The Power of Plans - New York

50 Shades of Planning

This episode is part of an international triumvirate, which has been put together with the help of old friend of the podcast, Ian Wray, and new friend of the podcast, Lucy Natarajan.

Ian, regular listeners will know, is a Professor at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at University of Liverpool.

Lucy is one of the editors of the Built Environment journal, a co-founder of Place Alliance, an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes and an Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning.

Ian and Lucy compiled the December 2022 edition of Built Environment and sought in so doing to explore ‘the power of plans’. This, they endeavoured to do, by way of a series of internationally commissioned case studies on grand plans that have been shown to work, asking how they worked and why. In this series Sam Stafford explores with Lucy and Ian three of those case studies.

In this episode, in a conversation recorded remotely at the end of November 2022, Sam and Lucy talk to Bob Yaro about New York, a city that has experienced rapid growth, rapid decline and an impressive economic turnaround. New York has long been planned on a city region scale, but the origin of it’s series of great plans lies in a small number of planning pioneers and philanthropists.

That economic turnaround has much to do, despite it not having a statutory function, with the Regional Planning Association, with which Bob is heavily involved and who’s role he describes as “advancing ideas whose time has not yet come".

Some accompanying reading.

Built Environment – The Power of Plans

https://www.alexandrinepress.co.uk/built-environment/power-plans

The Big Plans That Built New York City

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-02/how-new-york-s-master-planners-shaped-a-metropolis

Ian’s recommendation.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/the-power-broker-robert-moses-and-the-fall-of-new-york-robert-caro-review

Some accompanying listening.

Ian’s recommendation.

New York, New York by Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzCdxrfcAtc

Bob's recommendation

Take The A Train by Duke Ellington

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb2w2m1JmCY

Sam’s recommendation.

The Only Living Boy in New York by Everything But The Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgA6cpPNXEk

50 Shades T-Shirts!

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast you will have heard Clive Betts say that...

'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'.

Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html