By BILL CHAISSON
It was notable to me that the forums held last week in Claremont to discuss rethinking Pleasant Street were led by a couple of engineers and a landscape architect. Where were the urban planners? Landscape architects are often in the same department with planners, but they are different programs with different emphases. Presumably MacFarland Johnson and CRJN have some planners squirreled away in some cubicles back at their offices.
Urban planners are under-rated. They are one of those professions that people think can be replaced by “common sense.” Perhaps planning gets a bad name because people associate it with socialism or, worse, communism, as in “planned economy” or “planned community.”
If you want to compare unplanned to planned cities, look at Boston versus New York City. Boston was famously “designed by cows.” Each of its squares was once the site of a public watering trough and livestock wandered from trough to trough, making the wheel-and-spoke pattern that became the greater Boston area’s infrastructure. In contrast, above Canal Street in Manhattan, the city is laid out on a grid. Try driving around in each city and get back to me.
In the 20th century planning did become unduly influenced by ideology. On the one hand, you had the influence of Le Corbusier, the architect who more or less invented the high-rise housing complex that reached a nadir with the dynamiting of the failed Cabrini Green towers in Chicago. Le Corbusier did not care a fig what it was like to live in his buildings; he was in love with their aesthetics. On the other hand, you had the influence of power and politics epitomized by the era of Robert Moses in the greater New York City region. Moses catered to automobile culture and tore cities apart to accommodate them.
Perhaps in reaction to these high-handed corruptions of urban planning, the process now routinely involves an elaborate interviewing of the public in the form of forums like we had in Claremont last week, charrettes in which stakeholders actively make lists and drawings of what they want, and surveys that establish local opinions about what residents expect out of a public space.
I have covered many of these as a journalist and have also participated in some as a resident and property owner. I encourage all Claremonters to attend at least one event as this process unfolds for Pleasant Street. It is an educational experience because planners talk about activities that most of us simply take for granted. When I walk out of a store, what do I want to see in front of me? A bench? A shrub? A row of cars? How far away should they be from me? How closely spaced? Of what kind of material is a really attractive sidewalk made? If retail stores were put into the second stories of buildings, would I ever climb up there to visit them? Should dogs be allowed in shopping districts? The list is long, the subject matter arcane, and the answers from your fellow residents sometimes very surprising.
At the end of this public input process, the professionals will go off and make a plan. Will they simply take everything the public asked for and make a design out of it? No. Why? Because some of the things that the public wants are impractical and would doom a design to failure. If, for example, a large number of people insisted that another parking garage was needed behind the Goddard Block because the one on Main Street was too far away, that would be unlikely to be included. Parking garages are colossally expensive. I was stunned to find even one in such a small city and further stunned to find out the parking was free. I have literally never seen such a thing.
Populism is in vogue these days. The president continues to insist on a wall on the Mexico border because it was a very popular campaign promise. The media constantly polls the public to find out how they feel about everything. In this same spirit, planners will indeed incorporate into their design some of the ideas they collect at public input sessions. But mainly they will redesign Pleasant Street based on the principles of their profession. Planning has its own theorists, among them Lewis Mumford and Witold Rybczynski, and its practitioners are constantly critically inspecting each other’s designs and evaluating how well their own work. They then write papers and deliver them at conferences and publish them in peer-reviewed journals. This is a social science, informed by philosophy and vetted by data collection, experiment, and criticism.
While much of what members of the public want will be based on nostalgic recollections of a Pleasant Street of the past, planners will produce a design that will work for this city now and in the future. It is important for the professionals to sit down and talk with and to listen to the populace because each city has its own unique sense of itself. They can read all the histories of Claremont they want, but the best way to get a read on what Claremont is all about right now is to listen to what the people have to say. The planners won’t do exactly what you tell them to, but they will listen because they know it is invaluable to a good design. And a good design is one that works. If a new Pleasant Street is beautiful, but no one uses it, then it’s just an expensive mistake.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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