Tridib Banerjee

Creating Elder-Friendly Communities: Preparations for an Aging Society

Summary Because many communities where older people live were not designed for their needs, older residents may require support to remain in the least restrictive environment. ‘Age-prepared communities’ utilize community planning and advocacy to foster aging in place. ‘Elder-friendly communities’ are places that actively involve, value, and support older adults, both active and frail, with infrastructure and services that effectively accommodate their changing needs. This paper presents an analysis of the literature and results of a Delphi study identifying the most important characteristics of an elder-friendly community: accessible and affordable transportation, housing, health care, safety, and community involvement opportunities. We also highlight innovative programs and identify how social workers can be instrumental in developing elder-friendly communities.

The Negotiated Plaza: Design and Development of Corporate Open Space in Downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco

The development of downtown public space has been increasingly defined by agreements negotiated between the public and private sectors. In the last decades the majority of downtown public space has occurred in the form of urban plazas, built as integral parts of privately owned office and retail complexes. In this paper we document the private production of public open space in the downtown areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco—two cities that have used distinctively different policy approaches in forming public-private partnerships. We examine how the process of public open space creation is affected by the culture of planning and development, and discuss similarities and differences in the imagery and form of plazas in the two cities. It is found that urban plazas are the reflection of a market-driven urbanism. As such they are quite homoge neous in their form despite differences in the planning style and development process encountered in the two California cities.

Environmental Design in the Developing World: Some Thoughts on Design Education

Disaffected by the quality of modernizing environments, students from the developing world come to the West, desirous of an education that will show them how to design and plan environments that best satisfy local needs But, unfortunately, conventional design training in the U S often amounts to a socialization to professional world views and values of the Western world Little relevance is offerred, therefore, in approaching the staggering environmental problems of most Third World countries which continue to experience polarized development and explosive urban growth. It is argued in this paper that there is a serious need to re-think the nature of education for Third World designers who come to the West for advanced professional training In developing this argument, some of the typical concerns of Third World environmental design are discussed Preliminary ideas about how the design curriculum can be reoriented to be more responsive to the needs of foreign students are also presented

Walking to School The Experience of Children in Inner City Los Angeles and Implications for Policy

Neighborhoods walkability has become an important public health concern. The child’s-eye view of safe and walkable environments is typically remiss from the literature. Particularly the experience of inner city kids, very different from that of suburban neighborhoods, remains unreported. The study reported here offers new insights based on the walking to school experience reported by the children of inner city neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Interviews with fifth-graders from five grade schools suggest that the dangers in their social milieu are a much greater concern for them than the physical milieu, which the walkability research typically emphasizes. The findings necessitate new policies.

Response to “Commentary: Is Urban Design Still Urban Planning?”: Whither Urban Design? Inside or Outside Planning?

In his commentary, Michael Gunder (2011) worries that urban design is slowly slipping away from urban planning. His worry, however, is not one of narrow professional parochialism. Rather his concern is that the contemporary urban design outcome mainly has come to serve the interests of the private sector and corporate capital, but not the larger public interest, welfare, or good. He sees this outcome as a result of urban design not having the oversight of planning. Troubled by this trend, he argues that it should be a matter of intellectual and professional concern, and that urban planning should reassert its claim on urban design. He further asserts that if urban design is securely nested within planning, this would not happen as planning’s broader imperatives for equity, justice, and sustainability will prevail over investment and profit-driven directives of contemporary urban design. It is hard to disagree with Gunder’s observation about contemporary urban design outcome. Recent urban transformations in the West and emerging economies have come to represent a “privatopia” (cf. McKenzie 1994) of gated communities, shopping malls, entertainment complexes, hotels, luxury housing and office towers, and the like. These projects are often designed by star architects and financed mainly by global capital. These places are not very democratic and access is controlled, and the abject, the “unholy and the unwashed” (see Lofland 1973) are systematically excluded. Very little of this outcome reflects grassroots initiatives or community involvement. In fact in many instances they are leading to what can be defined as the “enclosure of the common,” indicated by Lee and Webster (2006) as an efficient outcome in urban service provision. The downside of “privatopia” as some observers point out is social exclusion, and perhaps economic and racial segregation (McKenzie 1994; Madanipour 2011). If conducted under the tutelage of urban planning, these socially edited products of contemporary urban design will not be possible, Gunder believes, because urban designers will be required to attend to the larger public purpose and collective welfare and to address issues of sustainability, spatial inequities, and distributive justice. Indeed these public imperatives of urban design should lead to open, inclusive, and just cities as emphasized in the writings of Sennett (1970), Sandercock (1997), and Fainstein (2010). We may all agree with this scenario and be equally troubled by the trend as Gunder. But his premise that this trend results from urban planning’s loss of control over urban design, or by implication that redemption will come only if urban design could be declared and claimed as a subset of urban planning, remains less than compelling. There are at least three reasons for this misgiving. These have to do with the scope of practice of urban design, the professions involved in that practice, and the nature of the global economy and its effect on local urban transformations. First, let us consider the terms field, practice, and profession. Field creates knowledge, offers critical reflections, and informs practice. Practice delivers the products and services that improve collective well-being. And the profession oversees practice and practitioners and promotes their authority, ethos, and legitimacy. In his arguments about urban design and urban planning, Gunder seems to conflate these terms. But if we treat them as separate constructs, some of the distinctions between urban design and planning become quite clear. Consider the term field: no one will question that planning has established itself as a field, albeit an eclectic one, drawing from intellectual traditions primarily of the social sciences but also law and environmental sciences. Similarly, urban design has become intellectually endowed with contributions from not just planning and social sciences but also the humanities, critical studies, design arts, and the like. In our introduction to a recently edited Companion to Urban Design, we have argued that urban design also has achieved the status of a field (Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris 2011). To be sure, there is some overlap between these two fields, but generally their coverage is quite different. Then consider the term profession, where planning has a huge advantage over urban design. As it has been widely acknowledged, including Gunder in his commentary, urban design has failed to emerge as a profession. But urban

Flânerie between Net and Place Promises and Possibilities for Participation in Planning

The information and communication technology (or ICT) revolution adds new possibilities for providing information about places and communities that may be used in planning processes. In this article we introduce the practice of flânerie in the physical and virtual space as a method to produce representative images of contemporary social life. We suggest how planning may be instrumental in shaping a public good alternative in this emerging hybrid social space, where the practice of flânerie can stimulate engagement in deliberative planning practices. Finally, we discuss some of the trade-offs and design choices for eliciting information from citizens about their localities to understand how future development may lead to qualitative changes in community life.

Book Review: Urban Planning/My Way: From Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to Lower Manhattan and Beyond

Allen, Judith, James Barlow, Jesús Leal, Thomas Maloutas, and Liliana Padovani. 2004. Housing and welfare in southern Europe. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Eurostat. 2005. Statistics in focus: Main results from the EU Labour Force Survey. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission. International Centre for Migration Policy Development. 2003. Migrants, minorities and employment: Exclusion, discrimination and anti-discrimination in 15 member states of the European Union. Vienna, Austria: European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia. Wilcox, S. 2002. UK housing review 2002/2003. York, UK: Joseph Rowntree.

Third World City Design: Values, Models and Education

The community of academics and professionals interested in Third World development and planning consists of three types of people: those who are “Westerners” by birth and training, who, while based in the West, are interested in the problems of developing countries; those who are “Third Worlders” by birth (with training from home countries or abroad) and have remained in their native settings to pursue a career in planning and development; and the Third World expatriates with advanced training in the West who have chosen a Western “base” for career development, but who remain vitally interested in the problems of the developing countries.

The Neighborhood Unit as a Design Paradigm

In this chapter we review the thinking about the neighborhood unit paradigm. Although it is seemingly an oft-told tale among environmental designers, we submit that their story of the neighborhood unit is incomplete, and that frequently they are ignorant of some important intellectual underpinnings of the concept that better explain its configuration. Rather than being a physical design created to accomplish some social ends arrived at de novo, the neighborhood unit is actually the three-dimensional expression of some underlying cultural and intellectual beliefs that pervaded American reformist thinking at the turn of the century. Moreover, it is also the most careful summation and delineation extant of more ad hoc design practices that have been carried on for thousands of years, for although the precise nature and purpose of the neighborhood unit well illustrates the American penchant for intellectual pragmatism, the roots of the paradigm can be traced back in history to the earliest civilizations. Furthermore, the concept of the neighborhood unit, in addition to nicely capturing some prevalent strains in American thought, has also captured the endorsement of most modern-day societies, for the concept is now employed throughout the world.

Mimicry in design: the urban form of development

Abstract This paper investigates the diffusion of Western-like built environments in rapidly urbanizing regions. It draws from Marshall Berman’s seminal treatise on modernity, which uses Goethe’s Faust as a metaphor. In the Chinese context, Berman’s analogy understands Faust as the consumer who craves the Western city. A further structural approach is suggested, in which Faust is also the State that encourages mimicry by pursuing fast development and creating artificial market dynamics. The Faustian metaphor thus explains the spread of simulacrascapes, which limits local inventiveness, participation and expertise. The conclusions of this paper recommend an endogenous approach to the design of urban form.