Top: From the outside, Alpine Modern beckons customers.

By Bryan Bowen and Harmon Zuckerman

Bryan Bowen is principal architect at Caddis Collaborative. Harmon Zuckerman is an attorney at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein. Both Bryan and Harmon are former chairs of the City of Boulder Planning Board.

When you first spot Alpine Modern on The Hill in Boulder, Colorado, you’re a little surprised. Located at a vibrant and appropriate intersection, the warm and welcoming coffee shop creates a meaningful node in the residential neighborhood and diagonal from a cemetery. There is loads of curb appeal: the old stone building, once the site of a grocery store, has great street frontage. The outdoor space includes an elevated patio, a fire pit, and umbrellas, while the indoor space features huge windows that look out on the patio and surrounding areas.

Rayback Collective is another delightful gathering space. Located on Valmont in midtown Boulder, Rayback is a former factory turned social hot spot. An indoor bar opens up onto a big yard with picnic tables, lawn games, and places for a handful of food trucks that rotate on a regular basis. Rayback also hosts music events, comedy shows, and more – and it welcomes dogs. It’s a fun, casual place that draws a lively crowd every afternoon and evening. In fact, it’s often hard to find a place to sit at Rayback – suggesting that Boulder craves this kind of kick-back space.

Closer to Caddis Collaborative’s office is Spruce Confection, located in Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood. It’s an example of an intentionally placed neighborhood commercial node that achieves much of what Alpine does. This is evidence that such gathering spots can be created through a planning process even though such businesses are never called for by the zone or regulatory world.

We wonder why Boulder does not have more unexpected and delightful places like Alpine Modern, the Rayback, and Spruce. People adore these environments. As former chairs of the City of Boulder Planning Board, we can see how well-meaning regulations stand in the way. What would happen if we wrote great zoning codes and policies that allow us to do a cool thing or even 20 more cool things?

People talk about the appeal of living in Boulder, about Boulder’s consistently high ranking as one of the happiest cities in the United States. The hot real estate market mirrors this desirability. Given all of this, why would Boulderites want to bind ourselves to zoning codes and other policies that dull delight?

Nearby cafés, entertainment, parks, lively density – people love these elements that transition us from suburban living to slightly more urban living. It’s what encourages us to walk and bike and leave the car behind. These elements are part of what makes and can keep making Boulder cool.

One measure of a community’s resilience is how many neighbors someone knows (check out Boulder’s resilience plan/strategy as an example). Direct observation reveals that familiarity creates real bonds. Neighborhood gathering places of the sort we have in mind allow residents to congregate and begin to develop connections. We walk past each other’s yards and porches on the way to and from our destinations. This contributes to a daily rhythm of familiarity.

In a 2004 Fresh Air interview, George Carlin talked about growing up on the edge between two neighborhoods in Manhattan: a privileged, white enclave right next to Harlem. “When you live near the border between all Black and all white,” Carlin said, “you don’t have the attitudes that the people who are insulated and isolated in the center of those areas have…. When you’re on the border between two cultures, you sort of learn to live together.”

As we consider making room for more delight, we are advocating a Carlinesque opportunity to create more edges in Boulder. In natural communities and ecosystems, the edges and interface points between different systems are where the action is. This is culturally true, too. When we created our city’s beautiful open space program, we took away our edges and seams. The result is that Boulder’s edges are all natural, which is nice, but we don’t have many cultural edges where people who are different from each other come together. There are some of these edges in Boulder, but over time, there is less and less distinction between them, and historically they have never had the sharp contrasts of some other American cities like Pittsburgh or Chicago. The result is a lot of monocultures that bleed into other similar monocultures.

Customers seated inside Alpine Modern have a great view of the outdoor patio and surrounding neighborhood.

We suggest four steps:

1. Look at what has worked for hundreds of years and plan for it to happen here, too.
2. Look for places in the existing city fabric where opportunities for delight would be welcomed.
3. Change those areas to mixed use zoning.
4. Add an optional criterion to the building application process in any zone: the “cool shit permit” (CSP).

Look at what works. As we think about creating more delightful places, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel – there are things about the built environment that just work. A coffee shop in Amsterdam built in 1809 has a carved stone lintel that says “café.” People in the early 19th century thought the park needed a coffee shop, and they were willing to carve this idea into stone – literally. More than 200 years later, this coffee shop is still in the right place, serving the right people, doing the right thing. Or take many American cities. Back in the day, numerous urban neighborhoods had corner bars, butchers, delis, restaurants, bodegas. Cities all over the country had those places woven in, creating the fabric of neighborhoods. As we reimagine Boulder, we can look for examples that are timeless and fun, that work, that people like – and then just shamelessly copy them and sprinkle them throughout our town.

Look for places where delight would be welcome. Areas abutting parks are natural locations for delight, and places where residential zoning pushes up against high traffic would also benefit from new zoning possibilities. If you see a house with an eight-foot cedar fence to wall the entire yard off from the street, that’s a spot that might work better as a gathering place. Because it is on a busy corner, that lot really shouldn’t be zoned for single family. Imagine the possibilities if it was rezoned and allowed greater creativity.

Change those areas to mixed use zoning. Code and policy need to reflect the experiences people love in their town. Think about the house that is sitting on the strategic corner in a neighborhood across from a park. Could that be a great little café? Imagine parents and grandparents hanging out on the patio overlooking the park while the kiddos are at a birthday party. Instead, there is a monoculture of low-density residential zoning that can’t allow anything else but homes surrounding these kinds of public spaces. If you rezone that strategic corner so that it allows the delightful thing, someday in a place as supercharged as Boulder somebody will come in and buy out the owner of that underutilized lot. The new person will come in and put in a cool little apartment building with the coffee shop on the corner where people can congregate and meet. It makes sense to pay a little premium for that lot to take advantage of that zoning because you can put in enough development to make that purchase price worthwhile. Most modern cities have zoning codes. But in a place like Boulder, which is a mid-sized city of 108,250 (2020 Census) with lots of money, a strict and sometimes abstruse land use code, and lots of code enforcement, it can be really hard to do great things. Everything is regulated in Boulder. This prevents delight because you’re never walking down the street going, “Oh, look at this different thing.” Instead, you’re saying, “Oh, look at this same thing. Oh, look at this same thing. Oh, look at this same thing.” When you have monoculture, it’s like walking through a cornfield – you’re going to see a lot of corn. When you walk through an arboretum, on the other hand, you will see a lot of really interesting plants every time you turn your head. Moving outside the strictures of zoning codes gives people the freedom to experience towns where you get to do creative and interesting things.

Add an optional criterion: the “cool shit permit” (CSP). People sometimes say to each other, “You know what would be cool?” What if that question was part of the city planning discourse? “You know what would be cool?” Instead of making room for that question, the zoning code limits imagined impacts on other people – it looks for the potentially negative and harmful outcomes of a project rather than balancing that with what it could contribute. We believe that the philosophy should be flipped. There should be a CSP overlay zone for the entire city. It could be an optional criterion developers can append to their applications: a cool shit permit. People bring the cool idea to Planning Board, along with pictures or renderings of the proposed project to illustrate how they would expand the nonconforming use. To make a CSP approach work, the focus of the review conversation would need to shift from the fear of a negative thing that could occur to the positive thing that could happen. The review criteria would include questions such as “Does it strengthen the community?” and “Does it advance the city’s larger goals?” Such a permit could be rescindable: if you break the rules of your conditional use, that use is no longer allowed.

Customers enjoy the ambience at the Rayback Collective.

As it thinks about moving toward more opportunities for delight, the City of Boulder should think about organic market forces and the possibility of rescinding or revising changes to the zoning code. Once you use a market-based organic strategy to allow for delight, not to force delight, the people who want to make those changes volunteer to make those changes and figure out how to pay good money for those changes. If it doesn’t work out, the city can rescind the zoning changes and go back to the old system.

Remember that the market dictates delight organically. Cities are always imagining and reimagining themselves. Once Boulder reimagines itself through the zoning code changes we are proposing, then the actual change will take place in a market-based organic fashion. Boulder would not be using eminent domain to boot people out, nor would it be prescribing the use that has to go in rezoned areas. Instead, the city would essentially be saying, “This is what’s available now under the code in this area. Have at it if and when you’d like.” If you upzone something and it ends up making a windfall for the person who is living there, that’s fine – let that person make a higher sale price. The person who is going to build the delightful replacement of that not-so-delightful land use in that crucial spot is also going to make money. In the end, there will be a new cool element in the neighborhood.

Move away from the fear of doing the wrong thing, and remember that we can reverse or rethink the code. Throughout our years on Planning Board, we have observed a kind of “stuckness” in Boulder: “it’s always been zoned that way,” “that’s how we’ve always done parking,” “this is how we’ve always done street width.” Boulder has a desperate fear of making mistakes: “It’s pleasant now. Let’s not mess it up.” But the stakes of our proposed revision to the zoning codes are actually quite low. We advocate adding some new zoning districts in order to allow some change. But if they end up not working, we can revert back to a different zoning code. Our proposed code-based changes are really easy to reverse or rethink. And best of all, nothing that we are suggesting is going to downzone or make property less valuable.

Spruce Confections is located in Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood, just a short walk from the Caddis Collaborative office.

There is a lot of delight available to Boulderites just outside the city. You can have trail delight in Boulder, but you have to drive to the trail to get there. You can have ski delight in Boulder, but you have to drive to the mountains to get there. You can have fishing delight in Boulder, but you need to go to destinations outside the city. There are all these available delights, but they’re not really in Boulder.

What we’re proposing is bringing delight – the surprising discovery, the unexpected activity, the cool place – right into the town where we live our daily lives. We relish the idea of walking up to the corner in our neighborhood and getting a cup of coffee or drinking a glass of wine or finding an innovative place for our kids to create and play. Alpine Modern and Rayback are great, but why not infuse that kind of energy directly into more communities and thereby create stronger bonds and more resilient neighborhoods? The Holiday Neighborhood is improved, not diminished, by Spruce Confections and Proto’s Pizza.

The neighborhood-serving businesses we’re talking about won’t cannibalize the other businesses in town or take away from Pearl Street’s vibrancy. When we talk about delight, we’re talking about the things you can’t buy on Amazon and don’t want to go to the mall for. That’s why we keep coming back to these social gathering places: coffee shops, bars, cafés. Or think in terms of a neighborhood’s kids. How about a place where children can build with Legos? It’s crazy ideas like this that make cities interesting and that Boulder has almost none of.

We are currently and always making our cities. Architects and planners are making our cities right now, and this moment – now – is when we need to do these right things. Cities take a long time, and generationally they change. Sometimes they boom and they seem to be changing like lightning, but mostly cities change when you leave and come back in 20 years and you’re like, “Wow, it looks different.” When people come back to Boulder in 20 years, we want their experience to be, “Oh, it got so much cooler.”

We want to make room for creativity for people who love Boulder and want to give delight to others. We want the code to allow that imaginative vision to be realized. Let’s make it possible for generous minds who have delightful ideas to share them in the built environment for all of us to enjoy.