For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
Citiwire.net
How does a metropolitan region project – and then plan – for its future? How was it done in the 20th century? And what’s new for the 21st?
I have a simple answer. For 20th, the word was infrastructure. For the 21st, it needs to be innovation.
That’s why the Regional Plan Association, where I work, decided to focus its 20th Annual Regional Assembly this month on new technologies that are radically more efficient, and promise significant cost-savings for cash-starved regional systems.
Our historic concentration, including three landmark regional plans – in 1929, 1969 and 1996 – focused on hard infrastructure such as transit lines, electricity, water supply, and especially early in the century, on accommodating automobiles. (Our 1929 document, for example, proposed 2,500 miles of limited access highways and included a plan for Radburn, N.J., entitled “New Town for the Motor Age.”) Later we took a different tack, urging as early as 1969 reserving several Manhattan streets for pedestrians and transit, and in 1996 a four-borough Second Avenue Subway.