“The Big Picture” by Greg Foster-Rice compares the 1969 Plan for New York, the only comprehensive urban plan ever written by the city, to the current state of planning here. The Plan was never enacted in law and was more or less officially abandoned before it was five years old. The question that comes to my mind is not whether NYC will ever have a real plan – I suspect it will not – but whether that’s even a desirable goal.
Planning here has always preceded project by project. Some of the projects have been related to one another: the 1910s “dual contacts” with two companies to simultaneous expand the IRT subway and construct the BMT subway comes to mind, as does the web of controlled-access highways constructed under Robert Moses’s control from the 1930s through the 1960s. Many of the projects have been one-offs, including the Commissioners’ Plan* (that created the number street grid), Central Park, the Croton water system, the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels, and so on. Many of the projects were planned after a crisis was imminent or already in progress: the city was desperately short of clean water before the Croton system opened, and the construction of tall buildings was creating lightless alley-width canyons before the 1916 zoning plan was put in place.
Zoning is the most obvious place where NYC has opted for comprehensive planning. Both the 1916 law and its 1960 replacement cover the entire city and account for the differing needs of different areas. That last point is the reason that comprehensive planning is so difficult here: the city is huge and various enormously in character from one neighborhood to another.
There is an unofficial plan**. The Regional Plan Association has created four plans for New York dating back to the 1920s. They are detailed, logical, and fascinating reading. And, of course, they have never been enacted, although some of their many recommendations have been built. One could argue that the presence of the non-profit RPA has reduced the urgency for the city to look at comprehensive planning: someone else is doing it, and the city government can pick and choose which portions to pay attention to.
The recent OneNYC set of documents from the government are more goals than detailed strategies, which brings the discussion full circle to the 1969 Plan, since that prioritization of stating goals over providing detailed methods of attaining them was a prime criticism of that document. And given our history of proceeding piecemeal, maybe a set of goals is what’s needed: let the next group of people in office figure out which goal they want to tackle and worry about the ones you want. That laissez-faire approach is a bit hard for me and I suspect harder for most architects and planners, since we’re all trained to solve problems. We want to plan solutions and then build them. But maybe it’s okay ifs we don’t.
* In 1811, the commissioners couldn’t imagine a need for streets above 155th. The map above, from 1870, shows the added street plan north from 155th to Spuyten Duyvil.
** I’m deliberately excluding Delirious New York. Rem Koolhaas’s book advertises itself as a manifesto, and even that may imply more organization than is present in it. It’s a fascinating book, but it is not a plan.
