Letters From Here

Tony Hsieh, the 38-year-old chief executive of Zappos, had called the 24-hour retreat as a debriefing of sorts. It was almost a year into the Downtown Project, his $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas — an area dominated by bare lots and check-cashing stores about an hour’s drive away.

Everything that people come to Savannah from all over the world to see and experience stems from two key leadership decisions made long ago:

1) Oglethorpe’s original plan, studied the world over as a near–perfect urban design that’s as brilliant now as it was in 1733;

2) The stalwart preservation of his original plan by forward–thinking community leaders like Emma Adler in the 1950s and ‘60s.

That’s it. Everything about Savannah that we might consider noteworthy — SCAD, Gulfstream, even Paula Deen and Pinkie Masters’ — in some way owes its success to just those two sterling examples of foresight.

Don’t believe me? Consider the sad case of Brunswick, Georgia.

Brunswick has never been what you’d call exciting. But with the devastation of the economic downturn, it’s now half boarded up — just a smelly beat-down place you drive through on the way to St. Simons Island.

But here’s the thing: Oglethorpe also founded Brunswick, and also laid it out according to his original Savannah plan.

What happened? At some point, Brunswick’s “leaders” decided they didn’t need those pesky squares slowing down traffic. So they let the streets run right through the middle of them. Only one Brunswick square remains intact, and it’s a pale comparison to even the least impressive Savannah square.

We see that Brunswick is not only paying for that example of poor leadership decades after the fact, it will continue paying dearly for that poor leadership far into the indefinite future.

The three legacies of the [Jane] Jacobsian turn:

• It diminished the disciplinary identity of planning.
• Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency.
• the seeming paucity among American planners today of the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession.