Sat 22 May, 2010
I Have a (Planning) Dream
Filed under: General, Planning, Planning and Zoning FictionTags: I Have a Dream Speech, Martin Luther King, Planning Literature, Public Speaking
Author’s Note: This has been written with my deepest apologies to Martin Luther King for desecrating his 1963 March on Washington speech. Also, this is a work of fiction, so any resemblance between the characters and any real individuals is coincidental.
Unfortunately, the art and creativity side of community planning tends to too often be lost under a sea of legalities, zoning administration, and other more mundane, day-to-day tasks. This is especially evident in the area of planning literature, where the vast majority of articles deal primarily with the technical side of planning.
The author of the following piece, Rodney C. Nanney, AICP, is pleased to make better use of the right side of his brain by publishing another in our “planning fiction” series:
What you need to know: It’s 2027. Automobiles have been gradually outlawed, except for emergency use, after an Islamist/neo-fascist terrorist group detonated a 100-megaton nuclear device in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia five years earlier. The bomb caused a series of chain reaction explosions and firestorms within the country’s oil producing infrastructure, culminating in an unanticipated but titanic detonation of the country’s underground reserves which obliterated most of the Arabian peninsula and destroyed or contaminated 90% of the world’s remaining oil reserves.
I Have a (Planning) Dream
(excerpted from the April 28, 2027 keynote address at the annual conference of the American Planning Association in Washington, D.C.)
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest APA conference in the history of the organization!
Three score years ago, a great American named John C. Portman, Jr. designed the first buildings of what would later become known as Edge City architecture. We now recognize that, with the demise of the automobile as the primary means of transportation in the United States, this momentous accomplishment, decried at the time, actually laid a new foundation that now stands before our profession as a series of endlessly fertile fields, ready for planting.
We have come to this hallowed shrine of city planning, the nation’s capital, to remind America’s planners of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of traditional planning practices.
Now is the time to make real the promises of urban design.
Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of site plan review to the sunlit path of urban infill design and re-development.
Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of automotive dependency to the solid rock of urbanity. Now is the time to make the promise of community a reality for all God’s children.
It would be fatal for us, as a profession, to overlook the urgency of the moment. The endless sea of obsolete asphalt will not pass away until there is a new renaissance in urban design that ends the artificial isolation of suburban sprawl architecture by infilling new life among the islands of older structures.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, lamenting the loss of our car culture. I say to you, my friends, that even though we face difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day on the fertile fields of suburbia will rise new communities, walkable, accessible and full of life.
I have a dream that one day my own children will live in a nation of great urbanity, where their lives will not be determined by their access to transportation, but by the limits of their creativity and ingenuity.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, the isolated buildings of our Edge Cities, surrounded by endless parking lots, shall be re-connected into the web of our community, with boulevards, accessible public transit and pedestrian-friendly streets.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that across this great nation will rise, from the depths of these dead spaces on the urban fringe and shining like strings of jewels, new urban places, new communities and new life.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I will take back with me to my day-to-day life as a planner.
With this faith we, the planning profession, will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our auto-centered urban environment into a beautiful symphony of community life.
With this faith, working together, struggling together, we will rebuild this ‘land of the Pilgrim’s pride.’ If America is to be a great nation, this must become true!
And when this happens, when we rebuild suburbia, when we re-integrate the isolated office tower back into the great urban landscape, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children will be able to gather together in peace in our new urban spaces, singing together those immortal words,
“Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”