Rae Town, project planning or urban husbandry? (Part 2)

Part one of this article appeared last week.

THEY ARE called 'urban husbanders', planning visionaries who advocate introducing change incrementally and monitoring it carefully, providing a great opportunity to learn from each step.

So where are the urban husbanders in Jamaica, who ought to be opponents of the mechanistic approach to project planning and urban renewal. If anything, revitalisation is meant to be about problem solving, relying heavily on the expertise of citizen users, and the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of long time residents.

Building on resources to diminish or overcome problems should be the chosen route instead of projects that obliterate worthy resources. This is what is expected in Rae Town and the other 47 communities and neighbourhoods to be 'renewed'.

The imagery of husbandry conjures up a notion of nurturing, care, tending and building on. To a people still emerging from our agricultural roots, this evokes a powerful icon - using our past to reinvent our future.

When the planter boxes were erected on Mountain View Avenue and other thoroughfares, I doubt very much if neighbourhood and community people were consulted, least of all, advised of the options and non-sustainable implications.

Was it meant to convenience pedestrians by shrinking the already narrow pedestrian access; was it understood that it could provide a foil for criminals at night and an open lavatory for people who have no access to downtown sanitary facilities?

Likely, it was sold as training and employment opportunities and not as short term opportunism with probably medium range contractual pop-offs.

Budgets are rarely in place to sustain these programmes which are designed to placate and compound an already bad situation. The Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation which owns the pavements were not even consulted by the implementing ministry.

Rae Town has its Sunday night old hits sessions which has been a staple for 23 years; it is also a fishing village without proper sanitary conveniences. Will project planning provide the necessary husbandry to nurture, build and "enhance what little urban fabric is left in that downtown community", into a diverse place that reflects the city of Kingston? I doubt it.

Downtown Kingston has been neglected for such a long time that it is likely that the urban husbanders are going to lose out to the project planners. The husbanders are essentially advocates, and recall the scorn the former Government Town Planner of recent memory heaped upon one planner, Arlene Dixon, who was painstaking in ensuring that the vision of the Montego Bay community was brought into the mainstream of the planning process.

For doing this, the plan was denigrated to an "advocacy plan", meaning literally that it had no merit. After said Government Planner was finished excoriating the notion of advocacy, any planner who had pretence in that direction would either suppress the inclination or migrate.

Apart from John Maxwell, there may not be anyone who is prepared to take on the husbandry role. He may have to be called out of retirement.

Contributed by Patrick Anderson, president of the Jamaica Institute of Planners. Email: Jiplanners@yahoo.co.uk. The second part of this article will appear next week.

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