Q1 :: scale + grit

I Found this well-written argument on archrecord.com.  

It's always an unquestioned premise that cities have to accommodate large-scale development projects, and yet there is always an undercurrent of concern that the need to contain the scale of 'large scale' sufficiently that they don't lose their soul.

It's a tender balance, made more difficult because the sites and investments are too large to permit the city to be shaped by its own evolution. The use of large-scale development techniques favored by private-sector developers and bankers is now so ingrained in our culture that we have lost track of the fact that this is utterly at odds with the way cities organically develop from public infrastructure and incremental, lot-by-lot development.

Cities also have to adjust to the mores of each successive generation. Hardworking blue-collar places like San Francisco (or Brooklyn) became havens for messy vitality precisely because they had lost their mainstream economies and there was thus a vacuum to be filled. But you can't sustain that vacuum artificially; the city sucks up energy and comes back to life, and since the city sustains itself on that economic energy it will not, as an organism, be easily prevented from doing so.

That creative period of economic vacuum can't be bottled up and sustained, like an interesting artifact found when the demolition crews arrived. To plan their destinies more successfully, cities need to reduce the size of each incremental input, based upon a clear, simple, and publicly-owned plan of development and smaller, simpler tasks for the individual developers. 

Then we won't have to worry about bottling a few gallons of "artistic temperament" to scatter like a perfume through lifeless new urban spaces.

- someguy (screen name), ArchRecord.com, message board re: SF Pier 70 development.