On this post, we intend to provide residents with the basic tools to create educated opinions about proposals put forward by our city, and intuitively know if the city has irrationally thrown a bunch of good ideas together hoping to fit a square peg in a round hole or carefully assembled a good concept of a plan.
We expect you agree that this is a good skill to have when asked to buy in on a $30 million dollar purchase.
There are a lot of good elements put into the proposed town center:
- Grocery store
- Patio dinning
- Rooftop dinning
- Public Art
- Stream water feature
- Movies in the park
- Kids play area
- Senior programing
- Markets
- Parking
Source: City's Voter Information Pamphlet
However, for a successful project to emerge, the elements must not only be good in and of themselves, they must be in harmony: First, they must strive in unison towards a stated goal and also purposely blend into the larger ecosystem we call our city.
A holistic perspective is essential to understand the complexities of city building, and for that I would like to direct your attention to the field of Systems Thinking, a topic you can find under our External Resources tab in the home menu. But for the purposes of this article, suffice for yout to take a moment to watch Professor Ackoff brilliant video on this subject.
Ok, hopefully you are now an expert systems thinker. Equipped with this newly acquired skill you may begin to see how the concept of a plan, called 'The Heights', assembles a bunch of ideas for great elements; a park, a parking lot, nice spacious buildings, and your systems thinking mind starts itching, all these things sound too good to be true. Can all these purpose of these elements work in harmony and create the utopian place rendered in all these wonderful pictures?
The question we must be able to answer before we vote Yes or No to bond is; can we, the public, intuitevly predict the likelihood of success by simply looking at the porposed elements put forward in such a plan? Prof. Ackoff would say yes, we can.
The sense of being "here" is created by the massing of the buildings
Regardless of the actual elements that will ultimately be put in place, we can predict the outcome of this project by recognizing how the mindset of the planner is working to select and place elements in the system. The first obvious problem that our systems thinking minds should recognize is the massing of the buildings. Their size and distribution is troublesome. They are distributed randomly thoughout the site with no ability to interact effectively with each other or with the site itself. A place that fails to create a "sense of place" cannot drive the kind of rents necessary to pay back the financial constraints of an expected $100million private/public investment ($30 million public investment is the bond). The basic rules to create a "sense of place" are in fact very simple and exquisilty explained in a video by Arquitect Andres Duany:
- Line the buildings up.
- Height to width ratio must not exceed 1 to 6 (the optimal is 3 to 1).
Further, the planned parking garage feature clashes with idea of a pedestrian rich area; mashing auto-centric with walkable designs is likely to create conflict and a hostile environment for one of the other type of user. As a result, 'The Heights' is a conept of a plan that is neither productive, has a strong sense of place, and continues to demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of the city to focus itself into becoming a walkable community or not. As a consequence the result illustrates an effort to try to force a square peg in a round hole.
On our next blogpost, we will explore how 'The Heights' matches up with the fabric of a city, and apply the concepts of Transects, and Jane Jacobs' principle that a city has the capacity of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
In the meantime, you are welcome to leave comments on our chalkboard or Facebook page - and VOTE NO on the Bond!
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