WHY DON'T WE JUST BET ON EMERGENCE?

I set a lament about the demise of electric traction in Milwaukee against a background of Technocratic Overreach.

After the War, the promise of Route 66 or the perpetual fun side of high school the Beach Boys were singing about made lamentations about trains being discontinued or streetcars replaced by buses so last year, to use a locution not yet in common parlance. And, from sixty years ago, the congestion to come on the expressways was something to be fixed by smart roads, and the possibility that all that public money spent on building the road network would ineluctably lead to additional public money being spent on a "wonderful transition" to something not a public road network, and sold under the rubric of building back better would likely have been laughed off as delusions.

That lament concluded, "Who knows, preservation railways might provide object lessons identifying all manner of policy failures, from the Public Utility Holding Company Act to the subsidization of excessively zoned planned use developments and the roads the localities lack the means to fix."

Strong Towns contributor Edwin Erfurt contemplates the parking crater that is Kansas City and hopes to salvage one technocratic error by doing more technocracy:  "A Massive Top-Down Plan To Fix a Massive Top-Down Mistake."

The Kansas City loop is a massive top-down project that was planned and built without any of the usual constraints of funding or property ownership—both cast aside in the name of progress and efficiency—resulting in a city being completely reshaped. What would it look like if this experiment was allowed to continue or used as a method of construction to build a new city?

In other words, if we operated in the highway-building mentality of no constraints, but with a modern awareness of the destructive nature of this development pattern, what could we do? If we just wanted to fix the problems caused by our last unconstrained top-down experiment with another unconstrained top-down experiment, what would that look like on the ground?

For the sake of argument, I want to explore if a plan could be developed using the same unconstrained planning approach that has been utilized by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The new master planner for this project would use all the tools of the FHWA, such as urban renewal to fight blight and encourage economic development. Less desirable uses of land, like surface parking lots, could be relocated and more productive uses could be proposed with the purpose of maximizing redevelopment potential and increasing overall efficiency. The plan would have very little environmental impact, and therefore would be exempt from environmental constraints, because all of the redevelopment would occur within the existing disturbed areas of downtown. The plan would likewise have no fiscal constraints, thanks to access to bonds and grants, and because of the promised projection of increased development. All of these tools would work together through a completely unconstrained plan to transform the downtown.

On screen, it looks promising: first push all the parking craters to the periphery, then, by some miracle, infill development happens. I think Mr Erfurt recognised he was being outrageous to make a point.

This fictitious master plan that promises to attract private investment and redevelopment is based on all the false promises and assumptions presented 50 years ago to justify the urban renewal policies used to construct the loop. Still today, and after seeing the built results of these projects, planners adopt these policies believing that they will yield a different result. As with the original highway plans of the Kansas City Loop, the plans were developed without fiscal constraint, which has resulted in the displacement of people and buildings. The promises of prosperity in these projects have never emerged, but the damage is evident.

I have great hope and an optimistic outlook for the future of Kansas City. Each of these surface parking lots is an opportunity site for bottom-up redevelopment that can adapt and react to the needs of the citizens of Kansas City. This type of redevelopment will not come from the top. Instead, gradual and sustainable redevelopment and investment will emerge through the power of hundreds of little bets, where citizens take small steps to improve their community and lives.

We have the Jarrett regency claiming that its version of technocracy will get it right this time. It won't.  In Milwaukee, both of the steam railroads' classic brick stations had to go, to provide space for expressway construction that either never happened or was later torn down to provide for the Deer District or might be torn down the better to provide pedestrian space from the Deer District clear to the Third Ward and Walkers Point.

Perhaps the best urban renewal policy, and the best urban transportation policy, is for the government to go away.