MASTER PLANS AND MASTER-
PLANNING: THE CHARRETTE PROCESS
The urban design and Smart Growth planning con-
cepts described earlier are most usefully brought
together by the creation of ‘urbanistic’ master plans
that focus on three-dimensional urban form instead of
two-dimensional plan diagrams that indicate land use
only. This is one of the key messages of the whole
book:
three dimensions are better than two
. These plans
are public documents that must be understood easily.
Clear and attractive graphics that deal with form and
space as well as use facilitate the production of the
plans and their implementation (see Plates 10 and 11).
Moreover, this three-dimensional infrastructure of
form and space allows long-term flexibility of use and
operation; it maps out the physical future of the com-
munity in ways that enable change to be monitored
effectively over time.
A strong urban form – a robust and connected pat-
tern of public and private spaces defined by coherent
building masses – can provide an armature for resolv-
ing many potentially conflicting concerns of commu-
nity design. These issues include the impacts of
changes in technology, social structures, economics,
uses, architectural styles, and development practices.
The detail study inherent in the kind of urban design
master plans illustrated in Plate 11 establishes the
physical framework for growth and change, and a
guide for public policy and investment strategies.
This practice is reinforced when the master plan and
its detail design vignettes are encoded by means of a
regulating plan, a design-based zoning ordinance,
urban design guidelines or general development
guidelines.
The reason for encoding detailed community
design proposals into regulatory form allows commu-
nities to mediate potentially major changes in pat-
terns of use within an urban framework of building
forms and spaces that is clear and communally
understood. In particular, the design-based zoning
codes ensure a typological fit between the new build-
ings and spaces and the existing urban fabric. This
allows for more continuous and less disruptive
patterns of human occupation; new buildings, and
conversions of old ones, are subject to physical stan-
dards of scale and arrangement that are clearly
depicted.
The master plan therefore provides a detailed
vision of the conceptual ‘build-out’ of the plan area
under the relevant market conditions. The plan, like
the one illustrated in Plate 21, lays out major roads,
public squares and parks, local streets and greenways;
it sets out the infrastructure of public transit; it plans
residential subdivisions by drawing all the individual
house lots; it locates all major buildings, and it
defines areas for environmental protection or land-
scape conservation. In our practice we do this on very
large colored drawings, often larger than 6 feet
(2 meters) square, combined with perspective views,
dimensioned sections through streets, and any other
specific details that might be appropriate to each plan
area (see Plate 12). We work this way even on large-
scale regional projects, (for example, the 60 square
mile area described in the first case study in
Chapter 7). At this scale this level of detail is
necessarily illustrative of key development types and
projects rather than comprehensive.
We know that no master plan we produce during
a charrette will ever be built exactly as we suggest,
even though our recommendations are always based
on developmental realities. However, we specifically
work at this level of detail for three reasons:
●
First, clear, detailed design of specific places estab-
lishes a lucid pictorial image of the proposals much
more effectively than any two-dimensional colored
map of generic land uses can ever do. The extra lev-
els of specific information enable the community
to understand what is being proposed and to share
the vision more easily.
●
Second, the projection of the future at this level of
detail enables the community to handle future alter-
natives and changes in a realistic and rational man-
ner. The impact of new buildings and patterns of use
can be evaluated visually in three dimensions to sup-
plement and modify conventional planning abstrac-
tions of traffic flow and trip generation statistics.
●
Third, we design the master plan area in detail to
see what makes sense under various scenarios, and
generally select one set of proposals as the most
appropriate for our final recommendations. We do
however, often include alternative design and devel-
opment proposals for important or controversial
sites as noted in the second case study in Chapter 8.
Accordingly, the urban design master plan works out
and illustrates this high level of detail not to establish
the exact template for future development, but to put
firmly in place the potential character of new build-
ings and spaces, with clear guidelines for the future
implementation, and
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