The California-based design company's "Smart Space" practice takes on the staid world of infrastructure, zoning and public process.
"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."
Thanks to Jim Barrows
FULL STORY: IDEO's Urban Pre-Planning
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