The recent release of the Regional Plan Association’s (“RPA”) Fourth Regional Plan (http://fourthplan.org/; the executive summary is at: http://library.rpa.org/pdf/RPA-4RP-Executive-Summary.pdf) (the “Plan”) got me to thinking about the relationship between placemaking and area planning. Places and pedestrians are well-integrated into the Plan: its recommendation 23 (of 61 states): “On city streets, prioritize people over cars.” Arguably recommendations number 57 (“Remake underutilized auto-dependent landscapes”) and 61 (“Expand and improve public space in the urban core.”) also have placemaking casts to them. There is even a page on the Plan’s website for “Places” (http://fourthplan.org/places). This is an a signal of how much placemaking practice has worked its way into planning culture, and there is no doubt that this is a very good thing.

But the nature of regional planning is decidedly top-down and large-scale – particularly when it comes to talking about expanding and/or upgrading the tri-sate transportation infrastructure – and it puzzled me as to how people-oriented thinking about urban revitalization fits in to creating a big scale, long-term vision for the area. Continue reading →