Apr 22 2009
Earthday_09
Earthday, urban land use and management
Image: 1963
Without a national land use policy, America’s formation of megacities in just over fifty years logically requires some kind of metro-management – a metro-megacity-corp. Planners have been criticizing our “land-of-a-thousand micro-governments” for decades, but something has changed that may add traction to solving the problems this presents to regional urban design. The fear was that if such a thing did exist it would function with the same level of oversight offered to outfits like Enron, AIG or Citicorp. The political will is to keep them at arm’s length, but preferably the short kind that hang from the sides of lobbyists.
Then comes this change. It is the widening availability of very large data-sets that can be used to define the nation’s 300+ mega-cities. The nation’s 50 state image is just that – an image. Turning the states into regional management corporations is becoming politically palatable because that is what is happening anyway. The governors have a whole basketful of PBCs that bridge state lines — seems only thing missing is a little federal oversight — in the national interest. It was the National Defense Highway act that put the nation on the mega-city path. In the words of a well loved Yankee ball player Yogi Berra, “You have to be careful if you don’t know where your going because you might not get there.”
The states would not be in financial collapse and budgeting would be balanced to a regional interest if the principles of Smart Growth laid out nearly a decade ago by Anthony Downs (April 2001, Planning) had traction (to see click here). Back then, too few knew that the use of mega-corporate level data was something the states already control, but did not share regionally across their boarders. The framework existed but it did not hold a soupcon of policy clout. Perhaps one of the reasons there are so many registered and unregistered lobbyists is to keep this a secret. The idea that the micro-marketing wars are only launched by business every ten years is a similar misunderstanding of the changing role of data systems.
Businesses large and small are too busy protecting their interests to worry about regional planning or urban design, but they do file their tax returns. Sharing rapidly developing megacity data is not crazy at all. After all, the small business and the mega-corporate entity is driven on the basis of a daily consumer voting process. The information on consumption is vast and until recently largely unused by states for regional planning. Once consumption is linked up to the vital statistics and social characteristics of “a region” the sheer power of it all belongs without doubt in a public realm.
Get a Handle
To get a handle on this see: Good Guide , and look up ideas like “industrial ecology” for access to data streams that get beyond the “green branding” phenomena to the cold, hard facts that define who you are and where you are going by what you buy every day, not who you vote for every few years. Wake up smell the coffee. Then check the brand for its “earth” friendliness and act accordingly. The idea is simple — these tools allow the consumer to shorten the caveat emptor cycle.
Resources such as these are described with terms such as “open data base connectivity”. It is the jargon of data systems that offer things like highly detailed product ratings that align consumption choices with values (even an iPhone app). Individual consumption data tools that account for environmental impact comparisons among consumption choices puts into action the ecology of commerce that Paul Hawkens talked about in 1993. The cycles are getting shorter. Something is working.
To put this consumption handle in its ”class” I recommend seeing the review of two books on data crunching in the CD blog. And, for more on the “mega-city” reference see video: here in post : “Go to Chicago”. See for RPD on NYC see: Climate Design. Also see, the Three Promises of progressive plannners that still need to be pursued with some urgency.
