Scott Page

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font size="3"><font face="Times New Roman">Most people use the Summer months to re-connect with pastimes forgotten during winter months.<span> </span>It is this time of the year that sales soar both at the box office and in bookstores.<span> </span>Most normal people I know take trashy novels with them to the beach or submerge themselves in an entire season of 24 (which thanks to Netflix can be accomplished in a few intense evenings).<span> </span>I tend to lean toward the other extreme (although I have indulged in bad TV from time to time).<span> </span>My wife calls me a design geek because my bedside table is always full of design magazines, books and theory.</font></font></p>

<p><span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana">I’m not basing this quick observation on any specific historical research or book, so bear with me.<span> </span>Cities grow and shrink; in effect they change rapidly (although sometimes it doesn’t seem rapidly enough and at other times all too rapidly).<span> </span>Where we operate in that continuum I think shapes much of how we see our role as professionals.<span> </span>Planning to address either shrinking cities or growing ones can seem, at times, like totally different professions.<span> </span>A colleague of mine remarked that planning for shrinking cities is definitely a niche market.<span> </span>With so much discussion surrounding growth and how we grow, there is much less dialog that defines the opposite.<span> </sp

<p><span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana">I would like to think that the overwhelming response to the question posed in the title would be a resounding, &quot;No!&quot;  I never gave the issue much thought before last week because frankly, I didn&#39;t really need to.  Working in a city like Philadelphia where the overwhelming percentage of proposed projects requires a zoning variance, we&#39;ve trained ourselves to work within an imperfect system and make the best of what&#39;s at hand.  (It should be noted that Philadelphia is about to embark upon a process to re-vamp the zoning code, but that is for another post in the future).  More importantly, the issues faced by some neighborhoods go a lot deeper than zoning.  So why this post?</span></p>

<p>This post is a few weeks after the fact but the recent APA conference only solidified my resolution to say something.  In early April <a href="http://www.california-architects.com/index.php?seite=ca_profile_architekten_detail_us&amp;system_id=14396">Teddy Cruz</a> gave a lecture here in Philly at the School of Design.  For those of you not familiar with his work, he has a unique and thoughtful perspective on the relationships between culture, planning and design.  </p>

<p>I&#39;m glad this blog to date has provided fertile ground both to challenge planning as a profession as well as to compliment planning when it happens to do something worthy.  In this spirit, I&#39;d like to irritate many of my colleagues out there and definitively say that starchitects are not the problem.  </p><p>I wish I could play the role of <a href="http://newstandardnews.net/content/fourthcolumn/?itemid=4244">Stephen Colbert</a> and ridiculously declare the end to this debate, but alas, I do not have the television airtime (or wit) to make this point as effectively as I would like.  This forum will have to do.</p>