The Perils of Planning

   The Santa Monica Civic Center Working Group is currently developing a plan for the area that is bounded by Ocean Avenue and Fourth Street and Colorado Avenue and Pico Boulevard.
   Since the mid-1930s, the City has developed any number of municipal plans, none of which have been fully implemented, though fragments from all of them can be seen here and there in the townscape. Sadly, though the plans have proliferated, the problems the plans were meant to solve have never been solved – either because the solutions contained in the plans were unworkable or events rendered them obsolete or because the City simply didn’t have the will and the wisdom to take the requisite steps.
   This edition features a rendering and virtually all the text from the 1957 Master Plan (see page 13), because it’s proof, if any were needed, that planning is a perilous process in Santa Monica.
   The plan posited that Santa Monica’s population would grow from 80,000 to 110,000, and presumably based many of its assumptions and recommendatons on that growth. In fact, our population has hovered at about 85,000 for decades.
   At the same time, while it focused on the establishment of an industrial district and rehabbing downtown Santa Monica, it did not see the inevitable tourism boom coming, and, but for the inclusion of a “hotel district,’ made no provisions for it.
   The primary lesson in the 1957 Master Plan is that growth and change are dynamic, volatile and unpredictible, so planners – especially the people who are now working on the Civic Center plan – should see themselves not as master builders of some new and better Santa Monica, but as stewards whose primary job is to do as little harm as possible.