Who Minds The Store?

Monday, February 25, 2008

The recent sub-prime meltdown got me thinking about this question more forcefully than I have in the past. If anyone with a calculator could have taken a look at the risks at the outset of this madness, they would have discovered that the mortgagees could not pay their mortgages when their balloon mortgages' interest rate doubled. Or, further, did anyone consider that because a lot of the buyers had marginal incomes and insecure jobs, loosing their jobs or taking on more debt to live that lifestyle for sure would help them to lose their homes? Where was the fed in all this? Did they not study the data or read the tea leaves that this momentum toward failure produced?

How this event got me thinking more directly about "minding the store" relates to planning and urban design was a reference one of the trad-arch subscribers provided to an article in "City". The  article presumably a critique of a new Bob Stern building ended up at as rant against modernism, other buildings nearby designed by decon starchitects. What the article should have been about is the state of urban design in New York City. The article mentions a question Vincent Scully put about a whole street of Gugenheim Museums; and what would be the effect. Is there anyone at the New York City Planning Commission that reviews and approves building permits for new development who has some guideline, let's say an urban design, by which to judge appropriateness? Or, to make my question easier, does the reviewer ever think about whether the new development adds to or detracts from the city's fabric, near and far?

How could New York have gotten itself to draw up a comprehensive 3D land use/urban design plan? In a city that is so dense and filled with many different urban design models and architectural styles that do or do not contribute to the city's fabric, for want of a better and less pompous word, there are a lot of starting points for such a plan. Let's take three good and one very bad model as a starting point: Rockefeller Center, the Mies Tower and plaza, Lever House's urban garden as the good ones.  And a real bad one: Lincoln Center. To these let's throw in the continuous and connected fabric of open spaces in Rome. Simply, an urban design plan for Manhattan emerges from decisions about how a fabric of a public realm, open spaces and streets and all of the stuff in the public right-of-way, is realized. Further, what type of massing of buildings with specific uses is appropriate to not only enclose but make active the public realm?

Of course, this plan has to be flexible to encounter changes of all sorts in building styles and specific needs for vertical and horizontal spaces. How they would enhance or detract from this urban design is the job of the New York City Planning Commission planners.

An example of what I am talking about is the plan for Battery Park City. You may not like the plan or the architecture, but a great deal of oversight was in place to monitor it. There was a whole approval process for all built things. And adjustments to the plan were made, to take into consideration different and/or better ideas. If there had been a form based code in place, that much more would have been added to the strength of "minding the store".

Yes, Battery Park City was a giant real estate development effort. And the participants, including the City, had the financial resources to provide oversight. Perhaps it was impossible to overcome the emotional upheaval that gave way in preparing a plan for Ground Zero, but the same care could have been applied there.

"Minding the store" is a pretty boring thing to do day-after-day. And most planners, not trained in urban design or 3D land use planning, and too many architects, who think they are urban designers. are not really good candidates for this job. But somebody's got to do it; or we get the kind of ranting I described above, which is absolutely useless after the fact. And, moreover, ranting does not make a plan.

Of course, the architecture and planning schools have got to produce these kinds of professionals. And they have to be politically directed to do this kind of work. Examples: The Philadelphia Planning Commission in the Ed Bacon days had a staff devoted to not only reviewing plans for the center city and preparing a concept for it. They also spent a lot of time platting vacant land and areas outside Center City for new development. The Boston Redevelopment Authority in the Ed Logue/Mayor White days had a similar staff, though they concentrated on those projects under development and left the rest of the designated urban renewal projects without the same kind of attention paid by the planners in Philadelphia.

I have read many stories on the various city planning lists to which I subscribe that amount to: "How could they approve............fill in the blanks. Perhaps these jurisdictions had some sort of "general plan" that is so general, almost anything is ok. Of course they had Euclidian zoning to enforce these generalities. Let's imagine that they got smart and hired DPZ, as an example. There would have been charrettes and workshops and a final vision would have been born. But when they leave town, whose left to make sure the vision or plan is implemented? Yes, any so-called "town architect" would be helpful, but there has to be an undestanding of what that kind of oversight means; and there has to be active support. Or, maybe it's not an architect, perhaps a firm hired on a retainer to provide those kinds of services.

What this post is all about is you get financial meldown and awful buildings, if there is no plan and risk analysis and noone to "mind the store".