Grading The Irvine Ranch
It was billed as the "place where urban sprawl ends." How well did this master planned community do its job?
Southern California's Irvine Ranch is the largest privately developed, master planned community ever to be built in the U.S. After four decades of development, the 93,000-acre new town houses about 200,000 people, two-thirds of them within the city of Irvine. Development is planned to continue for some decades.
Like a number of other U.S. new towns of the 1960s and 1970s, the Irvine Ranch was conceived as a large-scale alternative to the sprawl that characterized the postwar building boom of the 1950s. It has been developed in a coordinated manner over decades, using techniques that we now describe as smart growth, according to a master plan that has had remarkable continuity.
The Irvine Ranch did break the pattern of sprawl in a number of ways. It substituted tree-lined arterials and concentrated commercial areas for strip development. Its village densities rival new urbanist icons like Duany Plater-Zyberk's Kentlands in Maryland, and do so over a much larger area. (Kentlands is just 356 acres.)
In addition, Irvine has many more jobs than residents, meaning that people can potentially live close to work, reducing the traffic problems caused by sprawl. By 2000, with over three jobs per household, 39 percent of Irvine residents worked in the city.
Where it falls short — in areas such as affordable housing and public transit — Irvine is not unlike many other developments, including those avowedly designed along smart growth and new urbanist lines.
The transportation front
The Irvine Ranch, which is about 35 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, is divided by two interstate freeways, the Santa Ana Freeway (I-5) and the San Diego Freeway (I-405). At first, the landowner and master developer, the Irvine Company, simply considered these roads an obstacle to its plans. But once development started, the freeways and the nearby John
Photos by Ann Forsyth
Bike lanes line many Irvine arterials, although some cyclists might be challenged by up to six lanes of traffic whizzing by.
Wayne Airport were seen as a way to organize the landscape. Irvine's circulation network is based on the freeways and the loose grid of arterials that provides edges for Irvine's residential villages and business
(To be continued; page 2)