{"id":9033,"date":"2019-09-06T13:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T17:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/national\/?p=9033"},"modified":"2019-09-13T13:43:15","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T17:43:15","slug":"planning-city-wide-a-primer-part-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/national\/2019\/09\/06\/planning-city-wide-a-primer-part-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Developing Alternatives<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s assume that we\u2019ve managed to develop clear, meaningful objectives that have been made more comprehensive through connecting them strongly to the form of the city, we still face the challenge of generating and evaluating different city-wide design alternatives.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth reiterating at this point that the design process is not<\/i> linear and can\u2014and should\u2014re-inform the objectives and goals. Seeing one alternative, for example, may force one to re-evaluate a specific goal or its weighting against others. This is normal and should be welcomed.<\/p>\n

When dealing with large-scale city design and planning, it\u2019s common to start off with a lot of objectives that seemingly don\u2019t relate to one another very well and\/or that have constraints that are vague and variable. The generation of alternatives\u2014evaluated against the \u2018intermediate\u2019 goals\u2014should help clarify things, so there\u2019s no need to be too forceful in perfecting the objectives before alternatives are generated.<\/p>\n

So, where to start? Well, anywhere. Choosing a fixed set of options\u2014between 3-5 seems to work well\u2014allows for a diverse yet limited collection to begin with. These can be randomly generated without any thoughts towards the objectives, based on certain \u2018exemplary models\u2019, suggested by the existing context, or guided by the goals and objectives. There is no hard-and-fast rule.<\/p>\n

Armed with goals that are connected to city form (even a little) will help in evaluating the alternatives. Certain ones will quickly be eliminated as they violate the objectives by too great a margin. The rest are weighted against one another, with certain ones being developed further or combined\u2014integrating elements of two or more alternatives into a single option. This process of producing alternatives, evaluation and modification continues until the \u2018best\u2019 single option(s) are apparent.<\/p>\n

Anywhere along the process, different options can, and should, be open to wider public debate across diverse stakeholders to sharpen objectives and help with weighting or conflict resolution. Feedback is necessarily slow to filter through but invaluable in creating a more robust, resilient plan.<\/p>\n

The development of alternatives comes with the added demand of representing one’s ideas to themselves and others, via drawing, models, etc. That all<\/i> forms of representation carry biases is often taken for granted and must be given a lot of important attention.<\/p>\n

The growth of various representation softwares has opened many amazing possibilities\u2014such as the ability to easily model and analyze the impacts of different combinations of city patterns over time, across associated metrics\u2014but can also be very deceptive. Expanding on the impacts of city visuals on city form is a series in itself. For our purposes, however, it suffices to say that one should take great care in being aware of the biases behind the representations generated for the design options.<\/p>\n

What methods are typically used in developing alternatives? This is often the domain of designers and there are a number of possible approaches. However, two approaches are quite common:<\/p>\n