URBAN DESIGN WITH PEOPLE

EXHORTATIONS FOR MAYOR REID   -  Michael Dobbins, Commissioner 1996 - 2002

(delivered at past planning commissioners event for Georgia Tech's Student Planning Association, Atlanta, March 3, 2010) 

Planning matters. We’ve had eight years where mostly projects mattered, largely favoring insider developers and oblivious to contexts and opportunities for benefitting the larger community and the city as a whole. 

Every development initiative involves the government, the private sector and the citizenry. It’s a struggle sometimes, but worth it, to assure community leaders a fair representation at the table where the plans get approved. Citizens in the end are the judge of whether we’re making our places better or not. We live in a time when citizens’ knowledge and access to knowledge about the shape and condition of their communities is rapidly revving up – and the truisms of experts are unraveling. 

These are hard times, likely to get harder and last longer than anyone expected. Thus the emphasis must be on sustainability, starting with sustaining our citizens, prioritizing services and maintenance over new projects, and putting in place environmental and economic sustainability policies to shape future development  

But there’s no time like down times to recast plans and strategies; planning is crucial to take advantage of the opportunities; and planning is affordable. My mandate has always been getting stuff done and done right, and all of the one-liners to follow are doable. 

That said, here are EXHORTATIONS FOR MAYOR REID: 

Policy/Strategy 

• Serve the whole big city, the many, not just the big moguls, the few 
• Reduce poverty and not by displacement 
• Measure progress by reduction in the gap between rich and poor  
• Reduce racism and classism by strengthening and listening to the voices of the under represented 
• Run government as a transparent SERVICE, measured by satisfaction of all, not as an opaque business, measured by PROFIT for a few – publicize, don’t privatize 
• With community guidance, identify COMMUNITY BENEFITS associated with all major private and public development projects and facilitate AGREEMENTS to make them so 
• Reform city policy and set criteria to shape what development the city can afford to support so that it meets community needs and aspirations, not just let developers’ ventures land wherever 
• Test ideas against identification and analysis of the problem - don’t leap to the “solution” because there are no magic bullets 
• Study the numbers - don’t be conned by developers promises or threats 

Jobs/Economic Development 

• Fix the broken rungs at the bottom of the jobs ladder so that people find a job at a low rung and then have the chance to progress on up 
• Rework the workforce development agency so that it fits at least some jobs to work the jobless can do, including those wanting to overcome skills deficits, criminal records, or addictions, not just fitting people to jobs that businesses identify as lucrative for them 
• Prioritize identifying and developing industrial lands as good job sources, paying prevailing wages and offering advancement 
• Spread the work ‘til everyone’s earning a living wage 

Housing/Community Development 

• Fix the broken rungs at the bottom of the housing ladder so that people can find affordable, decent housing and then progress on up through a range of housing type and cost to enable sustainable, intergenerational, diverse communities 
• Act aggressively to enact and enforce codes to curb foreclosure speculators, as well as to develop a continuum of property code enforcement that runs from neighborhood deputies (maybe working out of rec centers), to code enforcement and compliance officers to police  - community policing 
• Take advantage of depressed housing markets to acquire and introduce affordable housing into major job centers, thus providing choice to live near work, save transportation costs, and invigorate empty condos – build on the Midtown Alliance/ANDP model that got interrupted 
• Explore the use of US DOT congestion management/air quality dollars for land cost writedowns to support housing affordability in and near job centers – might be cheaper and realize greater congestion and air quality benefits than building new lane miles 

Land Use/Zoning 

• The core of Atlanta, from West End to Pershing Point, from Northside to Piedmont , where the greatest job concentrations and highest densities of housing exist, is the logical focus of attention – pump the heart of the city 
• Where there is infrastructure and community support, focus public improvement attention to leverage private development to infill existing centers and strip corridors in order to encourage compact, mixed use, mixed income developments  
• Put density where it’s wanted – fill in parking lot laden job centers and arterial strips – don’t intrude into stable single family neighborhoods 
• Prioritize rezoning incrementally, picking up from the quality of life and SPI district improvements that have created market-responsive choices in density,  design quality, and diversity of use, and income 

Parks, Greenspace, and a Sustainable Environment 

• Collaborate with and support environmental sustainability initiatives to seize the downtime to put in place best practice design and development plans to shape development to come 
• Specifically, provide leadership in establishing and administering a green building code 
• Prioritize rivers, creekways, community gardens, and urban forests as the development framework for the future Atlanta 
• Review and audit the purpose and performance of watershed management with a view toward achieving more holistic community development goals, like creeks, greenways, and reservoir parks and possibly reworking the consent decree  
• Open the rec centers and keep up the parks we’ve got as a priority over sinking resources into future parks until operations funding is restored 

Transportation  

• Understand transportation as a comprehensive system to get people where they need to go: a network of all travel modes that shapes investment and settlement patterns, not a series of separate competing projects 
• Thus prioritize transportation planning and finance according to needs and opportunities from a systems and sustainable settlement pattern perspective  
• Build transit to connect within and between the highest concentrations of housing with the highest concentrations of jobs; this is the only way transit is feasible 
• Provide for first rate walking and biking choices: without these, transit-served, compact, mixed use, mixed density, mixed income places don’t work  
• Accordingly, plan and design the “transit triangle” to serve the core – along Peachtree from West End to 17^th Street to Northside and back down to West End, thus connecting Atlanta’s dominant destinations and highest densities of housing and providing the infill transit and streetscape environment necessary to support MARTA rail – keep Peachtree with Auburn-Luckie cross link as the highest priority system improvement 
• Face reality - put the BeltLine in its proper system and timeline perspective: build a greenway trail, protect the right-of-way for eventual transit not presently warranted, and save lots of money and resources needed for more pressing priorities

Georgia Tech's Student Planning Association is hosting an event on March 3, 2010 where three former City of Atlanta Planning Commissioners will be sharing their thoughts on the planning, urban design, and development priorities for the city. Check in here in a few days to get a fuller preview. All are welcome, and all may share their thoughts and ask the hard questions.

The charrette model can help people along in the effort to improve their civic environment - places. My experience has been that preparation, networking, and forming a broad-based yet sort of informal organization before the charrette is vital to sustaining whatever comes out of it. Building such a network can support a series of mini-charrettes to deal with issues of importance to subsets of interests. Relying on the one big charrette model risks being more about magic bullet solutions than addressing problems - good for consultants, definitely a contribution, but maybe not actionable for city councils or county commissions that ultimately implement whatever. 

The International Urban Planning and Environment Association is holding its 9th annual symposium in Shanghai, August 3-6, 2010, bringing together scholars and practitioners from around the world to explore these sustainable planning challenges:  

     - rapid urbanization

     - global recession

     - climate change 

I have submitted the following abstract in the effort to be sure that citizens' roles in the dialogue are included and considered:  

 “The Trajectory of Citizen Involvement in Planning and Development Processes” Session Proposal – Michael Dobbins

 Abstract  

The rhetoric of democracy spreads. The knowledge of planning and development best practices widens. Access to information extends to all who are interested. The ability to manipulate information broadens. The ravages – and threats - of inequity become more and more transparent. The failures of single-disciplinary “expertise” become manifest. Collaborative efforts in which citizens play a substantive guiding role are realizing successes. Citizen empowerment may be maturing from being closed out, to saying “hell, no,” to “no,” to “maybe, if” in dealings with government and private development. New relationships may be emerging that synthesize technical knowledge with place knowledge and culture. Trends underway around the world, in different languages, cultures, and however unevenly, put the question on the table:  can an active citizenry become the third leg of the stool, joining  government and development interests to lift planning and development policies and practices to a level that redounds to the benefit of all?

 Contact: Michael Dobbins, FAIA, AICP

               Professor of Practice

               College of Architecture

               Georgia Tech

               Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0155

               404 723 8698

               michael.dobbins@coa.gatech.edu

               author of Urban Design and People

书名/著者或编者    出版信息 （出版地、出版者、出版年）    索取号 英文

Well, I found the listing for the Chinese Translation of Urban Design AND People

A serendipitous compliment that they translated Mike's major professor at the same time, with intro by  one of his more famous classmates, who took the other path.  Bob probably didn't note, and maybe didn't notice, some of the values Rudolph advocated that Mike went on to embody; though Rudolph himself of course, had pursued the route Stern followed.  There wasn't much alternative then.  When I met Rudolph at the party Diane and Dick Ravitch gave when we married, he told me how proud he was of his chapel for Tuskegee, which was certainly more appreciated than the Yale Art and Architecture Building protesters burned. He knew I was from Alabama; he may have known I was a civil rights activist and even that I supported the protest.  There is no doubt it was a turning point.


They're listed right together but you do have to scroll

http://www.nlc.gov.cn/zxfw/ww/wenjian/NBlists0908_xw/T.html

Urban design and people / Michael Dobbins.    Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, c2009.    2-2009
TU984
D632
Writings on architecture / Paul Rudolph ; foreword by Robert A.M. Stern.    New Haven : Yale School of Architecture : Distributed by Yale University Press, 2008.    2-2009
TU-854
R917

Peggy

The purpose of urban design is to serve people's needs in the civic environment. Different that building design, whose purpose is to meet the needs of individual owners and the architects for whom they are patrons.

Mike is taking over Urbandesign BLOG with people.  Hopefully it will improve
Peggy aka IrvingDZeiner

Blog here.

Blog here

posting, by the hardest, reply to artnews: Karen, David, Mandie, Jon.

fussing with this trying to put your exchanges onto this blog, I reread the ambitious E.Atl/Kirkwood events!!!   I'm very curious to know how Oakland Foundation members responded to 'which side are you on?"  or was that the genius of the Kirkwood organizers:  art of transmogrification?    If so, my hats off to K burgers, god bless them everyone.    But I'm still inclined to wonder if we'd maybe have been spared that epoch worse than slavery if Lee and Davis had been convicted, not hung, but irreparably dishonored.  I'm big on honoring McPherson; now there's where Atlanta could get its lake!!   Since I'm using the urbandesignBLOGwithpeople, I should emphasize invitation to make corrections and additions to Urban Design AND People
pd

Peggy Dobbins reply to artnews.pd

Frankly, my dears,"  I'm thrilled to see the Liberation of Atlanta celebrated. Go E. Atl and Kirkwood!  I had been wanting to participate in a Liberation Procession over there where the monument of the, dare I say "surrender" occurred, at Marietta and NSide, between Nexus and Sandler-Hudson (I am forgetting the names of places) some Sept 2.
But it looks as if the spirit has properly moved a sufficient mass for significant motion.
Yay!!
As for vacant lots and suspended kindaminimums, driving in to town (pop 2000) Mike was just talking about trying to get the code change to dis-require paving of parking lots.  Permeable surfaces -- even gravel -- being better.  He said there are some hard working enviros working on getting that along with other green building code amendments passed by C of Atl. 

Mandie, I was glad to see your comment about new buildings with store fronts that will remain empty.  Perfect eg of overdoing new formulaic mandates to correct the last ones.
I'm forwarding this to Mr.-Pedestrians-gotta-have-

Blog here.  I'm sitting in the lobby of the Congress for New Urbanism congress in Denver.

I just interrupted Michael Dobbins talking to two of his former students about where the jobs for urban designers are in the new economy.    Aaron [ with Tunnell, Ward, and someone] said the big project guys are hurting, but "you know me, I learned my lessons.  I'm starting a job I'm really excited about in North Little Rock.  Bill Clinton is coming to do our kick off.  We have a very enlightened long term investor with 40 acres with whom we're going to do agricultural projects in the interim.  He's already started holding the farmers' market there."  Dobbins' wife lept up and kissed him:  "Just exactly what we were talking to the community around Ft. McPherson about."

Rebecca, [also with Tunnel ... they will have to blog on to promo proper corp id]  took pics this am of a community garden 4 blocks n of where we are. (court & 18th).  Brilliant.  They just put raised beds with wood bottoms on top of the paving on a parking lot. 

Frances posted a good question on the message board comments page about how citizen guided urban design interacts, (I would say "should" interact) vis a vis investment in real estate  -- land and development.    I think what she had in mind at the time were

• if as Dobbins maintains in Urban Design and People, citizen guided design yields the best result meaning a) it happens, it gets built, which means those putting up the capital are satisfied with the projected return and b) it delivers  community benefits as defined by citizens who participate in the design process 

• and citizen guided design improves as a function of citizen information, transparency, "sunshine."

• yet good public projects often fail because the land prices rise as a function of investments made on the basis of information about where projects are scheduled,