2024-04-28T02:26:57-04:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/106425627/should-city-planners-have-to-live-in-cities Amelia Taylor-Hochberg 2014-08-15T14:06:00-04:00 >2018-01-30T06:16:04-05:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/0d/0doqk232ncl6imgl.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>Brad Buchanan spends his summer weekends, and some predawn mornings, atop an ATV checking on his cattle along Kiowa Creek. [...] But each weekday, Buchanan shifts gears... The weekend farmer who's also a longtime architect ... is five months into his job as Denver's head city planner. That juxtaposition &mdash; an Eastern Plains rancher responsible for making key decisions about Denver's increasingly dense urban footprint &mdash; has some critics of the city's building bonanza grumbling.</p></em><br /><br /><p>In that ancient fable of localized identity, a city-dwelling mouse and his country-dwelling cousin try out life in each other's shoes. There are countless versions of this story, found in civilizations from all over the world. Invariably, when each mouse visits his cousin, he feels uncomfortably out of place &mdash; the food is strange, it's not clear what's dangerous, life's pace isn't quite right &mdash; and is relieved to return home.</p><p>Regardless of whether these stories end by taking a side, favoring city-life over country-life or vice versa, they all concede the idea that some folks get along better in the place they're from, and that makes them less capable in the other place. This classic urban v. rural dichotomy doesn't seem to matter much in contemporary architecture practice. It's common in the global economy for a firm that's based in a dense city center to build a monument in a rural setting, or for developers to flip properties in China from their offices in Ottawa. If the design is ...</p>