The Promise and Pitfalls of Contemporary Planning

By Rachel Stein

PART I: [Regarding the Nonsense of Spatial, Architectural, and Social Sense]

Los Angeles spills over itself until it collides with mountains, hard and defined to the ever-rolling waves to the West. Above it, the Getty stands tall and proud, posture straight and structure, firm. Built in 1997, a century after the rise of the Modern Movement, the building’s structure and content houses intentional friction that remembers an American history (Sveiven 2011).

This building, endowed with a staggering $6.6 billion held in the J. P. Getty Trust Fund, is one of the wealthiest art institutions in the world (Perman 2014). However, this wealth is independent of age, unlike other notable museums like the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the Getty is younger than the majority of people reading this post, including myself, visitors can see some of the most internationally famous masterpieces here. Within the last two decade, the Getty has established its name as an important landmark of history and culture.

“View of Downtown Los Angles from the Getty Museum” by Cobalt Kajun | Deviant Art

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The New York City Subway is a cultural icon and an institution. It is also the most extensive and well-utilized transit system in the world. In terms of size, 660 miles of track connect the subway’s 469 stations (Waterloo 2010). Additionally, the subway provides 5.9 million rides to residents in and around New York City on a daily basis (Waterloo 2010). This makes the New York City Subway the busiest transportation system in the western world.

Due to its magnitude and popularity, the subway has significantly influenced contemporary development in New York City. Subway driven growth is so profound that it has virtually dictated development patterns in Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens (Zimmerman 2015). As the subway’s expansion extended to the city’s limits in the 1960s, New York’s suburbs were also impacted and development was forced to adjust accordingly. Thus, it is not baseless to claim that the subway system transformed New York from an overcrowded port to a globalized metropolis. Why? The evidence to support this argument is right here. All one needs to do is simply read this article and examine the subway maps provided. Then it will be clear how New York grew into the great city it is today.

Figure1. A map of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Circa 1850. The darker city blocks show where development has occurred. The lighter blocks indicate that development has not occurred there yet (The New York Times 2015)

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Quiz can be taken here on Buzzfeed or in the frame below.

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“The Future Belongs To Those Who Prepare For It” Source: American Planning Association Video

But First, An Ode to the Underdog

Cities are known for their affinity to culture, industry, business, education, design, and much more. Large urban centers like New York and Los Angeles are famously known for all of the above, while others struggle to compare. Why are certain cities better than others? What makes one person’s beloved hometown better than the next?
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As a model city denizen, you are attentive to the challenges facing your city: sitting in a café discussing gentrification, broken-windows, rent control, and guerrilla urbanism with your buddies is your primary mode of social interaction. You are wondering what your city will look like tomorrow. Today’s American cities are undergoing many of the demographic, spatial, and economic shifts suggested by Alan Ehrenhalt in his work, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. Hordes of young and educated people are flocking to the city center and prompting an inversion, seeking to escape the complacency of the suburbs and benefit from the cultural wealth and unexpected encounter offered by the city. (Ehrenhalt 2013) Increasingly, city populations are seeing the street as part of the public realm and are contesting the state’s role as city planner.

In this dynamic context, the emergence of tech will shape the future urban fabric, posing questions that challenge our conception of the American city. This article presents four technologies that are — or have the potential to — radically alter the form, function, and character of the urban landscape in America. Will the changing social and demographic urban landscape jive or lock horns with the relentlessness of the tech industry? What will be the role of the urban planner in reconciling these differences? Do these technologies present unrealistic utopian visions or will they come to alter the vitality of our urban spaces?
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