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viewsDana Hazen | Community Builder
By giornalista, Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 1 comments
Dana took her position as the first-ever Mountain Brook City Planner in 2007 and has since worked to perpetuate the 1920s-drafted plans of Robert Jemison. Since its inception, Mountain Brook has prided itself on being a walking community that embraces the natural landscape. Houses are built on the land’s already-occurring paths, and foot paths connect each village node. By reorganizing zoning areas and establishing building regulations, Dana hopes to recreate a community synergy between the structures and their inhabitants. “How can we get our people walking and knowing each other again?” she asks. Dana often travels the 13 square-mile area in her top-down convertible. “It’s just like being in a candy shop when you work here,” Dana says. “Each [house] is more beautiful than the one you just passed. But, it’s all about creating relationships. If people don’t have relationships, it doesn’t matter what you build.”
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When Dana came on as the City Planner, Mountain Brook had been long awaiting her arrival. “Sam [City Manager] had the [hallway nameplate] in the cellophane wrapper in his drawer for years. He showed it to me when I had my interview and said, ‘Look, I’ve been wanting a City Planner for so long.’” She attributes a lot of the city’s divisions to zoning. “If we zone residential over here in subdivisions and then all the commercial over here, with industry over here…what we’ve found is that a lot of uses are compatible and symbiotic. The bad part of zoning is that we’ve taken that and broken it apart. That’s what downtown Birmingham is trying to get back to with their lofts,” she says. “There’s a certain wonderful blend of uses that makes a community. And segregating everything out is the opposite of it”
Mountain Brook prides itself on its structural setup encouraging people to be out and about. Sidewalk width increases walk-ability, businesses are pushed closer to the street to make them more appealing to pedestrians. The city even has ordinances about the percentage of windows on a storefront. The more transparent a storefront is, the more welcoming it is to potential customers. In school, Dana devoted study to the “relationship of the build environment on the people. It’s as simple as arranging furniture,” she says, citing the benches out front of the Mountain Brook City Hall. “If you arrange all the furniture in a square facing out, no one is going to talk to each other. IF you arrange it in a half circle, people are going to interact.”
Dana often rides around the city in her convertible and blue baseball cap. If you’re ever in the Mountain Brook area, look out for her!
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