Last week, noted New York City planner Amanda Burden spoke at NasherSALON. The presentation was valuable, especially considering the city officials and notables in the audience, for its reminder of just how seriously NYC takes urban design and development. In particular, Burden emphasized two aspects of New York’s planning initiative that she considers vitally important to a city wishing to remain competitive in the 21st century 1) dense development that relies on its extensive public transportation network, and 2) an activist planning department that has aggressively rezoned large swathes of the city as a way of determining where and how future development will take place, while ensuring such development is acutely sensitive to quality design, down to the minutest detail.
That said, in my recap I expressed how it felt as if some of those lessons got lost in the somewhat self-satisfied, mugging nature of the Q&A. Most of the weekend I wondered if I had been overly sensitive in my reaction to the lecture. But this morning, a Frontburnervian sends me this Salon article that reminds us just how bad off Dallas’ attitude and approach to urban development actually is:
If you took all the clichés about horrible urban design and shoved them into 75 acres, you’d probably end up with something pretty close to Dallas’ Victory Park. A pre-planned billion-dollar collection of imposing hyper-modern monumental structures, high-end chain stores, enormous video screens, expensive restaurants, a sports arena and tons of parking, completely isolated from the rest of the city by a pair of freeways, Victory Park is like the schizophrenic dream of some power-hungry capitalist technocrat.
The article goes on to discus the failure of so-called “entertainment districts” in their effort to promote renewed urbanism in post-auto cities like Dallas. And yet, this model continues to dominate our city’s thinking about design. There’s much to take away from the Salon piece, but this is the line our business-friendly city hall must take to heart, especially in light of Burden’s talk about activist urban planning:
It’s not just that the developers are boring people – the economics of single-owner districts incentivize blandness.
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Yet Mary Suhm, aided and abetted by the DMN editorial board, plans to divert $75 million (on a net present value basis) to the developers of Victory Park out of general revenues by using a TIF to disguise the giveaway as an incentive to West Dallas.
And people wonder why the citizens of Dallas are so cynical.
To me, the Arts District is another example of this…
In efforts to turn Flora into a pedestrian paradise and the districts main drag, developers have turned their backs on Ross Ave., the district’s actual Main Street and greatest potential for growth. Ross is what connects the district to the rest of Dallas. It’s where the neighborhood transition should occur. It’s where a future street car might amble up to Lower Greenville and where, hopefully, part of the highway noose might be removed.
In contrast, Flora is a street bookended by a motor court and…a motor court disguised as a “plaza”.
Boring.
Not exactly shocked that anything “master planned” in Dallas has turned out to be lifeless and boring, although I’ll take Victory Park in its present form any day over what it was when it was a contaminated dump.
“Not exactly shocked that anything “master planned” in Dallas has turned out to be lifeless and boring” . . . That’s painting with a pretty broad brush. Like most things, some planning efforts fare better than others and some succeed quite well. State Thomas grew out of a master plan as did White Rock Lake, as did Turtle Creek Boulevard, as did Fair Park, as did the downtown parks initiative now underway, as did DFW Airport. Could each have been improved? No doubt. But as downtown_worker also points out, when evaluating a planning effort, it’s important to remember what it replaced.
For example Robbie seem to have forgotten that the northeast corner of downtown was characterized by aging industrial structures, used car lots and largely vacant parking lots before Carr-Lynch was commissioned and nobody was on the streets – ever. It, and the Sasaki Plan that followed, unquestionably improved the area and those improvements weren’t limited arts venues. It also contributed to stabilizing important anchor institutions such as Booker T, Cathedral Guadalupe, The Belo Mansion and St. Paul Church and the historically significant buildings that housed them. While the pedestrian scene is still a long way from 24/7, it is far advanced from “pre-plan” days. With regard to connecting to Ross, and spreading the love beyond Flora corridor (and don’t Trammell Crow Center and the DMA already do that), that was one of the main goals of the 2007 Fregonese Master Plan update. Will it be successful? Time will tell, but the fact that something there in now worth connecting to is worth noting.
Youre right. Dallas is extremely boring. Which is why I’m leaving.