Bottoms up

Urban planning wasn't ever an actual 'thing' until humans decided to create some formal basis for how to design human settlement. Before that, it might have been a land's topography and climate that determined how a land was to be inhabitable, like Scotland's Skara Brae, or China's Banpo. Today's city all seem to aim for design homogeny that conquers the land rather than works it, a sad turn of events that is resulting in loss of cultural identity in many regions of Asia.

Cultural identity is important to keep a people rooted to their land, distinguish and love it enough to want to nurture it and to improve it for themselves and their community. Social sustainability is an activator of economic and environmental sustainability, and that is why public engagement has to be considered in the design process.

Top-down regional planning processes do nothing for the people. It is undemocratic because it doesn't consider the way the people want to live, but rather the planner's calculations of air pollution and traffic congestion which can offset the community's ability/will to be environmentally conscious. It is a muddled mixture of command-and-control forms of planning that really only caters to the transportation and land-use, which forgoes a comprehension of how people want to live. Depression has increased among the young as a result of highrise apartments that do not provide the opportunity for community building. A depressed city is an unproductive city.

Bottom-up approaches to planning however has its own set of problems. Firstly, you can't use a bottom-up approach where there is no bottom - in other words, new settlements have to be designed through a top-down approach. Secondly, as suggested by the first hurdle, a bottom needs to exist. Third, the community needs to be involved - therefore the community should be interested in being involved, and the bigger that community is, the harder it is to satisfy all voices. All of these factors indicate one thing: coordination of implementation is very hard to accomplish with a bottom-up approach.

The challenge is striking a balance between the two approaches, and one way to do this is by localizing the medication where its needed. If bottom-up approaches work best for smaller populations, keep these approaches to local areas to empower the people and make them feel that the city cares for their well-being. Top-down approaches frame the city through rational and system eyes, necessary to scale down the challenge of designing for high density to a solvable problem.

Now, this only really considers the approach to urban design. It's no surprise that top-down approaches are criticized for causing large-scale damage through poor policy (i.e. inadequate water/sanity coverage in Latin America). Where institutions are still being developed rather than established, it's better to keep the technical decisions to social monitoring, rather than governmental monitoring. Limit the scale of x, y, z development (height, length, width of a block). Promote walkable densities. Develop public spaces for public forums on these types of topic. Keep the city alive by keeping its citizens engaged.

Tabinda