This morning, I read this old article at OKC Central about a architecture critic’s visit to Oklahoma City and comments on the City’s efforts back in the 1960s through 1980s with interest.

While some of what the critic Hiroshi Watanabe said sounded well-reasoned and has proven to be largely correct (praising Bricktown, the potential of the Myriad Gardens, etc), one thing that sticks out, both in regards to the efforts of I.M. Pei that preceded the critics visit and to the comments by Watanabe on the quality of the setbacks and plazas surrounding downtown office buildings, is the influence of architectural trends and the general lack of urban understanding.  Simply put: a good architect does not necessarily equate to a good urbanist. In fact, many renowned architects are very poor urbanists with destructive tendencies when given an opportunity to work at too great a scale. Along these lines, an interesting debate has been taking place between proponents of Frank Gehry and members of the more Jane Jacobs minded (actually, more accurately, William Whyte minded) Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  The debate was sparked by a question about the quality of public space provided by Gehry buildings asked by Fred Kent, head of PPS and a recent speaker at the Oklahoma City Mayor’s Development Roundtable, at a symposium in Aspen; to which Gerhy responded, if at all, with a pompous disregard that astounded some in attendance.

In the end, a great city has to be a collective effort.  Architects certainly have a tremendous amount to contribute to the conversation and to the overall aesthetic.  Planners, urban designers, engineers, real estate developers, etc – also all have much to contribute to shaping the ultimate urban environment.  But none of these professions, or any other profession for that matter, should wholly dictate the detailed form of the urban environment at a broad scale.  Ultimately, an eclectic mix of many persons contributions; spread out over decades or centuries of the technologies and styles of generations; creates the type of city that I consider great.  In truth, I am concerned more with creating a framework that will sustain and grow a great city for a long time to come. Key decisions about the overall framework of city development have given us the cities we see today, even if we did not know the importance of those decisions at the time.    The  seventh generation approach is interesting to consider when making major decisions that will impact the historical, current, and future urban environment:

“Oren Lyons observes that the first mandate of traditional Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] chiefs is to ensure that their decision-making is guided by consideration of the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come:

‘What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have? (Lyons 1980, p. 174).’

“The seventh generation principle applies to the ancestors as well. In honoring the ancestors, one expresses gratitude to them as the seventh generation, which they kept foremost in their decision making and for whom they sacrificed.

What types of projects or policies will do the most to serve and respect future generations?  What projects and policies may hinder future generations? I have some ideas of my own, but would rather hear what you think.  Thoughts?

A while back we discussed some ways to improve public participation in Oklahoma City.  I think some good ideas came out of the discussion and have been hoping that the ideas would be considered at City Hall.  Still, often it is hard to tell whether the decision-makers take note of this blog, or anything else posted on the internet for that matter (except you Steve, we know they read OKCCentral).   I have often wondered if time spent writing formal letters and making phone calls would be more effective at getting things done, but abandoned this course of action because 1. it is boring 2. lacks transparency and 3. feel that the web is a superior medium for communicating ideas.  Ultimately, it will have to be the decision-makers that adapt to the new ways of communicating with constituents that are made possible by the web.  And some of OKC’s decision-makers are already ahead of the game!  I must say that I was quite pleased when Russell Claus, Director of the Oklahoma City Planning Department, dropped by the site to contribute to the discussion with the following comment:

Duly noted. ensuring a better web site is a high priority of mine, and a lot of your suggestions coincide with my own ideas for improvement. But, as you would appreciate, spare staff time to manage this is at an extreme premium. I’m trying to rectify this with the addition of an outreach position, something I’ve included in my last 3 years budget requests. I consider an effective citizen communications program an essential for any planning department and hopefully, I can make that happen soon. I apologize for the deficiencies in the interim. Thanks for everyone’s input

I consider Russell a good friend.  I had the pleasure of interning under him in the Planning Department’s Urban Redevelopment Division and think the city did well to promote him to Director.  I believe him when he says that these things are a priority and look forward to seeing public participation improve during his tenure.  With the challenges of implementing new systems and hiring new people at a time when the economy is hurting and municipalities are having to shrink budgets, we may have to wait a while to see all of this come about.

In the meantime, I will again offer to map the agenda items for free (as I did in the comments on 1/15):

I will definitely pledge to make a Google map of every agenda from this point forward in 2009 if the city will give me the information in a spreadsheet format I can use…

I think this single change could make for a significant improvement and lead to a number of new participants in the public process.  Though admittedly, depending on how the information is currently formatted, preparing the information in the spreadsheet may require city staff time that is just not available.

Either way, when city leaders enter into a dialagoue with consituents – be it in person or online – public participation can only be improved.  So thank you Mr. Claus!

“If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be – community-building places, attractive for all people – then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city directly and will have had an immense impact on the rest.“

- Allan Jacobs

Okay, lets get down to it. In the first post I argued that the current Chamber building proposal is flawed and requires a new approach. Part II laid out some basic information on the site and hopefully convinced you of its importance to downtown as the nexus between multiple urban districts.

Now, lets establish what the Chamber site should be; laying out what the plan for the site needs to accomplish and what elements must be incorporated into this plan.

WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH

It is impossible to plan the site without a clear understanding of what we are trying to achieve. Here, two things matter. First, there are the objectives of the Chamber, made up of their needs and desires for the building and site. But these objectives cannot be established in isolation; they must relate to the broader goals we are pursuing within downtown and the areas surrounding the site. An understanding of these broader goals combined with the requirements of the Chamber should give us the information needed to put forth a realistic proposal that meets the objectives of all parties.

One element the Chamber hopes to incorporate into their plan is a public space to honor OKC business leaders.

CHAMBER BUILDING OBJECTIVES

The Chamber has expressed a number of goals for the project that are specific to their needs, mission and prominent role in Oklahoma City. Based on the information about the project that has appeared thus far, I have created this list of objectives and requirements:

• building of approx. 50,000 square feet
• maintain views of historic Oklahoman Building
• create a “front door” for the community
• allow people to walk from convention center
• an iconic design
• includes a public space/plaza to honor business leaders
• convenient parking

BROADER DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES

It requires a lengthy process, collaborating with multiple stakeholder groups, to establish a set of broader goals for a community, a process that this blog has neither the time nor capacity to take on. Thankfully though, such a process has already taken place and provides an acceptable framework to guide the broader objectives of our plan.

One of the most repeated goals stated by leaders of the OKC community is to make Downtown more pedestrian-friendly.

The Downtown Design District (§ 59-7200) guidelines have these five stated objectives:

(1) promote the development and redevelopment of the downtown area in a manner consistent with the unique and diverse design elements of downtown;

(2) ensure that a DBD use is compatible with the commercial, cultural, historical, and governmental significance of downtown;

(3) promote the downtown area as a vital mixed-use area;

(4) create a network of pleasant public spaces and pedestrian amenities in the downtown area, and;

(5) enhance existing structures, preserve and restore historic features, and circulation patterns in the downtown area.

It is probably not fair to judge by legal language alone. However, the message from the downtown community has been very consistent in supporting these goals across the board. For instance, a quick scan of the internet found quotes from city leaders, real estate professionals, planners and more; all reaffirming that #4 – making the city more “pedestrian-friendly” – is not only one of the codified objectives, but a genuine goal of people from across the downtown community.

Here are a range of quotes from across the city that echo the priorities of the Downtown Design guidelines:

…The city is trying to change into a city that is less sprawling, has more density and is more pedestrian friendly…

- Mick Cornett, Mayor of Oklahoma City

Pedestrian traffic has to be addressed. For two years, I have been a downtown walker from West Main to Midtown to Bricktown all the way to the river. We need to improve our core to make it more pedestrian friendly. This also includes bicycles now. The new bike rack plan for Bricktown is a step in the right direction…I am a proponent of walking outside. I think it creates energy on the streets. Although the Underground is a nice alternative for very windy or cold or rainy days, I like to see people on the streets. This is also good for our tourism. We need to encourage people to walk … might help their health, too….improving our pedestrian traffic needs to be on the agenda for further discussion including input from urban neighbors and downtown workers.

- Judy Hatfield, Downtown Developer

Pedestrian issues are very big on our priority list.

- Jeff Bezdek, Urban Neighbors (Downtown’s Neighborhood Association)

Pedestrian flow is the real key to the overall success of not only Core to Shore, but also the sustained viability of the other points of interest our city has to offer to locals and out-of-towners as well. We have the ability in Oklahoma City to mitigate a lot of the horror stories other markets have seen by learning from their mistakes and being proactive. Our CBD is small enough that if you’re a tourist and coming into town for an NBA game, or an NCAA event, you could conceivably take in everything from Bricktown to Midtown to Core to Shore on foot over the course of a weekend.

- Brent Conway, CB Richard Ellis

We want to create more of an urban feeling. – Framing the streets and providing for a more secure sense of a pedestrian life. It’s not suburban in style.

- Terry Taylor, formerly of the Oklahoma City Planning Department

ELEMENTS OF THE PLAN

Reading through the objectives of both the Chamber and the broader downtown community, you see that at a base-level there is not much conflict. The requirements for the building do not indicate that it would have to, in anyway, detract from the type of downtown we desire. In fact, the Chamber is more or less the ideal partner, hoping to create a high quality building, include public space, provide for pedestrian connectivity, and preserve historic assets. The only element that there is not a conclusive agreement on is the mixture of uses within the building. The city rightly encourages “mixed-use” because it contributes to a thriving downtown and creates opportunities for urban retail. However, the Chamber building is in some ways a true civic building – not dissimilar from a courthouse or city hall. So perhaps the absence of a mixture of uses in the Chamber building is not only acceptable, but appropriate.

Now that we have identified the objectives of all parties and established that there are no conflicts to resolve, it is fairly simple to construct a list of what the Chamber site plan should include.

Designed by Layton & Smith and constructed in 1909, the Oklahoman Building remains one of OKC’s most beautiful buildings.

THE CHAMBER SITE PLAN SHOULD:

(1) Provide for a prominently positioned “iconic” building – 50,000 sf in size – welcoming visitors to the city

(2) Preserve views of the historic Oklahoman Building on the northeast corner of 4th and Broadway

(3) Create suitable pedestrian connections, especially along Broadway between the CBD/Bricktown areas and the Automobile Alley/Memorial area, and between the residential neighborhoods east of the site and the rest of downtown, along 3rd and/or 4th street

(4) Serve as the impetus for additional development adjacent to the Site to create a vital mixed-use area. Opportunities include the redevelopment of the drive-thru bank south of the site, the development of the parking lot northwest of the site, and the potential enhancement of Automobile Alley as a retail/mixed-use corridor.

(5) Provide convenient parking that is appropriate within the urban context of the site

(6) Allow room for a great public space that not only provides an opportunity to honor Oklahoma City’s business leaders, but significantly enhances the civic quality of life for the entire community. Its a place to congregate, to celebrate, to relax, or to play. It should be a great urban public space – an outdoor community living room!

Oddly enough, Oklahoma City once had just such a public space – our first downtown park – and it was located at 4th and Broadway.

Continue reading: Oklahoman Park: OKC’s First Great Public Space!

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For more on the planning of the Chamber site:

1. Re-visioning the Chamber Proposal
2. Re-visioning the Chamber Proposal, part II
3. Re-visioning the Chamber: Defining Objectives
4. Oklahoman Park: OKC’s First Great Public Space

Google Earth 5.0 has been released and it is a very worthy upgrade!  The coolest new feature of the program is that it allows you to search historical aerials.  With Oklahoma City, there are approx. 10 different aerial sets dating back to 1991, though only a few are from before 2002.  Still, it is great to have access to a tool that records urban transformation. For instance, check out the clips I took of Bricktown over the last 15 years:

1995

2003

2007

Google Earth 5.0 is available to download completely free of charge.  Google Earth Pro adds some valuable features, including large format image exports, but costs $400 – making it almost exclusively for commercial users. Regardless, the free version is great and is only getting better. I can’t wait to see how this is used in the future as the time between aerials decreases and the recorded length in the database increases. Imagine a future in 2050 where you could watch – like a movie – the changes that occurred in an area following some type of intervention – like the introduction of a new transit line! Certainly something I look forward to watching happen in OKC!

Following yesterday’s post, I thought it would be best to give some examples of places that citizens get tied in and expand a bit on what the city can do to help. First place I went to get information was the OKC Planning Department’s website.  I had the privilege of working as an intern at the planning department prior to starting my graduate program and hold the people there in very high regard.  Checking out their website, I noticed that they do a good job of making the agendas for upcoming meeting readily available on the right side of the page, which I have made available for you below:

• Board of Adjustment
• Bricktown Urban Design Committee
• Downtown Design Review Committee
• Historic Preservation and Landmark Commission
• Planning Commission
• Stockyards Urban Design Committee
• Urban Design Commission

Having the agendas easy to find is great, but there are still some things that need to be addressed.  Here are some of my suggestions, and I encourage you to go through the motions and see if you have any suggestions of your own.  With a few small improvements we can make it much easier for the average citizen to get and stay meaningfully involved.


FIX THE LINKS

Not all of the agenda links are working correctly.  The links for the Board of Adjustements and Planning Commission take you to a page with meeting times, but no agenda.  And the Stockyard Urban Design Committee link hasn’t been updated since October.  This is basic and should be fixed quickly!


RELEASE AGENDA ITEMS EARLIER

State law requires that the agenda be made available at least 24 hours prior to the meeting, not including weekends or holidays.  But most of the time the agenda are already complete before this, with copies available to board members, and the individual items that are likely to appear on the agenda are known well in advance of the meeting as they often require that neighbors on adjacent properties be contacted.  The problem is, if you are simply an active citizen that cares about what is happening in an area in which you don’t own property and do not legally have to be contacted, you will usually only have around 24 hours to download the agenda, read the entire thing (goodluck – the most recent planning commission agenda was over 500 pages) and decide which items if any deserve your attention.  You probably don’t have enough time to contact anyone and certainly not enough time to fire off a formal letter, so you have to decide if you want to go to the meeting.  But even then, the item descriptions provided in the agenda are usually only detailed enough to arouse your interest or anger, but do not give you all of the information needed to keep you from looking like a completely uninformed idiot in front of the committee.  Making the agenda items available at least one week prior to the meeting would allow time to ask questions, hold discussions, organize, compromise, etc.


ADD THE DATE AND TIME TO FRONTPAGE

People should not have to download a .pdf agenda or scour google to find out the date and time of the next meeting; this information should be easy to find.  Along these lines, though requiring more effort, if we really want people to become involved then we shouldn’t require them to sit through an entire half-day long meeting only to speak to one item.  Either the agenda should be broken up to give shorter time slots in which people could attend and speak to the item of interest, or some other solution – such as allowing comments to be submitted via email and read at the meeting – should be sought out.


GOOGLE MAP THE AGENDA ITEMS

It is incredibly difficult to look through multiple agendas in search of things that may be of interest to you.  As mentioned, this weeks Planning Commission agenda is over 500 pages long, and over 100mb in download size.  As you scan through the agendas, you have to look for the address on each item and then figure out exactly where this is located relative to the areas with which you are concerned.  This is overly cumbersome and I doubt anyone does this on a regular basis.

Agenda items mapped by location allow users to quickly find the information that is most important to them.

It is not too much to ask to have the agendas for all meeting provided in the form of a google map.  It is very simple to input a spreadsheet of addresses and be left with a map that could include the agenda item name, type, and a link to the rest of the relevant information (like in the example shown above).  That is the basics and is very simple to do. In fact, with a little tweaking it could be dynamically setup to update automatically as the individual agenda items are cleared for the agenda.

Allowing users to define their areas of interests would allow people to stay connected with what is going on in the areas they care about.

Eventually, if we are really going to strive for excellence and not just for what is required.  Then the system should allow citizens to create boundaries of interest.  So say for instance that that I am interested in all of the planning and development taking place in and around Bricktown and also up on Western Avenue between 36th and 50th.  The system would allow you indicate this through a map interface and then send you a feed straight to your email inbox or feed service of your choice with the agenda items that fall within your specified boundaries.  You wouldn’t even have to navigate to a webpage to view the map, it would happen instantly, as soon as the agenda items are uploaded into the system.  AND, you wouldn’t have to scour multiple agenda from different branches of the planning department – or of the city for that matter – but would be notified of ALL agenda items from EVERY department that fall within the parameters you set forth.  Of course, even without the feed and with just the map, the information becomes much simpler to navigate:

With the Agenda Map, you just click on the item of interest and it gives a brief description with links to more information.

This can all be done today by every city department for relatively little in cost and just a small amount of know-how.  With such a system, I really think we would see tremendous breakthroughs in the level of civic participation and contribution by the citizens of the city.

What do you think?  Do you already attend these meetings on a regular basis?  Would you be more likely to if these changes were implemented?  Has anyone ever read an entire planning commission agenda…?

We are standing on the threshold of a new era. Statehood has come and the rapid growth attending the founding of a state government. The Indian Territory, so long held back, brings its share of wealth. Men are plowing in ten thousand fields; the treasures of the earth are being mined, and the wheels of industry have begun to revolve. A hundred cities are rising on our plains, and the highways of commerce are opened wide. Every year will bring greater wealth; and with every year will come added numbers of people, until our cities grow to proportions we scarcely dream of today. But let every year be a year of progress so that our cities may rank among the first, not only in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.

From an address given by Philip Kates, former Tulsa City Attorney, on January 5, 1911 at the at the First Annual Conference of the Oklahoma Municipal League held in Oklahoma City.

Have the people of Oklahoma City quit dreaming of making this city great?  Or have we begun to recapture some of the spirit that defined the pioneers who settled this land?  It is clear that early city and state leaders had huge aspirations for the future of their cities, but I fear that even with all of the great things that have happened in the last 15 years we are beginning to rest on our laurels.

But let every year be a year of progress so that our cities may rank among the first, not only in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.

This should be a motto we scream today, though I would amend it by excluding the word “only” so that it reads “first, NOT in size, but in the achievement of splendid ideals.”  The focus should not be on growth, but on the continuous improvement of quality of life for ALL current and future residents of our city.

These are my ideals, to create a city that enables all of us to live a fuller, richer life; not based on material economy alone, but on an amalgamation of the quality of life components valued by us all.  This might include any number of things, but it has no single focus.  Ultimately, we have to have a process that allows for and values the input of all individuals and doesn’t allow any single person or organization to control our destiny.  Further, we have to be willing to change and adapt as the social, racial, and economical makeup of our city shifts towards a new future and as the challenges we are faced with demand it.

I don’t see this happening now; I feel as though in recent years we have paused following an almost two decade rise.  So many opportunities presented over the past couple years have ended with settling.  Settling for more of the same.  Settling for good enough.  Settling for something less than what the citizens of other cities consistently demand.

So as we move forward into the future.  I ask that the city leaders and administrators allow for – make that encourage – the meaningful input and involvement of the citizens they claim to serve.  And of equal importance, we require a more active citizenry, with more persons making their voices heard at council and design commission meetings, participating on civic or neighborhood boards, or any number of other possible roles suited to the abilities and interest of the person.  No matter where we get involved, the goal should be to demand excellence from ourselves and our civil servants.

Right now it is not always easy to get involved: adequate information is difficult to find, formal channels of communication are not always effective, and many decisions are made without the benefit of an open-forum or healthy debate.  These are symptons of the same flawed way of doing things that led to some of the greatest tragedies in our City’s history of planning and development.  We need to develop a process that will ensure we avoid another Pei Plan, or the injustices of the clearance of Maywood, or more recently the continued controversy surrounding the new I-40 alignment.  With leadership that listens and a citizenry that pays attentions, we will avoid some of the mistakes that have hindered us in the past and can push forward towards the creation of a truly great city that we can all be proud of.

So I will be en route to Oklahoma City tomorrow and wanted to leave you with what I think are some of the best posts from the last six months.  Thanks for reading and have a Merry Christmas!

1. Mapping Pedestrian Friendliness in OKC

This was one of my earliest posts and still my favorite. I really like Gehl’s work and it is interesting to apply it to Oklahoma City. Check it out and try to contribute to the map of pedestrian friendly places. Though I heard from someone the other day that there is not really a reason to map pedestrian-friendliness in OKC, you can just count of the places on your fingers…:)


2. Ten Must-Haves for OKC’s Downtown Park

It is fun to dream about the future of the “central park” that is being planned as part of Core 2 Shore. OKC has needed a downtown park or other place to serve as the “heart” of the city for years and it seems it is finally coming. Check out the list and add your own lists!


3. Oklahoma City’s 1910 Plan for Grand Boulevard by W.H. Dunn

OKC has a fascinating planning history that is largely unexplored. I am in the middle of researching a thesis about this history and found this great plan for OKC’s parks and boulevards.


4. The NEW I-40 Pedestrian Bridge

The bridge is beautiful! What more is there to say?


5. Bricktown Parking: Killing Two Birds with One Streetcar

Parking in Bricktown was a hot topic last summer!  I say, if we really want to solve the parking problem then we have to think outside the box and take our first steps toward a downtown transit system. In this post I layout a plan to make it happen.


6. I Love Oklahoma!

First big post and it took me forever to produce; so there is some sentimental value there.


7. What Is the Future of Suburbia?

Ideas that I enjoy discussing (keeping comment vague and general because I can’t remember exactly what I talked about).


8. Oklahoma City Gas Counter

Tells an amazing story! The steep “double black diamond” slope on the right shows both my stock portfolio, as well as my dreams for cities that encourage biking, walking, and smart urban form, come crashing down.


9. Walkability Rankings: Oklahoma City #35

I love cities that allow for walking and think Oklahoma City has plenty of room for improvement – as this walkability ranking attests. This post overviews the rankings, some of the flaws with their analysis, and discusses other issues related to walkability in Oklahoma City.


10. Axel Peemoeller’s Funky Parking Garage

This is just sweet!

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BONUS: Sunrise in Boston!

I am digging this new mobile upload feature and can’t believe I scored this amazing sunrise the day after I set it up! Looking forward to many more posts on the go in 2009!

In the course of my thesis research I have tracked down a copy of the 1910 plan prepared for the Oklahoma City Parks Commission by W.H. Dunn, a landscape architect from Kansas City.  The book entitled: Oklahoma City: A report on its plan for an Outer Parkway and a plan for an Interior System of parks and boulevards (the complete report is available in .pdf – see below).  This may very well be the first formal plan prepared for Oklahoma City, though there were previous planning efforts for individual developments like Classen’s streetcar neighborhoods or some of I.M. Putnam’s developments.  I don’t have time to get into all of the details of the this plan and my thoughts right now, but I figured I could make a bunch of information I have discovered available and allow you to read and discuss.  Please let me know if you have any insights or see any connections that you think are worth pursuing.  Looking through this plan that contains some of the earliest ideas that helped shape Oklahoma City has certainly been a pleasure for me and I hope you enjoy them as well.


OUTER PARKWAY GENERAL PLAN

This actually represents one of the earliest and most complete maps of Oklahoma City.  I have tracked down a couple maps that predate this one, but this is definitely the most complete and absolutely beautifully done.  Keep in mind that this map is a combination of what existed and what was proposed – not all of the ideas came to fruition.

For a higher-resolution image of the map, download the .pdf at the bottom of the page.



GRAND BOULEVARD






















CLASSEN BOULEVARD










DETAILED PLANS FOR NEW PARKS














Northeast Park – what became Lincoln Park

Southeast Park – what became Trosper Park

Southwest Park – what became Woodson Park

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE PLAN

These resources are all made available in .pdf.  These files are quite large (please use right-click Save as…).

• Complete 1910 Dunn Report and Plan in b/w .pdf, 7.5mb – (click here)
• Large general plan color map, 8.9mb – (click here)

Also, I have full-size 300dpi scans of all images available and will consider sharing them – please email me if you are interested.



RELATED RESOURCES

These articles are from journals available for free through google books that reference this planning effort around the time it was carried out.  They are helpful in completing the picture, though you have to take it with a grain of salt as early Oklahoma Citians were always hard at work selling their beloved city. I downloaded each journals complete .pdf and saved only the portion that contains the relevant article.

• “The Park System of Oklahoma City“ by Glenn Marston, appeared in The American City in 1909
• “How Oklahoma City Secured Its Park and Boulevard System“ by Will H. Clark, President of the Oklahoma City Parks Commission, appeared in The American City in 1910
• “The Park and Boulevards of Oklahoma City“ by S.T. Bisbee, appeared in Municipal Engineering in 1911

So, one of things I am required to do to graduate from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) is write a thesis. Typically the thesis research takes up some of your 3rd semester and almost all of your final semester.  Finished papers are between 50-150pg and the finished product is intended to be a complete work carried out on a fairly high level.  The first thing you have to do is pick the topic and for me that time has come.  I have been keeping track of thesis ideas for the past year and have a nice little list from which to choose. Here they are with my thoughts on each.

MY THESIS TOPIC IDEAS

1. Distributed urban college education
Basically I am curious what opportunities there are for higher-education to be distributed across residual space in urban setting, utilizing the facilities and expertise of existing firms to enhance the education, while providing a cheap and enthusiastic labor force.  Still interested in this, but decided that it was not the best option.

2. Effects of 21st century retail on urban form
What is urban form affected by new types of retail (i.e. internet)?  This topic is already receiving quite a bit of attention and is difficult to study.

3. Examine impact of agricultural idling incentives on city form
So we pay the carrying costs on land even as it accrues value for later development?  Surely this policy has a dramatic impact on urban form, especially in cities like OKC – I will have to wait to find out, because this topic is a little too boring to study for an entire semester.

4. Analyze potential for handheld gps enabled phones to measure pedestrian movement in a city
New cell phones – like the GPS enabled 3G iPhone – provide a new opportunity to understand the ways pedestrians move through cities.  Obviously there are privacy issues, but certainly a system could be anonymized.  This is a relatively new area of research and something I think would be really cool to study. The SenseABLE City Lab here at MIT has done some similar work with cell phone data, but the new embedded GPS systems provide an extra level of detail that makes the system work at the pedestrian movement level.  I remain intrigued by this, but ended up deciding against it.

5. Power and politics of urban design in Oklahoma City
Hmm…this would be really interesting! BUT, I decided for various reasons (e.g. my future job prospects) to leave this one alone.

6. Assess public places not by design, but focus especially on the surrounding urban design that supports the public place (i.e. library, retail, density of residents, density of office, density of lunch places, etc)
I love public spaces and this seemed like an area that hadn’t been looked at.  Interesting questions like, what are the best uses to have around a park?  Is a library good, like Bryant Park?  What about office buildings?  Concrete convention centers?  Fun stuff, maybe later.

7. Value based property taxes – taxing a property based on the building allowed by zoning; should combat land speculators that blight urban landscape.
Do you ever get tired of seeing surface parking lots in the middle of downtown?  Part of the problem is that our tax system enables these lots to be profitable, even though they often do not provide the same level of benefit to society as a developed project.  There have been other tax systems utilized that tax property relative to the residual land value sans improvements.  So an office building and a parking lot taking up the same amount of land would be taxed the same.  This was an idea pushed by Henry George, an economist and NYC mayoral candidate in the late 1800s.  Ultimately, this idea was politically infeasible and probably still is…which is why I am not doing it.

[correction 11/6 - Joshua (see comments) enlightened me to the fact  that land value taxation, or LVT, is being successfully implemented in a number of communities throughout the United State; you can find out more at urbantools.org]

8.  City organizational structure and its impact on urban form – Vienna has a combined planning & public works department, whereas Oklahoma City has separated the planning and implementation functions.
I am curious what the pros/cons are to having planning & public works combined into a single department versus the system currently in place in Oklahoma City.  In reality, street projects have an as great or greater affect on the form of our city than planning.  Not sure what the benefits of the current configuration are, but I will have to wait to find out.

9. Studying the ideas of Hans Mondermann on naked streets
The late Hans Monderman has shown how streets with fewer signs, fewer road lines, etc are actually safer.  Seems unintuitive, but has been proven true under a variety of conditions.  Obviously, highways are not a good candidate for such a system – as Kramer showed us:

10. Assessing the environmental impact of transportation infrastructure in a world of cheap, pollution free cars!
Even if we get to pollution free cars, we still have to look at the sustainability of the built form we use to support an auto-dominated transportation system.  I think we can probably do a better job in planning for a future that continues to see cars as the predominate mode of transportation.

THE WINNING TOPIC

Ultimately I decided that I wanted to write a thesis on something I enjoy studying, and I really enjoy studying Oklahoma City.  Some of the possibilities above have to do with OKC either directly or indirectly, but with any OKC related question I always come back to my lack of understanding – and the lack of available research – on the history of planning and development that created the city we see today.  Steve and others have done some good stuff on the post 1960 period and on various isolated elements of the early 20th century, but this early period has not received much attention through a purely planning, urban design, and development related focus.   So my thesis topic is:

The early planning tradition and development forces that shaped Oklahoma City

I am starting pre-landrun and will study as far as I can, but probably won’t get past 1950 – which thankfully will allow me to avoid the Pei Plan and the gloominess it brings.

NEED YOUR HELP

Well, if you have anything that you think will give me some insight into the early planning history of Oklahoma City, please let me know.  I, in return, will try to post some of the resources I come across and share what I find out.  In fact, I have already found some cool stuff that I will try to get posted later this week.