The new challenges for urban planners
In a talk at MIT on Tuesday, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan called for a new wave of creative urban planning to help cities evolve during a time of economic hardship. “The role of the urban planner today is more important than it was 25 or 50 or 80 years ago,” Donovan said. In his remarks, Donovan outlined his reasons for this claim, citing our era’s fiscal troubles, political pressures and environmental changes. For one thing, he suggested, the tight finances of recent years could well extend indefinitely into the future, meaning that planners and designers may often have to accomplish more with less. “How do we plan in an age of austerity?” Donovan asked. At bottom, he suggested, planners will have to make especially sharp appraisals of the long-term value of their work. In Boston, he said, the “Big Dig” — a massive infrastructure project that...