I’ve only recently moved to Downtown Las Vegas. I came here from Boston, a truly fantastic American city, but am originally from Birmingham, Alabama, a city like Las Vegas that is very much in a rebooting process. It’s cities like Birmingham and Las Vegas that led me into urban planning. While many of my friends will spend their careers working to make fantastic cities from San Francisco to Singapore even better, it’s the allure of working in the less publicized places of the world that drives me. What I’ve found is that we planners are often at a loss for just how to do it. In many ways, the prospect of changing course in the world’s more overlooked cities feels like being a doctor before the discovery of penicillin. Try as we may with our silver bullet cures of convention centers, sports stadia, festival markets, transit-oriented development, or innovation districts, the patients often don’t get better.
I don’t know if the efforts Downtown Project will lead to the discovery of “urban penicillin”, but I do believe that while many planners and politicians are trying to build a city for startups, the DTP is a startup trying to help rebuild a city. The combination of significant property ownership, super smart and committed people, and a city desperate for a reboot creates a unique laboratory for discovering how we can build an economy based on creation and innovation while building inspiring, livable, and happier places. This means that Downtown Project matters to cities and to urban planners, but I think everyone here already knows that. Our collective sense of mission is bigger than making a great downtown for Las Vegas. We believe – whether we’re reducing the burdens of starting a small business, giving support for the next big disruptive idea, creating space for mind-blowing learning, or changing the way we move throughout the city – that our work is bigger than just this moment in time and space. We believe we’re changing the world.
What we may not realize is why urban planning matters to us. It’s easy to look at the discord found in many cities and assign blame to those “in charge;” however, that’s a bit like blaming the firemen for not putting out the forest fire fast enough. While our urban planning ancestors and even some current cousins are to blame for some of our cities’ ills, for decades the field of planning has been trying to put out the simultaneous fires of social disruption, globalization, urban sprawl, and climate change all while funding and trust have been rapidly disappearing. That’s not to say that we’ve done the best job or made all the right moves. As an earlier blog post pointed out “cities are incredibly complex living, breathing things. Urbanism is as much biology as it is geography. Cities are our hive, our web, and our shell.” These complicated organisms can be studied from a thousand different angles and provide an equal number of challenges or insights. While the work of DTP has the opportunity to change the face of downtown Las Vegas for the better, even a conservative estimate shows that we directly impact less than 10% of the broader downtown. Rebooting our city will mean not only making a great llama, but being aware of what happens to the thousands of people on the thousands of parcels of land in the other 90%. While the discovery of penicillin gets credited to Alexander Fleming in 1928, this medical game changer was actually built on decades of discovery and experimentation by other scientists and took more than a decade to be made into a useable treatment by yet another group of scientists. As we set out on our journey of discovery here in Las Vegas, I encourage us not to lose sight of the many urban pioneers that call themselves planners that have and will invest their lives making cities more livable, more just, more sustainable, more democratic, more efficient, and more innovative. The decades of discovery found in the trenches in places from Denmark** to Detroit hold valuable lessons for us to build on and it will be the planners that will take our urban penicillin and treat sick patients all over the world, including here in Las Vegas.
*This is not to say that many of these aren’t good ideas in certain circumstances
** Yes, I know that Denmark isn’t a city, but Copenhagen wasn’t alliterative. I like alliteration almost as much as mixing metaphors.
For more on this interaction between urban planning and innovation check this out.