The simple pleasures of urban living are easy to recognize but are often difficult to plan for. The corner coffee shop with a pleasant barista who knows your order by heart each morning. The shady spot around the corner from your office where you enjoy reading a book in the summer. The quiet street lined with boutique retail stores and places to eat where you spend a Saturday strolling your son. Each of these pleasures relies on circumstances well beyond our control...and therein lies the great disappointment of urban designers.
While I subscribe to the philosophy and thinking behind smart growth and new urbanism as much as the next turtleneck wearing architect, I have noticed an increasing trend to plan cities as instant built environments complete with mature trees, fully occupied housing units, and businesses thriving from their consistent local patrons. The problem with this Utopian fantasy, is that cities do not "appear" like Brigadoon and there is no special peat moss mix to add to a piece of farmland and turn it into a livable neighborhood. Cities evolve. That is not to imply that you cannot plan for growth or even use master planning principles to shape a city environment, but ultimately the design of a place will be a product of its evolution.
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| Dubai Master Plan - Singular in Concept, Rigid in Execution |
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| Chicago Master Plan - Singular in Concept, Organic in Execution |
The best that you can hope for in a master plan or design is the include the infrastructure necessary for growth in and around the skeletal pieces. Especially with the volatility of economies and the rapid shift in how people "do business," the City dynamic as we once new it may be entering a new epoch, one without a clairvoyant image of how it may look.
In the end what is required of designers is critical thought as to the patterns of urban living that are tried and true and that provide an appropriate framework for diversity of uses, options, opportunities, and amenities. With each design, proper criticism should include: what happens if it does not all get built? what happens if it is widely successful and outgrows its constraints? How will it appear differently in 50 years?
I once heard a statistic that 98% of the urban built environment remains the same from year to year. That means that only 2% of a given city is brand new. So instead of envisioning broad brush solutions that anticipate instant rewards and instant success, how about designing an urban master plan to occur 2% at a time?
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