The Public Policy - City Design Disconnect

 “Long Island Republican warns of 'suburban uprising' over New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's plan to rezone land to allow greater density for affordable housing” – Headline quote from: Business Insider

Greater density generally involves taller buildings and increased floor quantity to shelter larger populations on the same land area. This is the assumption I’ve made from the headline I quoted above. I’ve also assumed that the proposal threatens the visual, social, psychological, environmental, and economic compatibility of the neighborhood, and that the threat is symbolized by the massing contrast involved. Aesthetics and composition are weak arguments. Social and psychological arguments are fraught with claims of prejudice. Environmental and economic arguments suffer from their dependence on opinion, so the debate often surrounds the shadows that will be cast and the scope of population and traffic volume that will be introduced. The increased demand on storm sewer capacity is often overlooked because the impervious cover capacity percentage of the system has not been recorded. The debate becomes a battle over isolated technical detail because the proposal has no strategic design objective based on knowledge that is larger than the proposal itself; and no adequate leadership language based on knowledge that can repeat success and avoid failure. The results have been symbolized by decline and sprawl.

I have no doubt that the proposal mentioned will produce unanticipated change in the surrounding area over time. I also doubt that there will be a language and plan that can lead others to an objective that is greater than the immediate, isolated proposal. The motivation has always been expediency that attempts to resolve an immediate problem without the tools, data, knowledge, and language needed for the leadership required over time.

Floor quantity is one of a number of design specification topics that must be correlated on individual properties to form a shelter pattern referred to as massing composition. The problem is that there has been no language capable of producing the correlation required over large areas subject to independent motivation and discretion. Successful results remain undocumented, so we extol site plan and building appearance without understanding the mathematical decisions beneath the success and failure we observe as symptoms of health and disease. These are the decisions that can be used to prescribe and lead without plagiarism of appearance. A host of technical decisions follow.

I won’t belabor the point because I have written extensively about the topic of urban design documentation, evaluation, knowledge accumulation, and leadership definition with an improved classification, measurement, prediction, and leadership language. I’ll simply close at this point in an attempt to be brief.

Walter M. Hosack: February, 2023