Urban Planning, Community, and the Future of the World

The title of this post probably warrant some grandoise diatribe, ranting and fuming, and postulating, etc... Unfortunately, I've got thesis on my plate, so I'll keep it terse, per the recent usual.

So many urban planning exercises fail miserably - in the scope of the communities directly effected. This is at the least disheartening, at most - a catastrophic, apocolyptic premonition of things to come. In my Urban Computing seminar, we have discussed many such failed commitee-run endeavors. The relocation and modification of streets, planned projects, leisure deterrents (spikey things on surfaces upon which people could possibly sit)... Car culture and the suburb phenomenon. Starbuckification.

There just so happens to be a recent current case of community backlash at proposed urban modification — right up the street from my old digs — in Park Slope. The DOT had plans to convert two streets from two-way to one-way — a plan that proposed faster travel. The community, as represented by more than 400 people rejected the plans in a meeting last night.

The above referenced post on Streetsblog made direct reference to top-down vs. bottom-up engineering — public and community-evolved emergence vs. committee dictated planning. This is a great thing, and hopefully we will see more of this in the future.