Does the public want good urban design? Having been involved in public processes in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin, and recent projects in Texas and Alabama, I may have a limited view of what people want since I haven’t worked in all fifty states yet. In my experience, when given a choice, citizens ask for places that are more personal, pedestrian oriented, with local businesses and a center for community pride and identity that differentiates their city and highlights their best aspirations of civic culture.

Given this support, what makes creating livable urban places so difficult? Admittedly, there are a huge number of issues to address. But the development patterns produced by zoning and traffic engineering in the last half century have rarely produced places that are beloved of their residents unless they were planned before the onset of Euclidian zoning. At the same time, creating McNeighborhoods and McTowns with strictly regulated facades, signs, and all of the current controls often creates places that are much better than those produced as a result of traffic flow planning, but still fail to satisfy that urban urge for the undiscovered anomaly, that crazy intersection of elements that produces the utterly unusual that just doesn’t happen elsewhere.

Now the whack-a-mole reference. A great deal of what is practiced in current city planning, including traffic engineering, is done via the whack-a-mole approach. There is a system in place, and when a failure of the system (the mole) pops up, it is promptly whacked with a new regulation or bit of code, an adjustment. Part of the problem is investment in the system; how can it not work after being slowly developed over a sixty year period? It’s so logical! It has court cases for precedence and prevention from lawsuit! Nevermind that if the actions resulted in places people cherished there would be no suits. Meanwhile, the code becomes larger, and more complex…and ends up serving itself, not the changing desires of the citizens and environments it was built to protect and serve. In the case of traffic engineering, of course, the continuing building of inhospitable environments for pedestrians innoculates the city against anything but automobiles. And because the original solutions were flawed, the cascade of following actions act as patches (the whacks to the moles) without any analysis of the underlying assumptions. Mission Accomplished!

So now we have a new ethic of design, one that seriously listens to the desires of the public, and the big surprise is that the public almost always want the main street and not the highway, the neighborhood and not the subdivision (if you don’t understand the difference we can provide a reading list), the authentic downtown and not the mall, public transportation options, and connection to the natural environment by means other than the automobile.

There is a danger however that the new urbanism can become the whack-a-mole plan for the future if its practitioners fail to take account of the need for diversity, even chaos, in urban design. The most interesting urban places have been formed over centuries in which an inevitable winnowing occurred; good elements remained while poor quality structures and environments failed and were replaced. This sort of organic change cannot be duplicated in a sigle design. The difficulty is how to design the framework within which diversity can be expressed without destruction of the identity of the place itself. To address this organic process, there must be a process imbedded in the original design allowing for incremental change, a flexibility that is not tied to style, that welcomes change within the context set by the plan. It is very necessary to separate the components of urbanism from building style and current economic constraints so that in the future, when other conditions prevail, the elements of urban structure will be maintained.

The plan allows for future diversity because it gives the public a toolbox of urban goals to enable change over time. It outlines the form of the urban environment in classic urban categories without creating large areas expected to be single use. Development density is not specified as such; it is implied by the form of the town center or neighborhood proposed. As such, the future of the comprehensive plan will be delineated in a series of individual master plans for the areas that will be based upon public participation that will include citizens, developers, businesses and future residents of each place. Because this comprehensive vision is grounded in the principles of urbanism and the goals of the community rather than upon a particular design ethos, it will stand the test of time as citizens use it as a vehicle for community change.

There are practitioners who are forwarding this type of planning: Paul Crawford in California; the Dover Kohl Partnership in Florida; Ferrell Madden Associates in Washington DC; Raimi Associates in Berkeley, California; Farr Associates in Chicago; Opticos Design of Berkeley, California; and undoubtedly many others. They are all committed to the process of designing in public to provide the public the tools for change.