Intersection
Planning and Architecture: Lost in Transition
The 19th and early 20th Century represented a period of unprecedented public investment in the civic realm. Recent decades however have seen the erosion of that assumed role of governments to create democratic public space for the betterment of all. Today the civic realm is a hybrid place charged with diverse and often conflicted responsibilities. Principally, it must enrich the public life of the city while paying its way as a productive capital asset, delivering both social and commercial returns. What does this mean for the quality of tomorrow’s built environment and for those planning and designing it?
One outcome of this shift in the public space of the city is a transformation of ‘client’ into a wide spectrum of interests, agents and stakeholders – from developers and superannuation funds, to project managers and property managers. While on the one hand this breeds tension between visionary investments in the future and the more immediate need for commercial returns, it also potentially has an upside for the professions of architecture and planning. The distributed network of interests and competencies involved in delivering public/private development provides an opening for the architect and planner working as skilful collaborators. Can this transformation of the client into a client body drive an associated transformation within the professions, where both are as much enablers as they are authors?
Both these questions lead to a third, concerning the deployment of architecture and planning as a means to rebrand a place, a city or a corporation. When combined with the steroids of digital imagineering and a political obsession with icons, the design of our cities runs the risk of becoming more a visual exercise than a spatial one. What risks are embedded in this Faustian pack? In the end, is the celebrity status of some at the expense of the more collaborative role of design in the evolving life of the city?