Can Master Plans Seize the Future?

This is part of a series of articles exploring the question, who owns the city and what it takes to run it.

When I first came to the US and saw articles in planning magazines that showcased “planned communities” I wondered how communities could possibly not be planned. Soon I learned that the usual development and subdivision plans are not really masterplans and that to follow a "script" for something larger than a single development was usually the exception rather than the rule.

traditional street in master-planned community like Roland Park, Baltimore
(photo ArchPlan)

As a direct result of the lack of planning, American real estate, development, planning and design professionals alike now consider “place-making”, community, sprawl control, synergies between various developments, and systems thinking for networks of mobility, recreation or preservation as high priority topics. Citizens who suffer from traffic congestion, lack of parks, trails and open spaces and good access to services, add to the chorus of voices demanding "community" and excellence instead of the way too typical uncoordinated assortment of built stuff.

The question is, can masterplans be of help?

Typical Subdivision street (Lexington KY. Photo ArchPlan) 

Masterplans are by no means a recent invention. After all, our nation’s capital famously followed the grand plan of the Frenchman Pierre L’Enfant. Oglethorpe's Savannah, Ga masterplan with its public squares is part of any study book about planning. More recent examples of widely known new places developed from masterplans are Columbia, MD, Reston, Va or Stapleton, Co.

Established cities can benefit from masterplans as well. New York got its Battery Park masterplan and Baltimore one for the Inner Harbor and later, the same architects who designed Battery Park, Stan Eckstut, planned Harbor East for Baltimore. Washington, DC has a masterplan for the Anacostia area and the redevelopment of the Navy Yards.

L'Enfant masterplan for DC

Some masterplan stem from calamity. New Orleans practically suffocated under masterplans after Katrina, and New York City got a resiliency masterplan competition resulting in the the "Green U" plan after Hurricane Sandy. More often than not, though, rebuilding blindly follows the old patterns instead of a more rational approach.

Most frequently guided by masterplans may be colleges and universities, practically none grow without one. Lately new technology corporations such as Google joined that academic bandwagon and developed corporate campus masterplans as a branding strategy. Baltimore's Under Armour, with a forthcoming plan to be developed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is a local example.

So, we have a great history and excellent examples of the success of masterplans. Still, many cities and new towns continue uncoordinated growth or leave development to happenstance. So time and again we either don’t get masterplans where they would be urgently needed or we call something a masterplan that is nothing but a set of guiding principles, at best.  Some so-called masterplans are such a general assortment of motherhood and apple pie visions that they are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. Another problem is that development often doesn't follow a plan even when the guiding plan is good because it has no teeth or nobody has the courage to enforce it.

Traditional university campus plan (Notre Dame)

The question of how enforceable plans has been taken to the courts to determine if a masterplans can be made binding, how masterplans relate to comprehensive plans, and if such plans are nothing but illustrations.

The challenge facing masterplans may come less from the legalities of consistency doctrines, and more so from the pace of our fast moving time when the risk is great that plans become obsolete before they are completed. This has as much to do with rapid pace of market change, changes to value paradigms, the rapid succession of large property owners, bankruptcies, defaults, auctions, successions and mergers as it does with the extremely slow pace at which most plans are created.

Throughout my blog articles I have suggested masterplans on many occasions, scales and settings: even as large as the the full-scale “blueprint Baltimore” that should have guided the zoning reform but never materialized. I asked for an update of the Baltimore Middle Branch waterfront masterplan after a large industrial waterfront section went from a defaulting developer to prospering Under Armour creating a large change in circumstance since the last plan was completed. I asked for a Towson masterplan to guide the influx of a slew of large developments. I critiqued a masterplan for South Baltimore where powerful developers join a stream of casino money for community development, both intended to change the communities for good, but which are currently following a road map providing mostly generalities and little protections or specific guidance. In almost all of these cases the masterplan was to have a role in protecting public interest and ensuring balance with the private interest of developers. But masterplans can also provide assistance to developers by making potential development areas more predictable and by pulling in a larger number of potential investors into a setting with transparent outcomes.

Is such a belief in masterplans misguided, a relic of the past, or a sign of too much reliance in government? Instead of predictability and transparency, are those plans actually preventing nimble responses to rapidly changing conditions, absorbing resources that should be better spent on actual physical improvements instead of planning and consultants? Is "tactical urbanism" the right answer, i.e. spontaneous action with temporary experimental measures that allow rapid adjustment?

There can't be a glib or simple answer to these legitimate questions. Any answer would first have to explore a bit more what master-planning is and what it tries to achieve. To this end I dug up a

Under Armour Baltimore masterplan concept (Bohlin)

definition that I had written myself when asked to delineate urban design and master-planning, two terms closely interwoven. This is how I had defined it in cooperation with my colleagues on the national Knowledge Community of AIA for Regional and Urban Design:

Master planning is the creation of a framework in which development parcels, massing, heights, relationships of buildings, circulation, and streets are defined in enough detail to define predictable outcomes but with sufficient flexibility to allow various responses of actual developers and designers of which there may be several or many within one master plan area.

Typically, master-plans are part of a regulatory planning toolkit and are formally adopted as part of zoning, comprehensive plans, “small area plans” or PUDs. Strategic plans of private entities or institutions are also often called master plans, even if they don’t deal with traditional planning elements such as buildings. 

Depending on the case, master plans can be more like two-dimensional planning documents codifying information for uses, heights, setbacks and the like, or be urban design documents including three dimensional aspects such as shapes, views, and other specific requirements which narrow down design options left to the designers of actual developments. 

With the increasing popularity of form-based code versus use-based code master-planning has become increasingly involved architects.
Master plans may include non-physical aspects such as funding, scheduling, or phasing. Larger organizations such as colleges or corporations may create master plans for their facilities that anticipate growth, transformation, and aim to create a blueprint for final build-out.
Increasing the term master plan is used outside the arena of buildings and just like the term “architecture,” applied to organizational matters of various types.

The answer wheter or not master-planning is obsolete is probably best answered by the most cutting edge corporations such as Google, Facebook and Under Armour who all resorted to masterplans as their tool to define their future. Or, for those who don't want to put to much stock into what those new companies are doing, the answer could come from our academic institutions.  Academia and corporations set on careful planning because they know that identity and memorable spaces cannot come from improvisation and from using band aides every time they need more space or facilities. Places that represent

Google campus masterplan simulation

value, increase productivity and ensure synergies between all the parts require a plan and good creative designers. For those who don't want to follow the shiny large new technology companies or the academic institutions, look at the largest redevelopment areas in the world and how they came about. For example, Hafen City in Hamburg, a massive redevelopment in a flood plain that would have never happened without a massive planning effort. I already mentioned the redevelopment of the old Stapleton airport area in Denver, also the product of supersized plans spanning over many years of build-out. An example of failure to successfully masterplan and a failure to develop without much of a framework plan at the same time is the London Docklands, an area that was masterplanned to death without any development until Margret Thatcher pulled all the stops and let developers go free. That resulted in one of the larger real estate bust followed by a large development boom but above all a clear lack of spatial cohesion even now 25 years later.

Hafen City masterplan Hamburg, Germany

Today, when quality of life is a major deciding factor in the international competition of cities for markets and talented residents, cities, towns, and communities must take those best practices to ensure that they provide quality of life. They must assure potential residents and investors alike that they see the bigger picture and can provide mobility, sustainability and the many other qualitative aspects that resdients have come to expect and which are not included in simple zoning or even comprehensive plans.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff JD

ULI: Outlook for masterplanned communities
The evolution of urban planning in ten diagrams (CityLab)
From Masterplans to City Development Strategies

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