What’s wrong with masterplanning?
What is a master plan?
A master plan is a strategic document that defines complex territorial development. It replaced the local general plan as a more full-fledged document containing, among other things, the territory’s socio-demographic, ecological and behavioral factors.
Spatial design projects require coordinated work of an interdisciplinary and frequently distributed team: urban planners, navigation designers, mobility experts, economists, ecologists, engineers, and authorities. Local communities and businesses are also involved in the process.
What do we get at the end of such intensive teamwork? A document of several development scenarios full of illustrations and texts about the bright future of a city and its inhabitants. Looks nice, but in fact, not achievable.
Hard to keep it up-to-date
Regular master plans provide the development of territories for 20–30 years ahead. At the same time, traditionally, after five years, any document at the strategic level requires updating. Therefore, all the work has to start from the beginning 3 to 6 times, even before the project’s realization. Even worse, the solutions provided in a document lose their relevance almost immediately after the release.
Today, ‘in advance’ seems wrong. Changes to master plans have to be made on an ongoing basis in response to the challenges of a space. But every minor update to a linear printed document inevitably leads to errors and requires verification and approval. Therefore, no one actually cares about the master plan’s relevance after a year or two.
The solution lies on the surface. The master plan development process should move from the sequential implementation of the TOR’s points to the simultaneous joint work of all participants in a unified space.
Irrelevant data
The raw urban data is the major headache for the project developers. The input data provided by the customer is usually incomplete or outdated. Updating and completing datasets require significant expenses at a comprehensive territory analysis stage.
There are also many disparate providers possessing different data layers. So, developers and stakeholders can interpret the data for their benefit, and the development process becomes non-transparent.
To avoid such ambiguity, a single data supplier should be responsible for data relevance and comprehensiveness. So there will be one entry point for any person concerned to evaluate the solution proposed by the project developers relying on data.
Nobody really understands the solution
For most city users, it is hard to apply suggested solutions to themselves. Community participation, whether at the research, design, or post-development evaluation stage, does not actually influence decisions. So even though the master plan predicts the citizens’ life for several years ahead, most people haven’t ever seen it and, if so, don’t understand the document due to its complex structure.
Master plans should be transparent and understandable to every city resident. To achieve this, we must avoid multi-page linear PDF documents with lengthy discourse and complex terms. Instead, we should use one personalized application where everyone, be it a regular citizen or an expert, can follow a solution and imagine its effects on themselves.
…
This is a new approach to designing cities of the future. Aino World is a virtual space for remote collaboration, data-based hypothesis validation and interpretation of the results available to every citizen.
Read more about Aino on our LinkedIn, Instagram and website.
