Urban Planning, IDEO Style

"Unlike most urban planners (a term IDEO resists), not only does IDEO avoid the appearance of parachuting in with a vision, but their success -- and billings -- isn't measured by the place that's eventually built, or even if anything ever gets built at all. The firm deliberately dodges all the "technical" parts of urban planning: arranging infrastructure, determining financing, and navigating the public process. Instead it practices urban planning as branding: define the spirit of a place and then let others articulate that spirit -- whether in bricks, mortar, tax breaks, or billboards. IDEO claims accountability only for its ideas...

It's not clear that works, mostly because it's too early to tell -- but also because the team at IDEO is messing with the DNA of the planning process. They're changing it from a concrete process of infrastructure and building to an imagined one of narrative and identity; they're exchanging the idea of a place for place itself...

...Alexander Garvin, Yale planning professor and former lead planner of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, offers a more direct assessment: 'Planning is not just about an image, it is about a place to live.'...

...[W]hat is clear is that the deftness of IDEO's communication illuminates how inadequately urban planners typically convey their ideas."