Subject:
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Urban planning exercise using LEGO bricks
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.mediawatch
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Date:
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Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:57:16 GMT
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Viewed:
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3892 times
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From today’s Baltimore Sun:
Workshop focuses on coping with region’s projected growth
By Timothy B. Wheeler
Sun Reporter
June 10, 2006
If you think the Baltimore-Washington area is too crowded, just where would you
put an additional 1.2 million people if you had to?
That was the challenge taken up yesterday by 250 planners, developers,
community activists and elected officials from throughout Central Maryland.
United by little more than a belief that the region cannot afford to keep
growing the way it has been, people frequently at odds over development plans
hunched over tables in the Baltimore Convention Center and played a good-natured
planning game with a serious intent.
Stacking colored Legos like poker chips on a giant map of the region, they
pondered and debated where to put the increased population projected for the
next 25 years, inside or outside the beltways girdling Baltimore and Washington,
or along major highway and rail corridors. Plastic toy blocks of different
colors represented housing and jobs.
The abstract nature of the game probably kept fights from erupting, but not
clashing visions of the future for Central Maryland, which has 4.1 million
residents.
“That’s sprawl,” suggested Nancy Floreen, a Montgomery County Council member,
as she eyed a clump of white, yellow and blue Legos that her table-mates had
placed on the map in Bel Air. They symbolized the thousands of new homes and
jobs proposed for the Harford County community.
“That’s realistic,” countered Col. Kenneth O. McCreedy, commander of Fort Meade
in Anne Arundel County. Wearing his camouflage uniform, McCreedy reminded the
group at the table that tens of thousands of jobs are destined to relocate in
the next several years to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford and to his Army
installation as a result of a nationwide base reshuffling by the Pentagon.
The daylong workshop, dubbed Reality Check Plus, is the third of four being
held around Maryland in a yearlong effort that organizers hope will yield a new
blueprint for the state’s long-term growth.
Similar sessions have been held on the Eastern Shore and in Western Maryland,
and another next week will focus on Southern Maryland.
“We want to be the key to change,” said Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director
of 1000 Friends of Maryland, a group advocating more compact development. Other
sponsors were the Urban Land Institute’s Baltimore branch, representing
developers, and the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at
the University of Maryland, College Park.
The exercises, each of which has drawn hundreds of participants, are being held
as polls find many Maryland residents unhappy about the fast pace of growth in
their communities.
In a tacit recognition of the public’s concern, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley
and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, who are vying for the
Democratic nomination for governor this year, showed up to welcome the crowd and
to promote their records as advocates for sensible growth.
They sat down to play the game briefly before slipping out, pleading other
commitments.
“We need to do thinking outside the box,” Duncan told the group. “The jobs are
coming; the people are coming. Where are we going to put them all?”
O’Malley, who followed Duncan to the podium, acknowledged the concerns of
suburban residents about traffic congestion and overcrowded schools. He urged
participants to put their job and housing Legos on the map inside Baltimore,
saying the city is pushing redevelopment in a bid to rebuild its population. “We
welcome it,” he said.
In interviews, Duncan and O’Malley criticized the growth-management policies of
Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., saying he has cut funds for preserving
land from development while not doing enough to promote transit or
redevelopment.
“We need to get back to Smart Growth policies in the state,” Duncan said,
referring to the pioneering sprawl-fighting laws adopted a decade ago under
Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening.
Audrey E. Scott, the state secretary of planning, defended Ehrlich, who was
invited but did not attend. Pointing to the governor’s Priority Places
initiative, which has offered state help on six redevelopment projects around
the state, Scott said, “My governor is extremely involved and committed to Smart
Growth.”
Scott told the workshop participants over lunch that the military base
realignment would pose stiff challenges for the region, as planners project
60,000 to 120,000 new arrivals within three to six years.
“Twenty years in planning jargon is the blink of an eye,” she said. “Three to
six years is an emergency.”
Most participants seemed to respond by filling Baltimore’s outline on the map
with Legos and by placing other Legos along highways and rail lines, and around
Washington’s Capital Beltway. Others argued for putting jobs, and at least some
housing, in the near and far suburbs.
At Scott’s table, black Legos representing low-density housing were scattered
around the map.
“I lost that battle,” she said.
At the end of the day, an instant analysis of the Lego future constructed by 25
tables of participants revealed that they had proposed relatively modest shifts
in current patterns of growth, with small increases in housing and jobs near
transit lines and in designated growth areas. The percentage of development
inside the beltways slipped slightly.
But with growth pressures spreading ever farther into rural areas of the state,
even maintaining housing and job densities in the region would be a change of
direction, said Gerrit Knaap, director of UM’s Smart Growth Research Center.
Reality Check Plus organizers said they plan to produce a more detailed report
on the workshop by autumn and hope to mobilize public sentiment for changes in
laws and policies to accomplish the growth participants favor.
For Marsha McLaughlin, Howard County’s planning director, the satisfaction of
directing growth where the participant thinks it should go, without regard for
political pressures, was tempered by the future reality it represented.
“It’s fun to play with blocks,” she said, but she added that she wasn’t sure
what would come of it.
With most participants choosing to place new housing and jobs along rail and
subway lines, she said, she hopes that might build public support for upgrading
the region’s transit system.
“It takes a lot of will to find the money,” she said.
Marc Nelson Jr.
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