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/
