Ask What Brownfields Can Do for You

A utopian “megaburb” is growing west of Salt Lake City, on the former site of a massive copper mine. Like the enormous development that replaced Stapleton International Airport in Denver, “Daybreak,” in South Jordan, Utah is being designed under strict New Urbanist principles, but unlike Stapleton, Daybreak is outside the city limits, and is conceived as a satellite to a city, neither an urban district or an independent town. The highly controlled experiment is taking place under the auspices of Kennecott Land, a subsidiary of the mammoth miming company that despoiled, then restored the soil on the 144 square mile parcel—the largest holding by a single owner in the country.

Given its history, Daybreak has been a suprisingly easy sell: of 162,800 homes planned over the next few decades, 800 retro bungalows and deep-porched two-story jobs are already sold and rising, even though buyers have to sign a statement saying they know the ground water is still tainted, and may contain pollutants powerful enough melt concrete. (Drinkning water is drawn from South Jordan's water district.) Kennecott’s attention to the ecology of their former fief, from reclaiming the ground to its push to make light rail the easiest commute into Salt Lake, has garnered the support of environmental groups and of Peter Calthorpe, the Berkeley, Calif., planner who designed Stapleton and whose New Urbanist doxology includes green features like walkability and lean energy consumption. Calthorpe has signed on as a consultant on Daybreak.

That leaves only the residents of Salt Lake’s West Side and an existing hamlet near the new community called Copperton to grumble: the former are losing bus routes even as the transit authorities redirect resources to the new TRAX rail line to Daybreak, funded by Kennecott. The latter, equally understandably, simply don’t want neighbors.