Great Interview with Dolores Hayden

This is a great interview with Dolores Hayden about her new book A Field Guide to Sprawl. Her previous books (Power of Place, Redesigning the American Dream) really influenced my decision to get into planning. She has a lot of powerful insights about sprawl and the process of sprawl – historically, psychologically, aesthetically.

I looked at this new book a while ago and didn't think it was anything special. It's like a picture book for planners. Did any of you read it, like it?

Comments

[gaela]

Here is the podcast

[gaela]

http://uniondocs.org/documents/radio/UnionDocsRadio5-20-05.mp3

[David Sucher]

I find that most books on cities have little new to say. And maybe there is little new except once or twice a generation. The vast majority of books seem to be replowing the same field and should be a nice essay. But publishers do not like to sell pamphlets because the public likes bulk, as well do tenure committees -- so there is a pressure to puff up that essay into a book.

That's not a comment on Hayden, btw. I haven't read her new one.

[Siamak G. Shahneshin]

I haven't read yet Dolores Hayden's A Field Guide to Sprawl, but I'd hope there are things to help professionals and students of planning and design in general. help to stop the sprawl mindset they got use to it, and begin to think and [re]evaluate what we done and continuing to do.

We have crafted a culture bubble, built an environ bubble, where mindsets are the extra-, the mega-, the over- cultures. So-said, "BIGNESS is good." The challenge today is to deflate the bubble before it bursts. The most vulnerable sector may be the environ in the extended sense of the word.

The basic point of shrinkage is that sooner or later our principle premises concerning growth and expansion must be urgently revised and reassessed. I suggest the shrinkage. We have recently founded an international award entitled 'shrinkage award'. The first edition is launced early this year (January 2005). This International Open Design Competition under shrinkage award umbrella is attempted to bring together academics, practitioners, theoreticians, and students in a diverse array of disciplines including art and design community in "poster-form" dialogues / seismographs that were intended above all to alert of current invisible and future problems as well as the social activism and design, responsible practice of thought and decision, and citizenship under shrinkage umbrella.

We used to see posters during the election-window-time in city, or the posters trying to grasp our attention in order to sell to us a product, but ShrinkagePosters are envisioned as – most likely – an international campaign for Good of all and ALL: for the Second Renaissance. It calls people to rethink and reassess the daily thoughts, decisions, attitudes, which go beyond the Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Green Movement, and so forth.

Simply speaking, "shrinkage" can be defined as "smart", "refined", "modest", and "intelligent". It is seen as new art – humanities – and science – paradigm – and converted into "culture".

Attempting to describe the shrinkage I would say it varies from simple portrayals of a transitional landscape to more suggestive characterizations of wholesale destruction of the world. For instance, take the farmlands, free-lands, forests, even wetland and lake lands.

Despite all the arguments from sprawl ers] – shrinkage is inevitable. If we consider sprawl in its extended sense we note that shrinkage is partially caused by sprawl and post-sprawl conditions such as leapfrog or scattered development, commercial strip development, and large expanses of single-use development.

If nothing else, the concept of shrinkage can help us to see how much the design culture itself is an environ, in which we behave in often unexamined ways, based on unspoken assumptions, and unanticipated consequences.

As a result, one of the best places to seek understanding of shrinkage is the study of sprawl and post sprawl and devastating implementation of those modern and post-modern theories, which share their eudaemonist concerns. Given the systematically disappointing results of the sprawl approach, it is time to look seriously at our alternatives.

When asked what shrinkage is, a first answer may well be that it is the engine for long-term prosperity in its true-sense. This line of thought takes us rapidly to the idea that some people feel prosperous when designing new development for the old city; others feel prosperous when designing new cities: prosperity comes down to whatever you happen to like. But this line of thought cannot stay up for long. The whole world today has a plethora of strange, unsustainable landscapes characterized by lacks in future-oriented thoughts and actions.

To introduce shrinkage, as a manifesto for present and future days does not employ counter-theory and thoughts as modern and post-modern pioneers introduced. Rather, shrinkage is the very essence of what we are witnessing, which lends this debate political urgency.

The Industrial Revolution as the first so-called modern era, and the Digital Technology as the second modernity have boldly marked in all areas such as culture of extra- mega- over- and self-ness. The third age which is being called a "reflexive modernism" I would call new Renaissance that has to deal with not only the devastated cultural deterioration but also with the shrunken world: shrinking peace, shrinking iceberg, shrinking population, shrinking public-health, shrinking farmlands, and so-forth.

It is imperative for policy planners, decision makers, marketers, designers and of course ordinary people to adjust their mindset and to call for radical change: culture of shrinkage. That means we should consider abandoning the sprawl-culture and replace it with shrinkage-culture. The real challenge in the coming years, in other word, is - as the old manners are not anymore suitable for present day and future – removal of quantitative manners and replacement of the qualitative thoughts/decisions/designs.

Designers and some rare decision makers are now taking land use and future more seriously than they had for some time, and realizing the importance of clarifying and deepening our understanding of these before rushing into decision and design. How do we realize such unconventional ambitions - how can we stretch boundaries of conventional design-practice? This competition in award form wants to answer to these challenging questions and beyond.

This event "shrinkage award" attempts to redefine the "growth" by situating it in the context of six-thousands-years of misbehaviour and erroneous-thinking of expansion "growth", greediness and self-indulgence. The event is using the entry-posters to switch the tragic nature of the world into the possiblitism to hope for a richer, healthier world for humans and all living creatures. It is a step forward to avoid a tragic catastrophe that human history will otherwise witness in the near future.

This event is a response to a growing, varied and multiple numbers of questions relating to decision and design, such as designing to have a child, designing a house, designing for the future of and entire city or region. These issues are most often framed as a crisis or threat. However, the scope of this event is to bring into surface the phenomenon of shrinkage and its various positive aspects. Our hope is that today's business leaders, decision-makers, politicians, design practitioners, academia, and anyone who is concerned about future will hear the call to greatness featured in shrinkage and respond to it.