Last week, I wondered “how many planners today are salivating at the chance to plan the reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas.” The answer was not long in coming.
The governor of Kansas has announced that she wants to make the reconstructed community “the greenest town in rural America.” She says she wants to “rebuild a better footprint.”
If I had to live in a major urban area, I would like to live in a place like the Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston. The difference between the Woodlands and the town plans I’ve critiqued earlier this week is that the Woodlands was planned by a developer, while the other town plans were written by government planners.
Flickr photo by HJPotter.
The Woodlands is a 28,000-acre development that began in 1974. Like other “master-planned communities,” it differs from smaller subdivisions in that it was designed as a complete community, with offices, stores, hotels, schools, parks, and residential areas. Although it includes a mix of uses, it is not, for the most part, “mixed use.” That is, the nine “villages” that make up the residential areas are separate from the retail and commercial areas. But the employment areas provide more jobs than the number of workers living in its residential areas.
The near-complete destruction of Greensburg, Kansas brings to mind the September 1936 fire that burned my hometown of Bandon, Oregon. As shown below, all but about 16 of the town’s 500 buildings burned to the ground.
This was in the middle of the New Deal and planning was all the rage. Oregon even had a State Planning Board, which viewed this disaster as a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of sound land-use planning. To give planners maximum flexibility, the board convinced 80 percent of the property owners in the city to put their land in a property pool. Landowners were given temporary building permits to replace homes and businesses during the emergency, with the understanding that they would have to be rebuilt when the plan was completed.
Imagine the state you live in is 98 percent rural open space. Moreover, almost half of that open space is owned by the federal or state governments and will probably never be developed.
Although your county is one of the more urbanized counties in the state, at least 90 percent of the county is rural open space, and well over a third of that is federal or state land. In fact, even though your town’s population doubled in the last ten years, there is still more than one acre of permanently protected open space for every resident in the county.
Boulder in the moonlight.
Flickr photo by Molas.
In our continuation of Anti-Town Planning Week, we turn to San Ramon, California, where the city council wants to build a new “City Center.” Incorporated less than 24 years ago, San Ramon is a thriving suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is built around an office park started in the 1970s.
Flickr photo of San Ramon by Jeff L. Used by permission.
The city is the world headquarters of Chevron-Texaco and also has North American or California headquarters of such companies as Toyota, AT&T, and UPS. Local retailers include Costco, Whole Foods, Borders, and the usual collection of supermarkets and other shops. The average household income in 2000 was $96,000, putting it well above the rest of the country.
But the city is suffering from an acute case of “downtown envy,” a disease the strikes many Sun Belt cities. Many people, including most urban planners, think that a city can’t be a real city unless it has a distinctive downtown or city center. But in today’s automobile age, developers no longer build distinctive city centers, so cities that have grown up since 1945 often feel they have to subsidize them.
The American Planning Association celebrates November 8 as “Town Planning Day,” so the Antiplanner will celebrate calendrically opposite May 8 as “Anti-Town Planning Day.” In fact, this is Anti-Town Planning Week, and each day the Antiplanner will present an example of bad city or town planning.
Vancouver skyline. Flickr photo by mureena.
First up is Vancouver, BC, a city of 580,000 people. Under British Columbia law, every city in the province must have a city plan, and those plans must meet a variety of goals, including supporting “the unique character of communities.”
