Total design
Do we need urban planners? This question was recently posed to me by a Geneva-based architect who had been tapped to help plan the last pocket of undeveloped land within the city’s limits. Explaining why he was involved in the project, he said that the authorities were looking to architects, rather than planners, to mastermind the scheme because the latter typically only operate on one scale. The city council felt that planners too often thought about the big picture, seeing cities as a series of “zones” and “movement corridors”, detached from the people inhabiting and using them.
I tend to agree. The planning departments that I worked with (when practising as a landscape architect) often thought that it was enough to have a diagram that highlighted where a bike lane was and how many people were using it, rather than investigating whether people might want to ride along such a path – or if they were just doing so out of necessity. Interrogating quality is essential for delivering friendly, liveable cities. This isn’t to say that architects aren’t guilty of focusing solely on their plot but rather that planning (while essential to city making) often misses a trick when those who practise it don’t think holistically and at a range of scales.
Herein lies a solution – doing away with the “specialist”. A good planner shouldn’t be too single-minded or specialised but creative and adaptable with an understanding of architecture, furniture design and sociology. In short, to deliver well-rounded spaces we need fewer Robert Moses types (the big-picture planner responsible for bulldozing large swaths of New York in the name of efficiency) and more total designers, such as mid-century master Ernesto Nathan Rogers, who once declared that he wanted to design everything from “a spoon to a city”.
Taking such an approach creates cities and neighbourhoods that work on multiple levels, with consideration given to everything from the placement of furniture to the positioning of buildings. Geneva – should the architects fully execute their vision – might soon be the perfect example.
Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. This column appears in Monocle’s October issue, which is on newsstands tomorrow. For more news and analysis, subscribe to Monocle today.
