The idea of urban planning never interested me much until I happened to meet William H. Whyte, the author of the best-selling classic study of corporate behavior, The Organization Man.
To my surprise, he wasn‘t very interested in corporate culture anymore. What he was interested in was how to make cities livable, and he thought small parks and green spaces were a big part of the answer. This was in the early 1980s, and New York City had just put him in charge of developing mini-parks.
What we talked about in the two hours I spent with him changed the way I have looked at cities forever. Laurie Volk, who is interested in revitalizing urban living spaces, is continuing that tradition. Her firm wrote a master plan for a development in Ada, not far from Grand Rapids, and has been consulting with Michigan communities from Howell to Dearborn to Warren and Monroe.
Yet what makes me uneasy is my fear that to undertake urban planning for some small suburb is to largely deny a greater reality.
New York is a city-state larger and wealthier than some countries. By contrast, Ada, Michigan is a small, largely self-contained township with a per capita income of about $40,000 a year.
They can both pretty much pretend to exist on their own. Yet many of the other suburbs Zimmerman/Volk Associates are looking at are just that -- suburbs. Communities that you really can’t understand except as part of a whole. They aren’t really cities, except politically. They are instead creations of the urban sprawl that has been pushing out from Detroit for half a century now.
Warren would not exist without the city of Detroit, nor would Sterling Heights or Wixom. Auburn Hills is a combination of bedroom community and industrial park for both Pontiac and Detroit.
These communities could certainly benefit from experts who can tell them just where to put a small park or a bit of green space.
Yet what is really needed is some kind of master urban development plan for the entire metropolitan area. This would be written and developed by somebody who sees the area as a whole.
Someone, that is, who knows that we are a region, not merely a bunch of places trying to selfishly ignore the fact that everyone in any metropolitan area is in this together.
Running any kind of a regional master plan would take metropolitan government at some level, or at least close coordination and cooperation by the commissioners of at least three counties.
Yet we need this desperately.
Birmingham will never live up to its full potential as long as slums that look like something out of central America exist within ten miles of its elegant townhouses and bistros.
No man is an island entire of itself, John Donne famously said. No community in Michigan is either, even Mackinac Island. We’re in this together, and ignoring that fact increasingly puts all of us in peril.
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