Two Ways To Plan
In looking into how urban planing works, I’ve begun to take the whole industry practice and break it down. My hope is by classifying and defining each part, I’ll be better able to spot trends and places where my work can fit in.
The two major ways of thinking about planning are top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is a way of imposing a design upon a place, where a bottom-up approach seeks to find a more holistic design based on empirical information. I’ll be looking more in depth at two bottom-up approaches I’ve come across in my work.
City Literacy
One way to go about it is to find the essence of the place. Dive in, observe, and experience it. Then report. After reading Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, I’ve been toying with this romantic ideal of what it is like to explore a city.
Lynch balances pragmatism and creativity to great effect. Within his descriptions, he decomposes a whole city into paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. He performed thorough studies of the city’s residents, probing them to define their location—even asking them to describe the way their neighborhood smelled.
[You can find a fantastic introduction to Lynch’s Boston here.]
Lynch was seeking city literacy. He wanted to know a city well enough to give directions to strangers in every neighborhood. He wanted to describe his current location by the quality of limestone used in local masonry. And by the time he wrapped up his tenure at MIT, he had amassed such a body of knowledge I bet he could do just that.
P2P Urbanism
A more contemporary thought is ‘P2P Urbanism’. Coined—as far as I can tell—by Nikos Salingaros at the University of Texas at San Antonio, P2P Urbanism gives people the decision-making and concept-generation abilities needed to affect change in their own environment.
Largely a reaction against large-scale development, P2P Urbanism feels that patterns are the future, that every idea counts, and co-creation with planners yields the best outcomes. From Salingaros’ PDF on the subject:
Lots of people have big ideas that may not work (e.g. “they should make all of downtown pedestrian!”), yet everyone has small ideas that are almost certain to work (“that derelict sidewalk could very well be a tiny garden”; “that bus stop could really use a simple roof”). It is hard to find like-‐minded people who, once grouped together, may actually turn thought into action. It would then be useful to know about similar projects that have succeeded or failed. The dissemination of knowledge would tell everyone the current state of the practice of urbanism, where lots of central planning is invariably bad, academia is fixated on improvable philosophies, and money-‐oriented development rules without any controls.
Moving Forward
I’m trying to find a balance between these two approaches in my own work. I love the emotion, the immediacy, and, frankly, the romance with witch Lynch imagines a city. P2P Urbanism seems like a great way to get the people involved, or at least make the whole process seem less confrontational.
However, his work may not be the most practical when it comes to smaller-scale problems and issues which are not concerned about city typology. And Salingaros’ assumption that every idea deserves a fair shot seems to be defeated when viewed through the lens of red tape and political interests.
