Can't Please Everyone, So You've Got to Please Yourself

When I was a kid I loved the song, "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band. I loved the narrative embedded in the song and as a budding non-conformist I was especially drawn to the lyric "you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself."

As a planner studying with talented, enthusiastic, but incredibly diverse planners at USC I believe that there was something that linked us beyond our love for cities, and I believe that it was our unquenchable desire to do good, sometimes to the point of pleasing others.

Planners want to create cities that serve as many people from as many walks of life and socio-economic levels as possible. "Equitable cities," "socially inclusive," "socially equitable- we can play this game all night people- cities," etc., But as we've all learned the hard way, if you try to please everyone you'll wind up pleasing no one.

Yale School of Architecture assistant design and professor Keith Krumwiede has designed an exhibit called, "Freedomland." Krumwiede has laid a grid over a fictitious land where all the things that we aspire to are met: local farming communes in harmony with urban living, but people can still go home to their single family homes.

As I am no longer in LA and unable to see the exhibit I'll let Nate Berg describe it,

"Each town is a square, three miles by three miles, subdivided into 36 square sections of 160 acres each, the entire landscape of which is bisected by primary roads at half-mile intervals. At the center of each town are four 160-acre infrastructural squares – an energy area with a field of solar panels, a water reservoir, a “ten-acre big box of community and commerce” market square, and “an ever-growing, manicured pyramid of refuse” in the waste square.

Each 160-acre square in the rest of the town is further subdivided into four 40-acre plots, one-quarter of which is used for housing, and the rest is preserved as open and agricultural space. The housing styles, the exhibition notes, are selected from “the country’s greatest builders” and represent the most popular designs in the country. Each housing plan and neighborhood layout is detailed. To facilitate crop rotation and the short lifespan of modern housing, each neighborhood is demolished every 20 years and rotated counterclockwise to the next 40-acre plot.

It’s a modern-day, tongue-in-cheek take on Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about a rural democratic society of citizen farmers."

Although many planners will rarely, if and or ever have the luxury of designing a town completely from scratch we need to be realistic. Trying to check off every single item on the town utopia of our fantasies doesn't create a fantastic bouillabaisse, it just creates a hot mess. This is not to say that we should not strive to create places that are equitable for all, but it's ridiculous to just throw whatever is at the wall and see what sticks. People already think that are cities are a hodge podge, let's not give them more evidence.

"Freedomland" is currently available for viewing at the Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery in Los Angeles.

source: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/most-absurd-community-one-tries-please-everyone/1273/

If You Could See It From My Perspective

I had a really interesting chat today with a friend of mine who is from Switzerland, and until recently was working at Pixar. We are relatively new friends, but from what I have gathered, he came to the US for undergrad at Northwestern in Chicago and now works here in Emeryville/greater San Francisco area. The reason why I provide this background this because I asked him if it was strange not seeing the cars that he was familiar with in Switzerland over here. He replied that where he was from not many people drove because gas is so expensive. Also, the public transport was very good. Transport was consistent so it was not a hardship to take public transit. Another comment that I thought was very interesting was that he said that he had a hard time understanding our bus routes. Where he came from the bus ran on a main road, not splitting off. Whenever people talk about public transit, not in that awed tone of "you read public transit!?" that one would reserve for occasions that your companion casually mention that they commute in on a flying unicorn, but in the blasé tone that one would describe the color of oatmeal I often think of Chicago and New York. These are both cities where public transit is woven so seamlessly into the urban fabric that it is truly integrated, not an anomaly like I is in, say, Los Angeles.