Necessity Makes a Frog Jump | Nov 8th at 10:02am
The Saturday morning session concerned “City Management,” and featured planners and architects with extensive experience working in the municipal governments of Shanghai, Ottawa, and Curitiba. The Ottawa discussion emphasized nostalgia. Mr. Doucet’s neighborhood used to have streetcars, powered by the city’s river, and the neighborhoods were designed around this system—since replace by buses and of course cars. He wishes we could go back, and his political efforts are aimed that way.
The Shanghai discussion, by the deputy director general of its planning bureau, again talked about its 1966 plan, with particular detail on the 3 new cities now in place or under construction of the planned 9. One is a port, one a university city, and one a residential area that will be generating a new economic base. In each case, the idea is to decentralize some administrative and economic functions. In Shanghai, another refreshing argument, which we only hope can be true, was that that planning process is more thoughtful and reflective, and less rushed, than the pace of construction and plan-making might make appear. The Curitiba discussion reviewed its familiar BRT, organized around desired growth corridors, as well as waste management issues.
These are pretty different places administratively, and we unfortunately did not hear much in the way of war stories about the “management” part of these planning processes, which might have clarified the nature of both management failures and achievements. Still, it was quite refreshing and reassuring to hear that Curitiba’s planners made many mistakes and experienced much trial and error (though without the details). One can imagine this might mean that Curitiba’s results, widely admired and emulated across the world, may well include as much of the process negotiations than the resulting infrastructure and urban design products. That is, Curitiba was partly an incremental process of discovery in a rather unique governance and administrative setting (the country was under military rule at the time, so the political accountability of these decisions was not exactly a democratic one), a point on which I’ve written briefly before (by way of comparison with Bogota).
At the same time, those efforts were “ground truthed” to a great extent. Plans and their built counterparts work best when responding to underlying fundamentals, rather than mere fancy. Mr. Rabinovitch illustrated this with the Brazilian expression, “Necessity makes the frog jump.” This was useful as for some reason I had been thinking they did it just for fun.
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
