"Make no little plans." : big moves for the post-industrial city

Abstract

With the current trend in planning and urban design aspiring towards incrementally executed, phased-in projects, it becomes necessary to ask if this strategy is based upon anything more than anxiety, fear and apprehension leveled in the face of reelection-minded city leaderships, institutionalized planning bureaucracies and developer-driven market forces. The notion that cities evolve in well-proportioned, single-serving digestible bites is as untenable as the notion that a singular logical diagram of physical organization can alone dictate a city's character and evolution. Constrained by these two notions the current practice of urban design appears both hemmed in and characterized by the contradiction of Burnham's charge and OMA's 'taboo.' While this 'taboo' may, somewhat correctly, be associated with previous notions of grandeur and oversimplified static models of urban evolution, it should be recognized as a severe constraint on the space of possible solutions to urban issues. As such it represents an obstacle to the formation of new ideas and models, particularly in cities undergoing the most dramatic transformations. Proposing a line of inquiry focused about the notion of radically-large scale urban design proposals this thesis inquires as to the appropriateness of such designs for post-industrial North American cities. It seeks to occupy and explore the 'taboo' which lies at the heart of the paradox of the urban proposition today.