Monday, August 4, 2008
A study tour of Seattle, Portland and Vancouver
On Wednesday August 6th Keith Hall CEO of the NZPI will present the study tour findings to a group of students at the University of Auckland.
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That was a great lecture. In my opinion, transport plays an important role in planning.
ReplyDeleteI agree, a fantastic lecture. I found Portland to be fascinating and would love to pay a visit there some day to check out the planning system. The American Planning System seems to be quite complex and in some cases does not allow planners at the local level to make decisions. Further to this, it was a common theme that the local community in Vancouver, Seattle and Portland all played a large role in planning.... something which we seem to lack in New Zealand. I wish we could say "no more highways"... it would get us far
ReplyDeleteI missed the lecture but have been to all those 3 cities and found them great to move around. I particularly liked Seattle where I had the fairly rare chance to hang out with indigenous americans from the coastal area. I even went to a pow wow. That aspect of the pacific northwest is great, but not particularly visible or present in everyday life - I wonder whet their involvement is in planning?
ReplyDeleteKathy, architecture tutor
Hello to Marilyn in Scotland. It was fund having you in the session this morning by video.
ReplyDeleteMarilyn, it was nice to hear your presentation about the American planning system. A bit of a different presentation to what we had last session where Keith went into quite a bit of detail about the structure and politics of planning in the States. From what I have seen of the States, everything seems to be quite controlled and orderly - much like NZ I guess. My other impression was that it is BIG! The buildings, the infrastructure - everything is large scale. Your video also made me miss you as our lecturer over here in NZ!
ReplyDeleteIndeed, that's nice to see Marilyn's presentation again.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, the Scale of American economy, high level of technology, very different creativity and determination of making good stuff are reasons that the States have large scale of infrastructure.
NZ really needs some of them.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the presentation. In response to Whitney, I think that planners do have as much discretion to make local decisions as they do here. There is a greater tie to local policy, but planners are generally in greater control over their local policy. Politics play a greater role, but planners often have more direct relationships at the political level. In response to Frisk, there is probably not enough participation by indigenous populations in local planning. However, Seattle's regional council does specifically include representatives from several tribal nations on its governing board. Indigenous involvement is complicated by the lack of state and local relationships with indigenous populations (the legal relationships of registered tribes are directly with the federal government and "theoretically co-equal" to state authority). The best place to see this at work is New Mexico (and also Colorado and Arizona to a lesser extent) where day-to-day planning really is affected by indigenous populations. Santa Fe, for example, is almost completely landlocked by tribal lands, so planning issues become quite complex (it would be easy if the tribal lands were simply remaining undeveloped to form a growth boundary, but the tribes are free to ignore local and state regulatory planning and development frameworks when developing their own lands).
ReplyDeleteCorrection... I meant that "there is a greater tie to local politics..." (not necessarily policy).
ReplyDelete