Uhhh, sorry but I don't understand. What is the problem here?

Huh o.o

Yes, Urban planning hasn't evolved at all in practice, while it has done in theory. That's true of a lot of things.

It's very glaring in planning - to the point that the practice of urban planning has stagnated so much that it, as a profession, is often reviled or avoided by its sister fields.

I know a little bit about intelligent layouts only because I took drafting and design, and architecture in high school, and did some landscaping and nursery operations at a vocational school as part of a special program. I've also studied feng shui enough to get the gist of it. It's not exactly what you're referring to here, but I think the principles scale out similarly; you want the high traffic spots to be easily accessible, you want corridors to those places to be wide enough not to get choked, you want everything to be laid out efficiently and in an aesthetically pleasing way, ideally. Looking at this? Dude.... I don't care what the application is, that's a nightmare c.c

The District mall must be one of the most horribly laid out parking lots I've ever seen. I was stuck in it once for 20 minutes because traffic was so bad. People weren't even able to back their cars out because every single lane was packed to a standstill....

Haha, yeah. I was thinking about that during my last meeting with Mr. Cherry (head of that division at the firm). Parking itself is overblown in CA. At least if you must do that much parking, integrate it with landscape and water strategies, make it a multivalent surface.

I feel like I spend so much time hanging out in parking lots.. such much that they should be considered a diffuse urban mat entirely of it's own typology.

Well, I think one of the main issues with that place is that the parking lots have so few exits. As I recall, its a parking lot that can, on a full day, easily have around 1000 or so cars in it, but only has 3 exits, spread far apart from each other. Just as well, that entire mall is a fiasco if you consider that you literally have to drive around to get around in it, unless you're up for walking a mile just to go to the pet store AND Bestbuy.

The fact that you have to walk a mile despite that you drove is what bothers me about OC.

<sigh> I can't wait to graduate in June. Then its back to pleasant living in Rancho Palos Verdes until I go to grad school x3

it's nothing that can't be fixed by fire. LOTS of fire. Maybe dynamite.

Yeah, the layout of the District parking lot is a joke. I wish they'd stop wanting to tear down the hangers too. Also, I've always been wary of building of homes and schools on top of old bases ever since I learned of the whole Love Canal thing from Niagra o.o

Hey,  dreamous and I live near there!

Heh, Ive been meaning to welcome you guys over coffee but I'm like 2 years late now. I'll be in and out over summer.

you boys should take aaron and i there during califur to get a break from the furmeet lol

Wow, I might actually be able to make it there this year.

What's with the depressing theme this year...

no clue. another con was doing post apocalyptic as well.

if ya make it shuold keep an eye out for me and we can get together for a bite or some such. :)

Lol, I was born there.

I swear you lost me ten journals ago. Also, most of the cities I live in never feel like they match sensible plans like this, just more, we need another mall, put it here, more houses more houses xP

This looks like a truly horrible place to be in. I've never seen such a poorly integrated master plan before in my life. Not to mention some very awkward spaces where you'd be hard pressed to build anything.

lol, I wouldnt call it horrible.

Ok, not horrible, but we can agree that whoever did the master plan must of made it with their eyes closed. Yeah I saw that the parking lot for the mall is pretty screwed. Probably didn't do a good job with the runoff either... It needs biosw, er bioretention basins. I nearly forgot you Harvard types don't call them "bioswales. XD Everything is better with bioretention basins.

treatment wetland... but, the road layout is not a problem. Honestly, there's nothing in that drawing that would indicate a problem to me (despite that one never uses gradients in their zone colors... let alone uses colored zoning).

Otherwise I agree, the site is striated by 2 or 3 channelized creeks originating behind Loma Ridge near Irvine Park. The site has AMAZING access from Amtrack, metrolink and a Jamboree (a freeway in training). I think it's a perfect place for congestion.

The problem is the objective is always to fill in the land with a color that means something concrete, like single family, or mall, rather than framing it as an open ended collection of fields that are colonized according to shifting economic and political regimes - the frameworks being the only constant Am I clearly a disciple?

Surprisingly successful was the reuse of base housing in those airfield lots. It's fairly dense for south OC, pushing FAR 3 I bet.

I was actually wondering about why exactly they decided to make the master plan as vague as possible. You'd think that would be the absolute opposite of what a master plan is supposed to be. What are those huge white spaces supposed to be anyways?

Odd...

You'd think that the necessary planning and forecasting required for architectural building would advance as fast (if not faster) than the methods and capabilities of their use.

Then again, we are kinda dumb...

UGH

As a student of urban planning, I am very interested to hear why you think that way.

I recognize that place xD was living around there earlier. It's not that bad. really. The driver's are terrible tho >.>

You should try Boston drivers.. holy fuck man.

the 80s came along and screwed up the whole reason behind a lot of things. it gave us the internet, but it sure messed up everything else.
i think the main problem about america urban (AND regional) planing, is its still worshiping the automobile, which was already a big mistake even then.
i know a lot of people won't agree with me, or can't or won't see it, but i really see that as being at the heart of the problem. that and trying to make everything have to begin and end with little green pieces of paper, whether there's any real need for a particular thing to do so or not.

60's gave us the Internet. What do you mean by little green pieces of paper?

not even arpa net existed yet in the sixty's. it wasn't until the mid to late 80s the internet went public. the most compact computers in the 60s, late 60s at that, were rack units the size of refrigerators with discrete transistors, and still well beyond the budgets of mere mortals. believe me, i graduated high school in 1966, and no one then had any idea that what we're doing now could even be done. they thought computers were just more complex adding machines and that you would always have to be some kind of math genius ever to actually use them. late 60s saw the first small scale ttl ic's go into mass production. it wasn't until the late 70s that there even was any such thing as a PERSONAL computer. but this digresses. there WERE many great things accomplished in the 60s and 70s. other kinds of things, that people went to jail and got called dirty hippies to accomplish.

little green pieces of paper = currency. that stuff in your pocket with which to buy things, only now they're usually just number on a mag strip and in some bank's files.

ARPANet was invented in the 60's. At least I thought.

I thought so.

"The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420."

-Wikipedia