process, projects, planning, and planners

PROCESS, PROJECTS, PLANNING, and PLANNERS

Planning professionals, developers, Wall Street investors and the like consider the rhetoric of Project Planning the only approach to city re-vitalization worth talking about. Project Planners dismiss anything that places more confidence in the judgment of citizens as irrelevent.

Opponents of Project Planning recognize and celebrate the complexity of urbanism and the interconnectedness of all components.

Change – the creation of sense of place – begins not with center-of-strength organizations, such as the New Urban Town Builders Collaborative, but with neighborhood relationships. It is the neighborhood narratives of place that are the roots of neighborhood revitalization. Neighborhoods cannot be dragged out of stagnation by developers, even the New Urbanists. If neighborhoods have no shared vision for their future there is no future. Shared neighborhood vision cannot be imposed from outside in, it must arise organically within.

Creating a sense of place requires community in the truest sense of that word. Not just a bunch of people, but people who come together as one to create shared vision, a vision that leads to a sense of neighborhood, of place. Of course, for this to happen, there first has to be a community of people residing in a neighborhood. New Economy Towns start with the buildings and hope that real community will eventually come about in time. In spite of the New Urbanist talk about place making and neighborhood building, the New Urbanism is, more often than not, nothing more than soothingly disguised profit making at the expense of others, at best, and at worst, ill-advised social engineering,
given that manufacturing and services have all relocated to more profitable locations, cities increasingly exist to cater to a spectacle-filled lifestyle...places where we consume urban lifestyle rather than actually creating it.

"Urban Husbanders" assume assets and resources are already in place to be reinvigorated and built onto in order to stimulate a place-based rejuvenation that adds to the long-evolving, existing strengths, instead of replacing them. Planning is meant to be about problem solving, relying heavily on the expertise of citizen users, the accumulated experience and wisdom of the community. Urban Husbanders advocate introducing change incrementally and monitoring it carefully, providing a great opportunity to learn from each step. They involve many entrepreneurs of various sizes, not just one big developer, and rely only on modest doses of government support, if any. They work to add a layer of organic urban growth rather than replace what has taken decades to grow. This layer may look and feel in many ways radically different from what was there before, but fundamentally the connection between before and after is not broken.

I'm always interested in the ways that place can be branded and re-branded to evoke distinct feelings and experiences. A place's identity extends to the people who inhabit it too, though--and the ways that place becomes an extension of individual and collective identity has a lot of power. the fusion of individual and spatial identity... an actual (or imagined...really the possibilities are endless) place that is personally significant. Creative Class-driven redevelopment efforts: they usually price out the people they attempt to attract. That merely means it is an imperfect system

Cities have two alternatives. They can work to become more competitive in terms of jobs, attracting skilled workers and middle-class families, or they can refocus their efforts on providing playpens for the idle rich, the restless young, and tourists. All too often the latter strategy is what many municipalities appear to be adopting. A number of cities now regard tourism, culture, and entertainment as "core" assets.