For a few years, Phillip J. Tabb, an architecture professor at Texas A&M University, has served as the master planner of the Serenbe community, a development emerging in the Chattahoochee Hill Country south of Atlanta, Ga. The project is featured in the June 2006 issue of Metropolis magazine, in an article titled, “A Workable Utopia,” on pages 48–52.

In the story, Tabb touches on the concept of “constellated urbanism,” which is further articulated in his paper, “Sustainable Planning at the Urban Edge: The Serenbe Community.” The idea, Tabb says in Metropolis, is “that you achieve a higher level of unity by connecting smaller, individuated settlements.”

The article concludes, that Serenbe, “set within an innovative regional land-conservation effort, … offers a workable place-making alternative that might be applied wherever corporate builders are threatening to sprawl their way across America.”

The June issue of Metropolis is available in the Technical Reference Center. Current Metropolis subscribers can read the article online at:
http://www.metropolismag.com/
cda/magazine.php

This summer, with funding form the Serenbe Institute, Tabb focused on Phase III of the project. He facilitated a charrette with health practitioners, health administrators, and healers from various traditions to develop a design for a Health and Wellness Hamlet. The hamlet will create a residential community in harmony with nature, within the context of Serenbe communities. Its inherent design combines eastern and western healing practices that encourage healthy living and support the commercial development of health and wellness services that will be fully integrated and woven into the very fabric of the hamlet.
Among the facilities planned for the hamlet are an integrated medicine and wellness spa, fitness center, therapeutic pool, vegetarian restaurant, inn with recuperative cabins, pediatric center, an east/west pharmacy, physician’s offices and treatment facilities, and healing herb glasshouses and gardens. This unique residential community will begin construction in 2008.