By David Crossley
Increasingly, it seems to me, the great citizen movements like Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Livable Communities are really talking about one thing: The Public Realm.
In a physical sense, the heart of the public realm is the streets, the pipes, the wires – whatever networks it takes for us to conduct our lives, hopefully with some safety, convenience, and even comfort.
It’s also the police stations, schools, hospitals, fire stations, maintenance facilities, office buildings, post offices, public housing, and all the rest. It’s the parks, the landfills, some of the parking lots. And the vast fleets of vehicles, not to mention the tools and equipment to get the work done.
But it’s also a lot of people working, using a lot of supplies, and costing a lot of money. Fortunes of dollars every year go into fantastic numbers of projects and pockets. There are unbelievable numbers of contracts and partnerships and many of these extend into the private realm, having huge effects on it.
To see the vast Public Realm as one thing is an interesting perspective. Its power is clearly enormous and we spend far more of our lives in it than we may realize.
When we are not in the private realm but are moving through the public realm, we are happier if the journey and experience are pleasant and safe, and even interesting.
Particularly in the physical part of the public realm there is an emerging general formula for design with street layout at its core. All new development “should be based on a resilient pattern of streets and lots,” say the planners at Dover Kohl. “The initial street and lot pattern will long outlast the first generation of buildings and land uses that are placed on them.”
Recently, I saw a detailed, three-dimensional drawing of Houston from 1891, and while the street patterns are completely clear and still basically in place more than a hundred years later, almost none of the buildings are still in place. There were a lot of buildings, and some of them were quite substantial, but those things change over time.
It seems reasonable that the people charged with caring for and improving some aspect of the public realm ought to have some guidelines about the general vision and principles of the citizens, not to mention their needs and even desires. Sets of principles, guidelines, manuals, presentations should exist, and they should all be based on one broad document: a comprehensive plan. Although we are a rare city in that we don’t have zoning and we don’t have a comprehensive plan, I am not talking about or proposing zoning.
I happen to think such a plan should be focused on the Public Realm. If we only brought some good design and efficiency principles to the public realm, the city would be transformed.
Comprehensive plans are properly developed through the highest possible citizen participation in a creative and educated process that can be completed in two years or less.
Houstonians from all walks of life have already worked in many planning processes and a large number of plans and visions have been completed. The “Connecting the Visions” conference in February explored those plans and extracted from them all the major themes. (They are available at http://www.livablehouston.org).
Certainly those broad themes could inform the beginning of a City of Houston Comprehensive Planning Process. Since that process is already described and even mandated in existing City ordinances, perhaps it should begin after the coming election, with the intent of publishing the finished plan and submitting it to the voters by or before November 2003.
At a moment when Houston is challenged as never before to change, to mature, and to become the attractive, world class city it is not today, it is clearly time to sweep away all the old and increasingly false mythology about how we do things here.