Scotland's Planning System Changes Leave Out Public

Yes, that pesky meddling public...

I worked as a planner at a Louisiana Speaks storefront office in SW Louisiana last winter and spring, where daily interaction with local residents was central to our work. As it turned out, local residents and officials were quite passionate about some of their Recovery Projects, so consequently, on their behalf, I assured local folks in my group that I would follow up and keep them informed on the fate of some these projects.

Calthorpe, among others, was hired to carry this planning effort to the next stage, which was to create a plan for regional recovery, incorporating the stated preferences from citizens in the 19 Parishes affected. Despite several attempts to get information from Calthorpe's office in Berkeley, CA, regarding the fate of specific projects in (my) Parish, no information has been forthcoming. Moreover, nobody back in the Parish, so far as I am aware, was ever contacted during the course of this second stage planning effort, which, quite frankly, now in retrospect, just seemed to be a nice piece of Government Pork handed out to well-connected consultants. So far 14 months after the Hurricanes... millions of $$$ for consultants; almost nothing for local citizens (as of last week, out of more than 70,000 destroyed homes in SE Louisiana where claims had been filed, exactly 22 owners (yes, that's 22) have received payment from the FEMA/Road Home program, designed to help folks rebuild their homes or to buy new ones, funded with more than $4 Billion of your (mostly middle-class taxpayers') money (these figures according to New Orleans Times-Picayune).

Regarding Calthorpe and Duany, I think that they sometimes do some nice urban design work, though Duany's designs, particularly, are getting a bit repetitive with yet another "Playa Vista," as you say, this time for cold and bleak northern Scotland. They are both architects, however, and perhaps see the world the way architects do, which is to say that society's problems can be solved simply with the right architecture and urban design. Moreover, designers, particularly big-ego designers, typically don't value the opinion of others when it comes to design matters. They don't... really!

So, despite all the talk about "design charettes" and "public input", designers like Calthorpe and Duany come to public meetings with their canned road show (like the one in Lake Charles) and their minds made up. There may be some audience give and take during the road show presentation, with perhaps one of the consultants' flunkies duly writing down what all the local yokels have to say, but at best this will find itself in an appendix of whatever planning document the consultants are getting paid to produce. Indeed, no room for a meddling public.