A planet of cities planning for growth is likely to be a messy business – a jostle of markets and government, informal settlement and infrastructure. The future of megacities of the developing world, in particular, was on my mind after visits to two museums in New York recently. First, there is the abject lesson of how not to accommodate a society’s population – the exhibit
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at the Museum of Modern Art, where teams of architects, economists, and artists re-imagined five areas devastated by the 2008 housing crisis. The hotspots in New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, southern California and Oregon are all primarily suburban environments, though not as far-flung as the so-called zombie subdivisions miles from anywhere. The ideas in the exhibit prompted much commentary about how realistic they were, from
James Russell,
Blair Kamin,
Diana Lind,
Bryan Bell and my colleague
Sarah Goodyear. Members of the team that re-imagined a factory site in Cicero, Illinois, Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay, penned a
New York Times op-ed calling for a fresh design and policy approach to housing for the 21st century. Curator Barry Bergdoll said the proposals were meant to be "provocations." In a symposium on the exhibit earlier this month put on by the
Forum for Urban Design, MoMA, and the
Lincoln Institute (where, full disclosure and as you can see in my bio, I also work) a panel of experts doused the well-attended exhibit with more cold water, talking about zoning and changing demographics and NIMBYism - all the challenges of reinventing more dense and less car-dependent patterns. There was a sense that in all these areas, planners and the housing markets had somehow got it wrong. In the built environment, it is a singular engineering challenge to go back and try to re-stitch things back together and get it right.
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