The point of this blog is the problem with focusing too much on design. I'm of the opinion that we have been doing this in the United States for a good hundred years now and it has always been the case for urban planning in a more general sense. But one thing I don't want to imply is that there is no connection at all. It is certainly true that a well planned city can be greatly enhanced by good design. But design is irrelevant to a poorly planned city and a beautiful design cannot make up for bad planning. So what do I mean by planning, if not design? Real city planning is policy, almost exclusively. Policy does have a geographic element, of course, but layout and aesthetics are tertiary concerns at best. In short, even the best design can't really work unless it's adjunct to a well functioning, economically and socially healthy city.
That's where we go badly off the rails in the planning profession. Almost everything that's done in planning is focused on design, if not composed entirely of design. What do we end up with? At best, we have cities that look great, but are strangely empty. At worst we end up with cities that neither work well nor look very good. That seems to usually be what happens.
And the reason should be evident. Cities don't work in two block segments. Cities must be integrated enough that neighborhoods work as a unit and, if possible, neighborhoods should be networked together as well. When new things are added the primary concern should be how they will work within the system as it already functions. If individual elements are added piecemeal this is usually the primary consideration. Housing would be added in an area with a high potential for housing sales and a car park would be added to an area that wasn't already overflowing with parking spaces. If lots are developed individually it isn't hard to keep the main focus on the area's function and allow the design to take its position as a tertiary concern.
Then come big developments. The big malls. They can be downtown malls with office towers included or suburban malls with all the standard cineplexes and department stores, but they tend to have one thing in common: they fail to integrate with their surrounding areas. The reason for this is that they aren't intended to do so. They're designed to attract people from all around the metro areas and beyond. The people who finance, design, and build them could care less about their urban functioning because they have another purpose, which is why design takes the front seat. But the problem is that when these places have exhausted their primary purpose, they end up being a useless eyesore that either gets abandoned, has to be re-purposed, or demolished.
They create a 'hole' in the urban fabric that damages, not enhances, the neighborhood that they're in. Almost without fail, mega developments do not match the neighborhoods that they're in. To be certain, this does not doom every mega project to failure. Some mega projects are necessary and some are beneficial. But by their very nature, they don't integrate into the surrounding area, which means they don't function very well as a part of the city. They may very well serve their intended purpose, unless that purpose is to blend into the surrounding city. They can't because they simply work at cross purposes. Their function will always be opposed to the city's function.
And that is where the design fails. Design is a combination of form and function. When a design fails to function properly, it's a bad design. It may look perfectly delightful, but when it doesn't function properly, it's bad design. When designers seek to make a project beautiful, more power to them. I like beauty as much as the next guy, but when their concern is how the project functions internally, without consideration for the surrounding environment, their project is doomed to failure, at least from the city's point of view.
I do realize that these sorts of projects will never disappear entirely, and they probably shouldn't, but we should consider the implications for the surrounding neighborhood every time we hear that a mega mall has been proposed in the middle of the city. Or a convention center is planned for downtown. These sorts of projects bring as many problems as they bring benefits and the tendency of city officials to praise the projects and even spend taxpayer dollars to attract these projects should be reconsidered strongly. As a rule of thumb, if the neighborhood residents collectively reject the project, it probably isn't good for the neighborhood. Projects that flatten the neighborhood and replace it with something else aren't exactly an 'improvement'.
