Over the next ten days you can have a say on the future of the former Fort Ord. The Fort Ord Reuse Authority has organized a series of public design workshops that will define guidelines for all new projects on the former fort – not for those already approved. I recently spoke with Peter Katz who is author of the book The New Urbanism and is on the consulting team that will help develop the urban design guidelines with the community. He says the places people like most are mixed use environments.
Peter Katz: They’re places where lots of different things are happening. Typically in fairly close proximity: places to live, work, recreate, shop and the more opportunity for these different activities to bump up against each other the better, and it’s really the job of urban designers is to figure out how that bumping up can happen in a good way rather than a negative way.
That’s really the skill, and the genius of the team that will be here. And the public of course plays a critical role. The fact that it happens in public view where every drawing, every important document from the workshop is going to be created in full view of the public where any member of the public can interact talk to the design team, express their ideas and ultimately that knowledge bubbles up through the work that’s created.
Krista Almanzan: Urban Design Guidelines –it may sound dry sound dry but it’s something that can really have a profound impact on people’s lives…
PK: Well it will be shaping lives for decades, for centuries. It’s an important thing to be involved in. As to whether an individual citizen might feel the call to come out and attend and mix and mingle with the team, and understand what we’re doing and communicate their thoughts, it’s their personal decision. There’s some people that just like these kinds of activities, but we want everybody. There’s always what we call the usual suspects who attend every planning meeting, who seem to have infinite amounts of time to research issues in detail. They’re great; we want them, but we want the broadest cross section we can get. We want kids, we want older folks.
We get our ideas from the most unlikely places, and at the end of the day, citizens really are the experts on the places that they live. There’s things we’re never going to know about this region until people tell us but by the same token, the average citizen hasn’t laid out three or four or ten or fifteen towns before and the team coming to Monterey has that expertise.
KA: Does Fort Ord present a challenge in a way that you have areas that have been preserved, areas that are already rebuilt, areas that have been slated for development have approved plans, but haven’t been built, and then, the area where these Urban Design Guidelines are really going to have an impact. Is that a challenge for creating something cohesive?
PK: There always in a challenge dealing with existing conditions, dealing with the odd juxtapositions that have come up over time, particularly with the military who had very specific reasons for laying things out in certain ways, but that’s also what gives a place it’s character.
You know, the old expression “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. It took centuries and it’s the layering of one use on top of another. One set of buildings that might have been really great and have stuck around for 2000 years, and another group of buildings of which six out of ten have been destroyed, but there’s this kind of accretion that happens in urban places that gives a wonderful character to where we live us the kind of character to where we live and the memorable qualities.
Peter Katz will be speaking at an Educational Forum today (February 2nd) beginning at 1:00pm at Carpenters Union Hall, 910 2nd Avenue, Marina. The first design workshop is tonight from 6:00 to 9:00pm also at Carpenters Union Hall.
