A new website has come to my attention recently, and I’m happy to toss it on the blogroll.
This website, Cultural Capitol, is New York City based and does a great job examining the current trends in urban design practices. Of particular interest to readers here might be this examination of the Florida city built by Disney called Celebration and what its design characteristics mean in the current time. In particular this might be an interesting read for residents who plan to be involved in the public proceedings regarding the Spring Mountain project in Northern Nevada.
The author, Will Kenton, is taking a good look at what’s going on, but he’s a little off on one thing, I think. Several times, Kenton references the Wild West as being a primary driver of exurban development. But he’s ignoring something very important, I think. That would be Levittown. He’s ignoring almost half a century of utopian village exurban development prior to the suburbanization of Long Island, but essentially, the whole thing he’s talking about was kicked off in New York.
Which brings us, naturally, to Robert Moses.
Now, Robert Moses was many things, and one of the things he undisputedly was is perhaps the most influential regional planner of his generation. He was using the cutting edge tools of the time, too. Those tools were inadequate on the level of describing ideal human environments, and since his time we have made many advances in our understanding of the core architectural design required to please people for visiting and habitation purposes.
Yet, Moses was actually right about something: He saw a growing population and saw that they were going to need to spread out. The perceptions of the scale of the world at the time, and the proper operation of a world at any scale, were way out of whack. But one thing is for certain. He was able to accomplish great results. His engineers built structures which are durable, and he was insistent that they be visually compelling and able to survive long time periods of wear and tear.
Moses was on to the notion that no given quantity of space is enough space for humanity. Humanity is like a goldfish. It expands to occupy the size of its habitable space.
Given this reality, it’s important to apply 21st century thinking to the practices which are employed in current regional planning. It simply won’t do to say no to all exurban development. I think of The Netherlands as an example to back up my point. They have been reclaiming land for 50-odd years. Their newest province, Flevoland, became a province in 1986. This wasn’t some military or political territorial acquisition in any conventional sense except that the politics which drove it were a popular desire to reclaim land from the sea and the foe that was being fought was none other than Mother Nature herself.
This is not anything new in human existence. For thousands of years. humans moved around desertifying every fertile, desirable place they came upon. Cities, regions and even whole countries evolved which could live in harmony with their surroundings. But in recent years, what has happened in the US in particular is that planning ideals have largely split into two camps: one insists that the post-modern pattern of suburbanization is in fact a desirable environment for future development while another insists that growth must be controlled by strictly enforced boundaries and land use codes.
One thing we definitely agree on is that it shouldn’t be left to a single developer to dominate a single contiguous zone. I have long been an advocate of what might be termed the business strategy of plat-and-resell, which basically follows the old pattern of the initial landholder dividing up the initial land into parcels divided by a street network and letting individual developers come in and fill individual plats or batches of plats.
The point though, is that we’re not done building new cities. Were that it was the case, but it simply isn’t. Taking to task Celebration, or even if you prefer, Spring Mountain or Coyote Springs, or any other project you might object to on a number of bases, is a good idea – it may influence the future of new developments proposed to accomplish similar objectives. But we must be stewards of regional plans, taking care to ensure that any land “reclaimed” from wilderness be developed in a manner which allows easy movement between points without generating excess pollution or subject to excessive congestion. We must take care to ensure that open space exists between developments and that any new city be designed to use a minimum amount of power, electric and other resources while still affording a good quality of life to its residents – on a sustainable basis.
To me, this is the key. Moses, as I said before, was using the cutting-edge tools of his day. They were a blunt instrument, but in the past 50 years we have generated plenty of examples to call upon to guide us in the development of the built environment of humankind. We have numerous case studies for what to do and what not to do. We need to study and call upon those examples. By most estimates, the human population is not done growing.
Comments