Hansen: Desert island challenges not so distant

If you were on a deserted island but knew lots of people were coming, how would you plan for the onslaught?

Your job is to design the roads, zoning and infrastructure. You have to consider cultural and religious demands. You have to build a village, essentially, that ultimately will lead to a town or a city.

For urban planners, this challenge is ideal. They can create a perfect paper blueprint and make it happen — in a manner similar to the master-planned communities of Irvine, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, Foothill Ranch and others.

These cities are carefully aligned, accommodated, rendered and, well, maybe a little boring.

Contrast those beige, wall-lined boulevards with Little Saigon in Westminster and Garden Grove, where businesses seemingly embrace density and disarray.

It’s as if they find comfort in the din, shagginess and intimacy of business glut.

I thought of Little Saigon often during a recent vacation in Bali.

What was once a pristine island is now a random network of potted roads, crooked buildings and wily street dogs.

And yet, somehow it works — incredulously, like an organic, mangled ball of yarn. It’s not perfect, by any means, but the people don’t seem to mind. At least publicly.

There is a curbside restaurant next to a radiator repair shop — spilling fluid into the gutter — next to a small day-care center.

Literally.

Again, I thought of Little Saigon and the mash-up of businesses, those shop collectives that sell everything they can with caveat emptor in fine print.

The belief must be: Why focus your life on one product when more products add up to a multifaceted life?

On the other hand, it could just be selling out to the tourists.

The parallels between the commerce of Bali and the tourist zones of Disneyland, Laguna Beach and the Asian Garden Mall are hard to ignore. All have adapted to the inevitable, catering first to economic vitality.

The questions that face urban planners, however — and indeed our desert island idealist — are more nuanced. The requirements include commerce, sure, but also pollution mitigation, energy consumption, transportation and vision, among other things.

In other words, is the island sustainable?

The many challenges that face urban planning in developing areas fall into a couple of workstreams. First, there is an assumption with any master plan that it will be too costly and rigid to work. So it needs to be phased and flexible. By and large, the plan needs to be a value-creation tool or else there will never be buy-in.

Second, does the vision include both government interests and the people’s needs? Too often global planning forced down the throats of the locals will not work. It’s a common problem that has a name: “forced globalization.”

The irony here is that forced globalization is now the rule — whether we’re talking about Bali, Little Saigon or Laguna’s Forest Avenue.

No matter the age, design or apparent “build-out” of cities across the county, the continued population growth will force a reboot of all urban planning. While Third World countries continue to feel the brunt, developed countries are not immune.

According to a recent report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, it is critical to national economic and social development to address sustainable urban development by design.

“The speed with which many regions of the world are urbanizing, the haphazard spatial development of urban areas, and the deplorable conditions under which more than 800 million slum dwellers live make the need to address urban poverty more urgent than ever,” the report said.

To paraphrase: Think Olympics in Rio.

In almost all cases, urban planning and infrastructure are at the core. But more often than not, land-use regulations and plans are rarely followed. Community organizations are weak, lacking funding and integration into governmental processes. And when there is funding, there is corruption.

So what does all this mean to our poor desert island planner?

Maybe pray you never get found. Turn the island into “Gilligan’s Island,” learn to surf and retire.

On the other hand, you could tackle one business at a time, one road, one district, one village and slowly try to make it better.

--

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.