masterplanning

Masterplanning has its roots in early historical settlements. However, its modern incarnation can be traced to the 19th century, when the predominance of urban populations led to a number of proposed utopias – the Metropolitan City (Haussman and Nash), the Garden City (Howard and Wright); the Industrial City (Tony Garnier) – and finally to International Modernism (Le Corbusier) in the early part of the 20th Century. Each proposal conceptualized the city as a product of functionality, zoning, movement and traffic. While Haussman possessed the authority and power to reshape Paris, other pioneers were often unable to realize their schemes.

In the decades following World War II, masterplans became one of the main tools of reconstruction and planning. They were usually highly prescriptive with detailed land uses and an outlook much wider than the architecture of individual buildings or districts. Plans could include huge areas of cities or establish complete towns isolated into separate blocks or cells.

In the 1980’s, masterplans began to take the form of detailed, three-dimensional illustrations. Prepared for sites perceived as run down and dilapidated, the renderings’ attractive neighborhood visions helped generate funds by means of sales or leases on each of the proposed buildings. With this graphic tool, architects increasingly began to include “masterplanner” in their title and to compete with planners for claim to urban design. Yet, as their primary representational technique moved away from conventional architectural drawings and toward artistic impressionism, their design decisions continued to revolve around the plan as a two dimensional pattern.

Currently, conventional master plans operate as top down urban management and as property-guided urban regeneration. They derive public space from interstices of the private sector. This defining characteristic can erase fine-grained structures and interconnected activities, replacing them with a coarse grain of static disposition. Such schemes tend to be deterministic, inflexible, and conceived as products rather than processes. As products, they require completion to be effective and the more detail they include, the more rigid they become.