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Get
Ready to Plan
Albany: The Sustainable City. Sound far-fetched? Albany’s
planning department hopes it won’t for long. And on Aug. 6
and 7, they, and a nationwide team of experts assembled specifically
for Albany, want to hear from you about how it should happen.
Yes, you.
Earlier this year, Albany won a grant to participate in the
American Institute of Architects’ Sustainable Design Assessment
Team program. In April, an AIA staffer and an invited expert,
Alan Mallach, made an initial visit to Albany. Based on what
they saw and heard on that visit, they assembled a team that
so far includes an urban designer, a market specialist, an
expert in community development, and an open-space/green-space
person. They also plan to have a transportation planner and
a community-visioning expert and/or green building architect.
This team, led by Mallach (who himself is a planner and an
expert in housing and vacant properties) will be devoting
all of their brainpower and considerable expertise on Albany
during their upcoming three-day visit. But they won’t be doing
it in isolation. Most of their time for the first two days
will be spent in three public charettes. A charette is a very
intense, focused work session used in the fields of architecture
and planning, generally designed to get quickly to the heart
of complex matters and generate potential solutions. When
open to the public, they are considered one of the most serious
and empowering methods for public involvement in planning
and design.
“The
time pressure-cooker [of a charette] is an incredible machine
for generating ideas,” says Mallach. “The synergy is really
amazing.” SDAT charettes often get people at the same table
who’ve never met, let alone sat together as peers brainstorming
solutions to common problems.
The role of the team members, says Mallach, will be to synthesize
what they hear and turn it into a set of recommendations,
which will be presented to the public on the evening of Aug.
8.
Sustainable design is admittedly a somewhat fuzzy term. Erin
Simmons, the AIA SDAT staff member who visited Albany with
Mallach, describes sustainability as planning for the future
long-term, “generations and generations” out, and balancing
“social, economic, and environmental” needs. Thinking like
this has done wonders for come-back cities like Chattanooga.
Of course, long-term planning is hard to achieve without stepping
outside our day-to-day routine a little: That is one of the
benefits of a charette.
Reginelli and Doug Melnick, the new director of Albany’s planning
department, are considering the SDAT program to be “homework”
for the city’s upcoming comprehensive plan, a way to get some
expert advice and input to get the comp plan off on the right
foot. Hopefully, says Melnick, the recommendations that the
SDAT generates can be presented to the comprehensive plan
board for possible formal adoption.
They are understandably excited about the process. Charettes
are what planners live for. Here are two reasons why you should
be excited too:
(1) They mean it about the public involvement. Nothing has
been decided before hand. The charettes are not just opportunities
for “feedback” on a plan that has been created and no one
really wants to change. The public is being let in at the
right point: at the beginning. We are also not only technically
welcome, but actively being sought out. The College of Saint
Rose has donated space for the meetings that is accessible
by bus and with ample parking available. There will be food,
and there are afternoon, evening, and morning charettes to
accommodate different schedules. Reginelli is working on getting
word about the charettes out everywhere from the radio to
local churches—this is not being done official-legal-notice-of-a-public-hearing
style.
(2) A basically neutral body is in charge. In a whirlwind
series of charettes, with an outside team picked by the AIA,
not by the city, there will be little chance for back-room
conversations or over-influence by certain factions. And little
motivation for it. Since this is a grant the city applied
for, not a team hired by the city, the assembled team will
have little incentive to do anything but call things as they
see them. “We’re not part of City Hall, we’re not beholden
to City Hall,” says Mallach. And though it should be, and
will be, the people of Albany setting the agenda, the fresh
perspective of outsiders might actually be a good thing to
shake all of us out of our usual ruts and patterns.
This isn’t, of course, to say that the process will be magically
free of politics. Mallach, who has participated in many of
these AIA- sponsored programs, says that the teams are usually
aware that any place has its competing political agendas,
but that they make “a real effort to find out what’s going
on underneath.” It has happened in past that a team didn’t
recognize until too late the agendas that were driving what
they were hearing, says Mallach, and in such a case, the results
were not very useful. But that’s not common; more often the
results give energy and focus to people trying to forge positive
change. Nonetheless, this is yet another reason that it’s
essential that a wide range of people come out and participate.
With enough buy-in and momentum, this could be the catalyst
for a bold new step forward for Albany. Will you be a part
of it?
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
The SDAT charettes will take plan on Aug. 6, 1:30–5 and 6–7
PM and Aug. 7, 9 AM–noon. A more general town-hall meeting
with a Q&A format will take place Aug. 6, 7–9 PM. The
team will present their recommendations on Aug. 8, 5–7 PM.
Kids are welcome. All events will take place at the College
of Saint Rose. For details about location, parking, etc.,
call 434-2532 ext. 16, or visit albanysdat.com. Also check
http://metroland.typepad.com/the_big_questions/.
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