At Planners’ Symposium : Clash of Design and Democracy Cited

A central theme of the second West Hollywood Urban Design Symposium was the tension created between the planners’ desire to design a humane urban environment and the need for democratic participation of local residents.

Held at the Pacific Design Center, the session attracted 150 planners and officials from Southern California.

“Design and democracy don’t always share the same priorities,” said USC architecture Dean Robert Harris. “Designers tend to think in terms of physical solutions, whereas citizens may be more concerned with what goes on in those built environments.”

West Hollywood City Manager Paul Brotzman talked about the difficulties of dealing with problems such as parking, traffic congestion, noise and the destruction of residential neighborhoods “without imposing controls so tight they stifle economic and social vitality.”

‘Entrenched Regulations’

Mark Winogrond, West Hollywood director of community development, underlined the complexities of these challenges by commenting on “the lack of a useful planning vocabulary to overcome the many entrenched regulations and procedures that don’t meet the test of creating humane urban places.”

The heart of the matter, Harris said, is whether planning professionals and administrators see themselves as “visionaries or intermediaries.”

“In Southern California,” he said, “the public realm is largely powerless. Almost all of our physical environment is generated by the private sector on a project-by-project basis, with little concern for what happens next door.”

He said the planner plays an intermediary role, trying to mediate between private property owners to ensure some coherence in the character of neighboring developments.

‘Self-Sustaining Order’

“This is a vital function,” Harris said, “but it cannot get very far without some overall vision of what a neighborhood, district or city is about.”

Several questions focused on the current absence of what Harris described as “a naturally self-sustaining order.” “You can’t make great places by law,” said a planner from Carlsbad. “Without a wide public consensus on the kind of cities we really want, in a positive as well as a negative sense, it’s hard to have any kind of valid urban vision.”

Questions during the discussion included: How can an urban environment change character and evolve in the context of a cumbersome democratic process? Given that diminishing density cannot solve traffic problems, how can you effectively deal with congestion? How can planners compensate for the dismal lack of positive political leadership in dealing with problems of growth?

One example of leadership was offered by Mark Hinshaw, a Bellevue, Wash. urban designer. Reacting to an excess of uncontrolled commercial development in the 1970s, Bellevue adopted urban design and planning guidelines that restricted commercial building to the city’s core and imposed a very low density in the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Banality of Architecture

“In the past decade, Bellevue has evolved from a suburb of Seattle into a city in its own right,” Hinshaw explained. “To control the character of the city, we developed a stringent policy of design review.”

Viewing Hinshaw’s slides, however, members of the audience commented on the banality of the architecture such strongly codified design review procedures seemed to encourage.

UCLA architecture Dean Richard Weinstein, a former New York City planner, lamented “the Balkanization of the Southland’s political structure,” that makes it hard to deal with vital regional problems such as transportation, sewage and toxic waste disposal.

Weinstein was concerned that a balance be struck between regional and neighborhood concerns. This was a balance New York City has failed to achieve, he contended.

Fewer U.S. Funds

“I think we’re in for real changes,” he said. “If we cannot rise to the occasion, we shall surely sink under the accumulated weight of our indecisions.”

Weinstein and Harris emphasized that in the current political climate of federal and state governmental withdrawal from the provision of funds for many public programs, the private sector has been left to provide the resources and initiatives needed to develop the public realm.

Landscape architect Jean Gath, a partner in the SWA Group, a co-sponsor of the symposium, said, “It is symptomatic of the current climate that the day of the great landscape projects that helped create our unique Southern California environment is definitely over.”

Developer Ira Yellin welcomed the rise of “a new generation of developers who are aware that quality in architecture, landscaping and the urban environment pays off.”