Master Planing: Limited Potential
Master planning can be defined as ,"an ordered process that determines community goals and aspirations in terms of community development." This plan often determines a cities future development for 10, 20, 30 years in advance. However, this actually limits the potential of the entire city.
As times change with society, these master plans remain stagnant with very little change. This is due to the multitude of social and political hoops that are required to make these changes. This limits landscape architects and traditional architects in their design and creativity, predetermining building footprints, programs, and placements in the cities. As we have talked about in class, society is constantly adapting to new needs and trends. These trends create reactive architecture of the time that conform to societal needs, both influencing the future of design while supporting current trends and technologies. With master planning, society is planned too far ahead in time to be relevant when the time comes to execute the plan. Could this be due to the restrictive nature of the social and political influence of the master plan? Do these plans look into what may help society in the future or do they only think of current wants and needs? Is there a way we could make these plans more flexible for future influence?
Crawford mentions that master planning and urban movements create an, "absence of any means of incorporating everyday urban life into the city, architecture and landscape architecture become marginalized, void of much purpose beyond the functional or purely aesthetic." So does master planning really strip away the freedom and potential of future design and influence the impact it has on society?
Hey Nathan,
ReplyDeleteI agree that master planning can cause unforeseen obstacles for future design. However, these masterplans are typically created to restrict things that would be detrimental to a city. An example could be that developers will come to a small town where land is "cheap" and they have a lot of land to build whatever they want. Now this could be really good or really bad depending on the developer and unfortunately in most cases this is bad. These developers will buy up land outside of small cities and create 5,000+ homes and neighborhoods that don't connect back to the town and create their own urban fabric. This creates a situation where there is a strong potential that public activity will not be at the existing town near by but be at these suburbs, allowing for these towns to become underused and eventually abandoned. These actions also creates a disconnect of town and neighborhood identity. This is a really long explanation of why I think that masterplans are doing more good than harm.
Master planning has the potential to invest in a community's future over time. Too often, decisions are made on behalf of a community instead of by the community. Imagine if designers were advocates for a community's interests, defending their needs and proposing design solutions that were developed with them. Instead, those that make decisions often do so to the benefit of the paying client.
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