
What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects? - jseliger
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/opinion/what-happened-to-the-great-urban-design-projects.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
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jseliger
Seattle, by the way, is actually building a lot of rail, and it's going so
well that people want more of it:
[http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/962706-129/bertha-who-
seat...](http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/962706-129/bertha-who-seattle-
transit-tunneling-is).

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EliRivers
An awful lot of the really big ones (on the scale of towns and cities) were
bloody awful. Aesthetically pleasing on paper, but unliveable. Logical minds
planning carefully separated zones and routes and so on in ways that looked
nice on paper and created soulless cities with broken public spaces.

An excellent read on this is "Seeing Like a State", by James Scott. The
chapters on forestry and collectivised agriculture are similarly interesting.

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fennecfoxen
What happened to the _great_ projects is that the governments responsible
generally flubbed their ability to _balance a budget_ so badly that people
lost faith in their ability to deliver anything. The MTA Second System was a
glorious and wonderful idea on paper, and any New Yorker would love having it,
but look what actually became of those lofty ideals: one useful connection and
the station named "Grand Street" (B/D) plus a bankruptcy.

Increased labor costs (thanks in part to pro-union prevailing-wage
legislation) and environmental-planning holdups in years since haven't helped
get things built for less money, either, and we've suffered a parade of
boondoggle public-transportation projects, like the Acela service: crazy-money
wasted on designing new trainsets instead of importing existing ones, and then
the trains are run at normal-train speeds for most of their trip. Next up:
California high-speed rail. Not that this is specific to public transit, mind
you: the Big Dig should disabuse anyone of that notion. And even when the
government supposedly tries to be efficient, we end up with scandals like with
the new Bay Bridge.

Bonus points, too, when the laughable micro-projects with insane price tags
that _are_ approved find themselves over-budget and end up dropping some of
the promises that they _did_ make. (In the Bay Area I know there are people
who still complain about how VTA promised to run light rail up West San Carlos
Ave, from downtown to the Valley Fair mall, and the old BART/VTA
institutional/political rivalry is still running after all these decades.)

How can we restore our faith, asks our intrepid columnist? You'll need to get
the governments involved to get their acts together, and then it will be
pretty automatic as they demonstrate competence. I wouldn't hold my breath,
though.

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pm90
The government and especially municipal bodies are staffed by people from the
community. If you want the government to change, there is a way to do so:
generate more interest in what it does, how it functions. Get more people
involved/interested, including yourself :) .

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mseebach
This is merely a restatement of the ideal of government, and doesn't address
the fundamental complaint of the GP.

Government isn't incompetent because it's made up of incompetent individuals
-- it's incompetent because it's been deeply captured by special interest
groups, including, but not limited to, public sector unions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice)

(TL;DR: When studying government from an economics perspective, the sum of
rational self-interest actions across all actors isn't very well aligned with
the overall public interest.)

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pm90
I was not aware that this was an entire field of study! Thank you. I will need
to do more reading.

How exactly do you "deeply capture" government? I had the impression that
these "Special Interest" groups can press their agendas precisely because they
can staff government with people who are pliable to their agenda. If enough
people with no "special interests" can be elected to positions of power,
wouldn't that immediately remove corruption?

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mseebach
Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's
interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on
the big ticket stuff such as outright corruption, nepotism and so on, but it's
also about a general dynamic that exist benignly at all levels of bureaucratic
organisations: discovering the public interest gets increasingly difficult the
deeper into the details you get + I'd like to _be seen_ to be doing a good job
to advance my career. Is fixing this or that pothole first more in the public
interest? The citizen with the persistent letters to the right people (and/or
the influential blog/the ability/luck to make a Facebook post viral) typically
gets to decide.

This dynamic scales up the chain. When you're buying a new IT system, do you
get five clever guys down on Main Street to do it, or do you get Microsoft/IBM
with all the promises of synergy in the cloud, the 15 page SLA (think of the
bus count!) - and an invitation to that big "trade show" in Vegas? In
practically all situations, even without corruption, the rational choice is to
go with Microsoft. First, if it doesn't quite work, well, you have reams of
case studies and white papers to point to, you really did do your homework, it
must be us doing something wrong, let's get McKinsey to write a report. If it
goes down, look at the fancy SLA. Plenty of cover that you don't have with the
local guys - indeed, you'll learn just how many of your colleagues could have
told you from the beginning that it would never have worked. And if it did
work, all that nice money you saved disappears from your next budget to have
the equivalent of Microsoft fix potholes in the next department. Concentrated
benefits, dispersed costs. Again, all of this without specific incompetence or
corruption, without being specifically pliable to any outside interest.

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chrismealy
The problem is cars. Older cities were designed too, they were just designed
for people instead of cars. A lot of what looks like spontaneous generation
was just designed so well you can't see the design.

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Adam_O
Your reply reminded me of a lecture from an ocw course I'm watching on and
off. He covers a bit about infrastructure design and policy choices in that
lecture. I thought it was really interesting.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpcbBk5ckas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpcbBk5ckas)

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icebraining
This talk by Andrés Duany is quite interesting as well:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwd4Lq0Xvgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwd4Lq0Xvgc)

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ilaksh
I have been working on integrating some ideas.
[http://tinyvillages.org](http://tinyvillages.org).

Note that the files are on Github and it really isn't about one person or
group doing a complete design. One of the things that I have started thinking
about that needs to be fleshed out more on that page is Open Source
Engineering and ways to make zoning and all aspects of urban systems more
component-based as well as moving beyond code/standard and form-based to
common information systems platforms that will facilitate automation of
planning/approval and smart/sensor network data integration.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I see that each house have their own kitchen. How do you justify that. Seems
extremely wasteful.

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toomuchtodo
Balance between shared and personal space. I would never live somewhere where
I had no other option than a shared kitchen, community, coop, whatever.

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skywhopper
I find it amusing that the photo that heads the article of the Millau Viaduct
which, while truly a good example of the sort of project they are advocating,
could hardly be called "urban".

