REM !

Sustainable planning with a sense of humor.....

The Farr Side

Saw Doug Farr in a lecture last night. Very impressed.

West 8

some projects by Field Operations

S333

...

way too many names to pick out one or two.

try reading "postmodern urbanism", by nan ellin for a thoughtful and intelligent answer to your question. there are very few influential planners that she does not mention (am surprised no one mentioned peter hall, for example, even though he has been a staple of planning discussion for 3 decades or more).

i am not sure if s333 and west 8 are really urban planners or graphic designers...like them as architects, not sure if they are really influential as planners...andres duany has waaaay more influence on the state of things..and is i think much much more radical (even though i don't like new urbanism).

Two current practioners whose work tends to be under-rated and under-the-radar, but who almost never fail to impress/inspire/influence me:

William Morrish (especially his past work with Catherine Brown at the Design Center for American Urban Landscape at UMN)

Doug Suisman (in Los Angeles)

william morrish, yes.

and also alex krieger (chan/krieger). chan/krieger's work is solid and smart. krieger's writing is brilliant and fun and to-the-point. besides that, he recently ran a public comment/workshop session here in louisville centered around the city's plans to construct an arena on our waterfront and it was great to see that he is also a great communicator, a rarity among academics and thinkers.

urbanlab just won the city of the future competition, so they'll be good in 100 years...

there is the planning side of urban design

and

there is the landscape side of urban design

ok, some architects also get off on urban designing...


good and bad influences abound on each side - planners tend to be more analytic and by the numbers, while 'scapers/tects tend to find the poetic and unique. - this is a blatant stereotype so don't get too pissy over this.

TK began to allude to it, but i think that it is important to draw a line between urban/regional planning and urban design... of course they are related and interconnected, but a graduate program in planning is VERY different from a program in urban design...

urban/regional planning tends (and this may be a generalization) to look at things from a statistical standpoint... they look at population densities, development trends, etc...

urban design looks at things in terms of creating spaces at different scales (among other things)...

given that this is a design/architecture forum, we will tend to favor design over planning...

that said, i'll second west 8 and field operations

also, in the spirit of providing multiple viewpoints (i in no way endorse them as good designers)... but the following people are important/relevant to the whole new urbanism thing... bleh...
duany plater-zyberk
torti gallas
urban design associates

and for a more palatable new urbanist...
peter calthorpe

and i'm one of those architects that get off on urban design that TK mentioned...

I've seen this planning/design issue come up before, and this is what I've never really understood: since urban planning, as architphil points out, tends to look at things in terms of regional statistics, trends, and resources, are there really any nongovernmental urban planners out there? The only names I can ever think of are people who research and write about trends, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, Keller Easterling, people who have not done, as far as I know, much actual planning. And I only mention those three names because I'm familiar with their work, others with a broader knowledge of the field might add to, or amend, that list.

I know there are some people on this board who have that broader knowledge, so how about it? Forget 'urban design' for the moment and let's talk about planning. Do you have to be Robert Moses to make any kind of large scale changes? Do you have to work for the local or regional governemnt to be influential? If you do, who are the contemporary Robert Moses'? If academics do have some influence in actual planning decisions, who are the influential academics?

Everyone always points out the difference between 'urban design' and 'urban planning' but that distinction always leaves me confused about the difference btw urban planning and good lod fashioned politics ...

don't forget Micheal Sorkin as agent provocatour.

this tread is skirting thin ice around 'coding' versus planning, but that could be a fun hole fall into.

more later on this subject - too much to do today at the office.

i like the work of FIELD OPERATIONS / James Corner....
Sorkin yeah its a provocateur... he's interesting also, still im glad cities dont look like his renderings...

will b interesting also to check what the big firms r doing in places like China and Saudi A....u know SOM and the top 100 firms...im not familiar w/them but i will look for some names that r doing "contemporary" urban planning

Last friday I saw Linda Chapin from the Metropolitan Center for Regional Studies at the University of Central Florida speak about some planning exercises that her group undertook with Johnathan Barnett at UPenn's Department of City and Regional Planning.

They developed a report (for lack of a better term) that showed what would happen to the 7 county central florida region in the next 50 years if the current development pattern remains constant. The results were pretty amazing/disturbing. This information is now being used to develop a regional plan with public input.

In fact, they just wrapped up the public voting process that let people choose between the current trend, green areas, centers, and corridors.

I thought that is was pretty interesting. You can find a powerpoint presentation of the UPenn project at the metrocenter website. Look at the bottom right corner of the webpage in the "downloads" box.

They're going to be bringing UPenn students back to do a similar investigation for the entire state of Florida.

These links are great, I didn't know about William Morrish, his stuff looks fascinating, great diagrams.

I've gotta say though, after looking at a lot of this stuff: it's ironic that digital formalism is derided for tending towards unrealistic fantasy, while masterplanning is held up as the height of civic nobility. More lies get told every day with markers, trace paper and watercolor than are perpetrated in a semester's worth of Maya and 3D studio max.

All the happy customers with balloons, out there strolling on the planted brick sidewalk, plenty of free parking for all ... Planning has got to be one of the most compromised design professions out there, stuck between feel good politics and development economics. This is why I want to hear more about nongovernmental planners with influence and interesting ideas.

That 'Choose your Future site linked above has got to be one of the worst offenders, anyone who's paying attention knows how quickly the bait-and-switch goes down after all of those 'voters' go home convinced they've made a difference.

This stuff needs to be called out by people like us, these are lies that people actually believe, and they affect large scale issues. And people are sitting there ragging on Maya renderings? Please.

another "choose your future" type planning exercise... this time in the tampa bay region of florida...

from the tampa tribune

courtesy of reality check tampa bay

... not to be too cynical, these voting exercises probably do a lot to raise awareness, but somehow the implementation always falls short ...

The Port of Los Angeles has dozens of reports sitting on a shelf somewhere from the past 20 years of visions for the waterfront... Politics and Economics destroy most well intentioned masterplanning projects.


but then look at what happens to infrastructure projects that don't get any 'design' planning- aka the Los Angeles River as it is today or the entire Lakes District of Miami/Everglades...

One of my students had this response (to 765's question):

"Planning is about the administrating the code - it focuses on the present; Urban Design is about the vision and idea of the city - its about the future."

Not a bad characterization, although most of the planners I work with would take issue with this statement.

That said, I'll offer this distinction:

Urban Planning may (although not necessarily) attend to statistics, demographics, etc - examining rates of poverty, car-ownership, crime, health indicies, etc. But its not an entirely analytical practice, since Planners often draft public policy to address what is revealed in the statistics (planners are the people coming up with city policies for 1 acre of park for every 1000 people, or whatever, as suggested by the analysis). Adopting such policies is politics - and planners are not immune from playing politics to push policies they feel are appropriate, just and ethical. Robert Moses is probably simultaneously a politician and a planner, but perhaps more of a politician.

Planners can be both public and private - and my student is right, many public planners are engaged in processing and administrating the zoning code. Private planners are likely to be engaged in comprehensive or specialized projects as contracted by municipalites (whose planners are too busy processing to do any planning) or other entities such as developers or non-profits that have an interest in outlining development policies for a particular area.

The physical, designed consequences of such policies is generally the domain of Urban Design. Urban designers may be responsible for the design of a transit-oriented streetscape, for which planners directed into being via policy. Urban designers may not necessarily be engaged in the public policy arena that planners play in, although of course, many urban designers do think policy, and arguably much planning policy is better if it is informed by design (ie policies about access to light/air will result in required setbacks, and open space). Moreover, urban design is probably more effective when it also becomes policy, which tends to mean it starts thinking in terms of typology, prototypes and systems that can be repeated.

JL Sert!

That's a very lucid and thoughtful answer, thanks Alan.

Maybe one reason that planning always seems so well intentioned, yet so compromised, is this layering: processing -> planning -> design -> implementation. So many opportunities for the best intentions to get diluted and subverted.

Alan - that's a really excellent definition/explanation.

765 - I think you raise good points about the rendering bait and switch. That's one reason that over the last few years we've been working with other strategies to try to describe the character of a future place... words/photos/existing examples/etc... trying to imply what the place might be like without literally drawing it. When it comes time to put the pen to the paper, it's very difficult to create an accurate representation of what that place will be after it moves through all of the processes you describe above. Having said that, those renderings you criticize are oftentimes a critical component of raising the necessary public/political/business support for a project.

For me, designing what the place will look like and feel like someday is much less interesting than designing parts of the process - and I think that is where the real opportunities for urban design are today. There is a LOT of design opportunity in this zone.

A few excellent contemporary offices that were not mentioned above:

1. Crimson, Rotterdam
2. Utile Architecture & Planning, Boston
3. Gehl Architects, Copenhagen
4. CHORA, London
5. Urban Studio/John Kaliski, LA
6. and an old school, design-it-all-master, Manuel de Sola-Morales

Joan Busquests

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=joan+busquets&btnG=Search