Thanks, thanks, glad to be here. Now give me a second – there, and uh… crap. How do these things get harder to use every year? Where’s the power button? Okay. Right. Thanks. Good.
So, we all know why we’re here – let’s skip the preamble and the happy-to-meet-yous and get right down to business.
First things first and the most obvious issue: we’ve got a lot of prime land down by the river crying out to be used that’s currently buried in a tangle of uselessly domesticated monoculture crops, where it isn’t slowly slithering out to sea. We clear that off, we can start putting down succession from the pioneer species onwards – get the weedy little shits in there fast so they can start shading the soil and sinking their greedy fingers into it before it all oozes away. That’s a good initial step, but I think we can do better: a lot of this terrain is low-lying because it’s drained marshlands. We can set those up again once there’s enough greenery in place to prevent erosion from sweeping everything in one fell swoop; get things nice and sludgy again and turn this all into a proper filtration plant that can clean up the water for a population of millions.
Next up, we need a proper downtown. The good news is we have a great place for it, the bad news is we’ve currently we’ve got a pile of ugly skyscrapers covering it. I know those things suck to clear, especially the stumps, but there’s no helping it: they’ve got to come down and it’s got to be done. And it’s not all bad: you can sell the scrap cheap for habitat construction.
Once we’ve chopped down the buildings and broken up the concrete, you’re looking at prime foundational land for an old growth city core. Accelerate the succession because it can take it; really burn through those first few years of sun-tolerant ground-coverers, get through the disturbance and start laying the foundations for a place where you’ll have to crane your neck straight back if you want to glimpse the sky because it’ll be wall-to-wall ancient hardwoods. Transit will be painless: an arboreal traveller will be able to slip straight from one side of the place to the other without ever once touching the ground, and the number of accessible branches per station will be luxurious and affordable.
Speaking of transit, I want to take a moment to address this head-on: yes, we’re incorporating carbon taxes into the basic requirements of our infrastructure. I won’t mince words, you can’t do modern planning without it, and if you plan to attract good, sturdy woodlands to your area you’ll let them take away your carbon without complaining. If you don’t want to have your carbon taxed why not ditch society entirely, eat your meals cooked, and go sleep in a suburban duplex like some kind of drooling hominid.
Right. So we’ve got our filtration sorted, we’ve got a long-term project for the downtown, and now we need to plan water access. I’ll be blunt, right now it’s not great: we’ve got a concrete waterfront that totally obstructs commercial and private access to detritus and green algae, and a correspondingly grossly impoverished population of marine life. We need to get in there and renew things, give them the tools and the space they need to stand on their own fins – ‘give a fish a worm for a day/give a fish access to water filled with wriggling things that fit in their mouth for the rest of their lives’, you know how it is. So we’ll dredge the landside of the shoreline until we hit dirt and then and start infilling the channel and the harbour until they’ve got a healthy silt layer at the bottom again. This is something that’ll take time too, but the good bit is that the better our other projects do, the faster it’ll happen: we get the filtration sorted, and no more phosphorus-driven algae blooms. We get the downtown revitalized, more organic matter is getting dumped into the river and washed into the bay. And once you’ve given enough to the water, it’ll start giving it back – detritus for beached carcasses; bugs for fish; land nutrient for deepwater sediment. I cannot overstate the fundamental importance of free and fair current exchange in prosperity.
Now, I’ve saved your biggest problem for last, but don’t think it’s unsolvable. Yes, you’ve got a lot of untenable unproductive suburban wastes sprawling around the hinterland. No, tearing up every single isolated family dwelling, swimming pool, driveway, and garage one-at-a-time would not be a productive use of anyone’s time. Yes, the soil is poor. No, it won’t be a world center of productivity, look good on a brochure, or be the thing you brag about to your colleagues anytime soon.
But you know what it can be? Something goddamned usable, which it isn’t right now. Plot it out as mixed-use woodland, and stay hands-light – it’ll never be the star of the show, but let the traffic take its way with it and watch what happens and I bet you’ll see potential in there you weren’t aware of. Parks can turn into copses; lawns can become meadows. Don’t try to measure the sow’s ear for a silk purse right away, start curing the leather and think about wallets. Give it half a century and come back to it ready to make a new plan once the lemons have gotten lemonaded.
So there it is. You have hundreds of square kilometres of cement-and-rebar wilderness out there right now, yes. But now you ALSO have the plans and the potential for hundreds of square kilometres of vitalized, energetic, world-class economically-active multi-biome civil society. You’re welcome.
Yes, I know this is a lot of work. Yes, I know it’s going to take ages. But unurban planning done properly is all about the long term, gentlecritters, and if you’re planning long term you’re either thinking big or you’re screwing up.
‘What about the hominids?’ What about them? Go join a preservation society if you want to, that’s not my problem. Bleeding-heart dogs and cats always asking ‘what about the hominids, what about the hominids’ – if they’re so damned smart and adaptable they’ll tool-use themselves along just fine. Now let me do my damned job.