And don't laugh just because it's about Long Beach. Yes, Iowa-by-the-Sea has just hired architect and urban planner Stephanie Reich as its first "urban design.... And don't laugh just because it's about Long Beach. Yes, Iowa-by-the-Sea has just hired architect and urban planner Stephanie Reich as its first "urban design officer," and her concepts just may make thet headline ring ture in no long time. A quote:

Placemaking is . . . an important endeavor in urban design, and takes place on a variety of different scales, on all different levels. So placemaking can be at the median level, at the street level, block-by-block, it can be pocket parks or dog runs, and how those discrete places then combine to build identifiable neighborhoods where people can say, for example, “I live in Willmore City,” and really be proud of that place where they live. And how then each of a variety of discrete places within the neighborhood gets tied together, and then that can be tied together in a larger community, and how those connections are made is also a function of creating an important urban design framework so that there’s not . . . discrete places and, in-between, sort of, not necessarily a no-man’s land, but a place that is really not identifiable . . . not distinguishable. So one of the most important opportunities in urban design is to identify the streets as an important place. Mark Winogrond, someone I respect very much, often quotes . . . Louis Kahn: “The street is a room by agreement.” And that’s a very important concept, that all members of the community – businessowners, residents, visitors – have a stake in creating a room by agreement and deciding where the furniture goes.

...

In my view, good urban design is not really achieved by a fixed ideology, a preconceived notion of what a community can look like. It has to develop organically from who is here, first and foremost, and who makes the community, what they want it to be and what we have to work with.

Read the entire interview in the Long Beach business Journal.