Think Big. Freak Out.

Daniel Burnham's line "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood" is probably one of the most famous quotes to come out of the field of urbanism. It's also one of the most thoroughly abused. Burnham's maxim about aiming high is used by proponents of megaprojects like Atlantic Yards (the poster child for megaprojects, you see) in defense of superblocks and devastatingly overbearing towers. In truth, Burnham did not stop where the quote does. The quote is almost always truncated, cutting off much of the great planner's intent. The full quote reads:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big. (via)

The idea of a noble, logical plan becoming a living thing is about as far from the logic of the contemporary commercial megaproject as you can get. Giant developments that have become commonplace in cities like New York, London, and Chicago over the past two decades are designed to eliminate risk, to minimize mess. They are, in a word, sterile. Burnham was talking about creating plans that are dynamic, and that improve their surroundings, not wall themselves off from them.

So if it's not the four-tower 3,000-condo 250,000 square-feet-of-retail megacomplex, what does a grand plan look like? What can we do to stir mens' blood, to re-engage the many millions of people who have become disconnected from the urban environment, who have willfully or accidentally removed themselves from the discourse? In the face of increasingly grave problems, how can citizens be energized to turn their cities into the viridian green, environmentally-restorative engines that we have heard so many advocates call for them to be?

There are no small changes that need to be made. I refuse to parrot, any longer, the absurd myth that changing your lightbulbs or using a fabric bag to pick up groceries will save the world. The words "hogswaddle" and "poppycock" come to mind (apparently climate challenge turns me into a Dickensian lower-class Brit). It's true that these things add up, but public opinion on fighting climate challenge is waning; people are growing tired of the issue. The public is, of course, fickle, so this should come as no surprise. The bite-size formula is not going to work. The ante must be upped.

For planners, architects, and urbanists, this necessitates a call for big plans. We need so many more Burnhamian Big Ideas. It's time to re-think infrastructure, and architecture, and every tiny component of every city. All things can be re-imagined; we're starting to see these kinds of big ideas in playful fits and starts. Defunct airports can become magnificent tree-covered mountains; parks can be used as psychological and environmental rehabilitation centers; whole cities can become stand-in icebergs; we could build rivers in the sky, and fill them with floating classroom-ferries. Nothing about our cities is set in stone -- not even their geography. And as nature starts to change our cities in new ways, we need to re-think how our cities interact with nature.

Perhaps the greatest piece of infrastructure that cities have at their disposal, in terms of reimagining and regenerating the cityscape, is often also the last remembered. People -- the citizens that use the city, kick it, punch it, pull it down and lift it up a hundred million ways each day -- are brimming with ideas about how to make their cities better. The images in this post, for example, are from a collection of entries to a public call for the reinvention of Coney Island. This is the crazy shit that people come up with; it follows that what they want to start seeing more of, in addition to genuine, solid plans for making cities work better, is some freaky, crazy shit.

Here's a proposal; the seed of a big idea, perhaps: let loose. Think about the most unchangeable features of your city, and try to imagine them changed. Don't just daydream; come up with Big Ideas, grand plans for revolutionizing the way that your city works. Get crazy, and put down on paper the ideas you wouldn't dream of bringing up in a meeting at work. Then upload them and share them with everyone who has a computer and a set of working eyes. We need more sky rivers, more radical civic interventions, and more acid-trip theme parks. More than ever, we need very, very Big Ideas. And if we try hard enough, if we come up with enough crazy shit, maybe we'll be able to shock more people into caring about how their city works, and what it looks like. No one cares if you tell them the airport is being turned into condos and a dog park. Heads turn when you suggest that it be geo-engineered into an urban Matterhorn. It doesn't have to happen. It just has to get people to pay attention.

Burnham wisely noted that each generation's sons and grandsons would do things that would stagger their forebears. Make your grandparents proud; go freak out on your city.


(Photo from MASNYC's Flickr gallery.)

Making Over Slumbai

When I first heard of the Mumbai Project, a series of articles tracking the progress of various urban projects in the city in the Hindustan Times – one of India's main papers – I was pleasantly surprised to hear of citizen engagement in the city's development. Launched in 2007 and revisited these past two weeks, the feature follows issues like airport redevelopment, transport projects governance and other facets of “Mumbai’s makeover.”

It turned out, however, that the articles exclusively summarize the perspective of the upper classes, who demand that their streets are smooth, their airports efficient and their city "world class." Never mind that that the majority of Mumbai's residents – 55% of whom live in slums – would be calling for a toilet, clean water and a secure place to live, if given such a platform. This exercise in citizen engagement unflinchingly makes clear who counts as a citizen, whom the city's "makeover" is intended to serve — and who is in the way.


This bias is unambiguous in the December 22 feature, which examined why reconstruction of pavements had not proceeded apace: “The reason? It’s more like 5 lakh reasons – that’s how many encroachers are currently hogging your pedestrian space across the city… With nearly 5 lakh encroachers, including hawkers, having made the city’s footpaths their permanent home, pedestrians are left with no space to walk on.” The header states that, "Encroachments by hawkers, squatters continue to plague pedestrians.” Clearly, the important question for an investigative piece on this subject is why pedestrians are troubled, not why so many people lack proper homes or spaces from which to sell goods conveniently to those same passers-by. The article quotes a municipal engineer as saying, "We had a huge demand for better footpaths from...citizens.” It is clear that those families forced to squat on the pavements do not fall under this definition of "citizen."

In "Tug-of-War Clogs Loo Project" on December 16, the series highlighted stalls in a state project to construct public toilets due to conflict over whether corporate or community-based interests would build and manage the toilet blocks. While the state handed the project to community-based organizations, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) wants private firms to construct the 227 toilet blocks. The article focused exclusively on this agency's misguided aim of building "five-star toilets" at the expense of community-managed ones. R.A. Rajeev, Additional Municipal Commissioner at the BMC, is quoted as saying: "We do not want to present the city as ‘Slumbai’. We need to construct toilets in a manner that reflects the changing culture of the city." Considering that most of the city's population continue to live in slums, and that these are the people who most need public toilets, this statement is laughable. The fact that community-constructed and managed toilets are more sustainable, more affordable and better managed has been demonstrated in India. The article also neglects to mention the fact that Mumbai's regional development agency has separately embarked on a community-based sanitation scheme in partnership with one of the pioneers of community-managed toilet construction, based in Mumbai. In fact, they didn't interview a single community organization or anyone lacking a toilet.

On December 22, the series examined the progress of a project to revamp the city’s drainage system to reduce flooding. The header was: "Slums still crowd areas around city's 150-year old drains, and unmapped utilities snake underground, delaying ambitious plans for flood-free monsoons." Slum dwellers would probably like more than anyone for the city to address its flooding problems, which can prove fatally dangerous. Slum residents – who often inhabit low-lying and flood-prone areas, have structures that are least resistant to rain and flooding and have little money to rebuild their homes – are most vulnerable to flooding. This article paints slum dwellers as obstacles to the goal of flood reduction, instead of portraying them as citizens who would also benefit from the project and presenting slum improvement and flood reduction as two sides of the same development coin.

The tone of the Mumbai Project highlights the frequency with which infrastructural and beautification projects are formulated in a way that pins city development against the shelter and livelihoods of the poor. Poor people who live in cities in the developing world often carve out space for themselves to live and work in the crevices of the urban infrastructure – along railway tracks, near airport runways, near sewage drains, on city pavements – because these are available spaces to set up shelter in the absence of formal housing options or vacant land while remaining close to the central city. When infrastructural projects emerge, these communities thus seem to "get in the way."

Mumbai does need infrastructural improvement – for everyone's sake – but this should be part of an approach that understands infrastructural upgrading and housing options for poor people as part and parcel of the same mission.

Otherwise, a perspective that portrays the poor as obstacles to development leads to demolition for the purpose of transforming the city to fit the needs and aesthetics of the upper classes. In some cases this is feasible with pure force, and in other cases, as with those slum dwellers who can prove themselves eligible for resettlement under certain policies, eviction takes place under a defined procedure and people are relocated elsewhere. Although Mumbai is relatively progressive for resettling those who fall in the second category, and this could theoretically be a win-win solution if proper accommodation in serviced and well-connected locations is available, most resettlement sites are peripheral and threaten to become "vertical slums." In the end, this is still a way of clearing populations who are "in the way" out of central urban space in order to reshape the city for its high-end users.

(Images from the Hindustan Times and Beaten Paths).