When I hear of urban planning, my mind automatically pictures urban renewal, that widespread failure of the 1960s intended to reinvent cities that were losing population to the suburbs.  I’m a city dweller but nearly every urban renewal project I’ve ever seen or heard about makes me want to head for the hills; the hills of the suburbs.

Fifty years ago the answer to urban blight was to knock down historic homes and commercial buildings in a city center and replace them with open space, but not just any open space, concrete open space.  Uninspired block structures of cement and pre-cast stone were stacked into planters and fountains with a tree or two plunked down in the middle of it all.  Planners believed once the buildings were out of the way, we would all congregate in the sunny open spaces.  They failed to consider a couple of important things.

First, few places are more uncomfortable in the summer than fields of asphalt in the sun.  All that tar and stone and brick absorb the heat and send it right back onto the people walking around on it.   It didn’t take long for citizens to feel they were roasting out there so they stayed inside their air conditioned spaces or sat on the shady porch or front stoop. The sparse vegetation in the plazas struggled for the same reason.   A tulip here and there and the trees surrounded by water-repellent inorganic surface material kept municipal grounds crews busy with constant replacement.

Winter then brought a new problem. The open landscapes were pummeled by winds which picked up speed in the canyons of the taller buildings ringing the open spaces.  The surface was icy and unforgiving, lacking guardrails or even walls to lean against.  Ambitious pedestrians who ventured forth provided a spectacle of entertainment as they slipped and slid across the tundra.

In Syracuse, the open plazas leave me cold.  The Federal Building and Plaza remind me of former communist eastern block projects I saw in East Germany shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.  The Everson Museum is a thrilling and important work of I.M. Pei, however the stone nothing of a space upon which it rests is useless to all but skateboarders.  Not even the addition of berms and plantings a few years ago makes it attractive.  And Hanover Square, our oldest downtown business district, is better now that the clunky and inappropriate paver fountain thing has been removed.  I would still like to see it returned the way it was way back when.

There is an urban planning experiment being studied in other American cities that I would love to see explored in Syracuse, and our one-two punch of city county leaders Mayor Stephanie Miner and County Executive Joannie Mahoney are just the visionaries who could do it.

It’s called GIS, or Geographic Information System.  Using satellite imagery and software called intelligent mapping, a University of California professor named Nicholas de Monchaux and his students are looking at dead urban spaces such as unused roads, alleys and paved areas near industrial parks and highways in San Fransisco, New York, New Orleans and Minneapolis.  Unlike the gigantic and centralized Big Dig project in Boston which relocated the central arterial beneath the ground and opened up a green space where the multiple-lane highway once stood, de Monchaux advocates taking back tiny slivers of unused space and turning it into parks and other green spaces.  He calls it “urban acupuncture” for the thousands of little areas that can be improved with the needs of the neighborhood in mind.

In Syracuse this wouldn’t mean turning the Federal Plaza into a park, as much as I’d love to see that happen, but it could reclaim all the dead zones in our challenged neighborhoods around the city and make them healthier and friendlier places to be.  Developers would follow with new homes and small decentralized neighborhood businesses much like the original settlers of our great American cities, according to the de Monchaux plan.  The idea is not to turn an entire city into rural fields again, but to replace unused concrete and asphalt tracts with space that is used, healthy and admired.

On a fundamental level, this sounds like little more than a community garden project, however it signals a 21st century approach to human settlement.  With rampant foreclosures and adjustments in long established migratory patterns created by this Great Recession, we have an opportunity to pause and merge vision with computer software, creativity with pragmatism, and most hopeful of all, we have the chance to be better urban planners than our predecessors of fifty years ago.