Make No Little Plans

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. ---Daniel Burnham

I confess to being an urban planning junkie from way back.  I love looking at architectural renderings and reading blogs like Steve Boland's San Francisco Cityscape.  My fascination with the built environment even helped give a name to this blog.  But lately I have begun to notice something of a dark side in urban planning discussions; the "we know what's best for you" attitude that design professionals take toward the likes and dislikes of the people that their designs are ostensibly supposed to benefit.  It wasn't always this way; Burnham's quote suggests that he saw the urban planner as visionary, inspiring people with the greatness of his designs, so what happened? 

I think perhaps it was Modernism.  In the first half of the 20th Century, architects such as Le Corbusier presented grand, sweeping designs for the city of the future--giant highrises in green parks linked by busy expressways.  Think of Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama design for the General Motors exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair.

After World War II, there was a general consensus among intellectuals in the West that the Soviet Union held the winning hand and that it was a simply a matter of time before Socialism would take over the world.  The best we could do would be to soften the blow.  Hence the socialistic emphasis on top-down planning.  Men like Le Corbusier and Bel Geddes had created the designs; now all that remained was to build them. During this period in the United States, we saw urban redevelopment projects that replaced whole neighborhoods with modern highrises.  But despite massive public investment, the promise of Modernism went unfulfilled. The sparkling, modern highrise public housing developments like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis succumbed to vandalism and crime and were demolished. 

Today, even urban planners reject the heavy-handed approach of their predecessors.  Touchy-feely designs like New Urbanism that feature walkable, bikeable communities are all the rage. With slogans like "Giving more people more choices about where and how they want to live" what's not to like?

So far, so good but what if people don't want walkable, bikeable communities?  Studies have shown that many people continue to prefer traditional, suburban living and resist the denser development that New Urbanism favors.  "But this contributes to sprawl! wail the New Urbanists.  What they need to do is take a leaf from Daniel Burnham's book and use their designs to inspire; but instead, inflated with a sense of their moral superiority the New Urbanistas make snarky remarks about Bush voters with their gas-guzzling SUVs.   

It's a complicated problem.  I don't pretend to have an answer, but to solve it there first needs to be dialogue.  Design professionals need to come down from their mountains and walk among the common people.  Their designs may not be like the Modernists, but they do share some of their prejudices.