Professor compares urban planning in San Diego and abroad


“They have the urban stuff down pretty well,” he said, “but not the stuff in the outlying areas.”

With notebook and camera in hand, Stepner and his wife, Rosie, walked the streets and roamed the countryside in Spain looking for examples of what to do, and not do, in San Diego.

Here are some of his take-away thoughts on what San Diego can learn from its one-time colonial master and what Spain can learn from us.


A: It some ways they want us to talk to about how we’re correcting some of our mistakes so they can learn from them.


A: I think it’s the same argument new urbanists make in the U.S. We built a lot of things before World War II that were walkable and had good public transit. Then after World War II, things changed and in some ways the same thing is happening, only it’s more than 25 years later. People see what Americans have and want something similar.

Q: Why do residents in central Madrid want to move to the ’burbs?

A: One of the reasons is schools. Some people feel suburban schools are better. Another is they want to have more space. The third reason is people are complaining in many cases that it’s getting very expensive to live in Madrid. The demand for some of this urban development is raising the rents. You move out farther and pay less money. It’s the same syndrome as here. What you end up with is a situation where people put money they save on rent into the car because they’re driving everywhere.

Q: Americans often marvel at the many shops within short walking distance of Europeans’ in-town homes. What’s the secret?

A: One of the things I found is that because there’s no parking and because of the intensity of development, you could walk to a grocery store — we had two groceries a block and half away from where we lived.

Q: What are three things you took away from Madrid that San Diego should seriously think of adopting as planning or zoning rules that would make life better and not cost billions of dollars?

A: I think making sure that we have services — parks, libraries, schools — to accompany the higher density. I think design matters — and you really need to pay attention to the quality of design wherever you go, public or private. Third is scale: In older parts of Madrid, the buildings were of a scale that really protected and maintained the character of Madrid — six- or seven-story buildings that weren’t whole blocks.


