implementation and
response over time, and then begin designing phase two (if and
when another phase is deemed necessary at all). At present,
this long-term, multi-stage, responsive design process does not
meld well with today’s development and financial models, which
require more deterministic foresight than true incrementalism
can provide.
Constraining a design proposal to a limited number of aspects
helps prevent one’s personal ideologies from totally overwhelming
or replacing the project’s existing conditions. A project site
comes replete with interfacing systems that operate at a level
of complexity far beyond the best designer’s comprehension.
Ignorantly tampering with too many of these systems will likely
disrupt the place’s overall stability in more ways than the
average designer is willing to admit or take responsibility
for (consider climate change). If the designer merely selects
a couple of the present systems to engage with and actively
avoids disrupting the others, his/her actions are less likely
to compromise overall stability. Instead, the place improves
because a few of its layers have been distilled in the face
(rather than in place) of its preserved layers, setting up a
new (but not alien) dynamic that can generate unforeseen (but
sustainable) complexities emergently.
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