Places: Urban designer from Britain advocates long-term approach
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Fallingwater's gates are painted Frank Lloyd Wright's signature color, Cherokee red. They were sold as is, with a gallon of matching paint for touch-ups.Click photo for larger image.
The Remaking Cities conference held in Pittsburgh in 1988 -- the one that featured a keynote address by Prince Charles, who arrived in a blinding snowstorm -- was "very important for British urban design," said Alan Simpson. "We took home a lot of knowledge that we never had before, and I think we got ahead of you."
Simpson, an architect and writer who lives in Yorkshire, England, made his remarks last week at the half-day Cornerstones conference, which brought together more than 100 architects, developers, students and others at the SouthSide Works Cinema for an exchange of ideas about remaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Simpson had been a participant in Remaking Cities, which focused on ways grassroots leadership and quality design can revitalize older industrial towns. He brought back to England the concept of the Regional Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT), sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and pioneered in America in the late 1960s by Carnegie Mellon University architect and urban designer David Lewis and others. R/UDATs bring together architects, historians, economists and other professionals to brainstorm with community leaders in design workshops. The Remaking Cities R/UDAT, you may recall, focused on ideas for redeveloping steel mill sites in Homestead, Duquesne and McKeesport.
In 2001, Simpson was invited by the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward to create a renaissance program, and in the past four years he has worked with 18 towns of between 150,000 and 300,000 people to create long-range plans for their evolution over the next 25 to 40 years.
"For many of these communities there was no plan," said Simpson, whose title is Urban Renaissance Champion.
He urged everyone to think beyond the traditional five-year plan, which elected officials with finite terms tend to favor. Business owners, homeowners and others have "long-term commitments to towns that go beyond politics," he said.
First Published October 12, 2005 12:00 am
