Like a fool in love, before my International Placemaking course I viewed starchitecture and monumental development behind rose-colored glasses. I was especially enamored with Calatrava-like bridges, more so than with Hong Kong and Dubai global city mega-project fabrications. I was smitten by the economic development benefits and the brilliant ingenuity and engineering behind jaw-dropping design. As a result, I neglected to see the lurching dark side where the quest for starchitecture leaves the poor in the shadows.
I found Miriana Fix’s article, “Bridge to Speculation,” very interesting. For me it highlighted the power of agency showing that it matters who tells the story. Her article also made me think about what is really going on with Sao Paolo’s planners. Is Sao Paolo simply not planning for low-income people who live in the favela’s because it is full of bad planners who could care less about the public’s welfare and only favor the rich? Is it that planners are pushing projects based on political agendas that they have no means of influencing even if they disagree with the direction? Or is it a little bit of both? I would like to think that Sao Paolo is not full of bad planners, but even this is very arbitrary, my notion of bad might be very different from someone else’s notion of bad.
What puzzles me the most is how governments can completely ignore certain undesirable populations within their jurisdictions, as if ignoring them will make them go away. Continuing to ignore the poor and further marginalizing a subset of a country’s population is not an appropriate method to diminish poverty and it can also be argues that it negatively affects the middle and upper class. Governments are very vain. They want to be able to show-off spectacular cityscapes and at the same time pretend that the poverty that hovers over them will disappear with the trickle down effects of city beautification projects like the cable-stayed bridge over the Pinheiros River in Sao Paolo. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case in the real world.
I am also deeply puzzled by the issue of what planners should do when larger political agendas are in direct contradiction to their ideologies and pareto optimal solutions. To be fair, this problem is not unique to Sao Paolo it appears in cities over and over in many different forms. Throwing in the towel is not an option. Like entrepreneurs, planners need to be idealistic, innovative and believe that we can make a difference in the constant uphill battle between social equity and market inequality.
This course offered a robust survey of the different elements and politics planners have to deal with around the world. Every week it made me think about who planners plan for? And why some people are ignored in the planning process. I think this course could better prepare planners for international and national practice by including more material about the planning infrastructure and framework in place in different countries. Exposure to the rules of the game and will help us better understand why certain projects and policies happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment