For Rochester, Regarding plans for Renaissance Square

For Rochester
Regarding plans for Renaissance Square
by Bill Reed

Every city has a unique Story – the story of its place. This story describes the evolution of the geologic, biological, and human forces that have shaped it, its purpose and its course into the future. The greatest cities are identifiably unique and have their own personalities. The great city planner and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, Jamie Lerner, states that every great city has a ‘vocation,’ or a purpose, for its people and the land that supports it.

The best building projects are informed by and are designed in cooperation with these forces that continue to shape the City and its environs. A major building project is an opportunity to rediscover the forces and aspects that make the City of Rochester unique. These unique qualities can help the City identify aspects of its culture and geography and urban structure that cannot be replicated by any other city.

Engaging the community in a process of rediscovering the attributes that have formed the City is a very powerful and effective way to address the best potential for the use and design of the Renaissance Square site. It can be done in a way that unites people around common ideas rather than compromise and argue over ideas that do not have the generative power of meaningful purpose.

This project is an opportunity to leverage the uniqueness of Rochester to create a non-displaceable foundation for economic development and the inspiration for a new way of approaching the revitalization of the City.

A Story of the Process, McAllen, Texas, USA (a project process led by Regenesis of Boston and Santa Fe)

The charrette began Monday morning with a presentation of the understanding of the patterns of place to the design team and about twenty local stakeholders. The framework was posted on the wall and used, throughout the power point presentation, as a way of helping people see the connections between and among the images, facts and anecdotes presented, as well as their present and future significance for the project and the community.

The patterns were refined into potential: the ability to facilitate exchange through diversified storages. The patterns and potential were developed into principles based on these understandings ranging from how to configure spaces to how to enable exchanges, cultural, economic, and ecological. The design team gathered to begin its work. Given that the team was charged with presenting a substantially complete conceptual master plan, with illustrations, to the same community group on Friday afternoon, the pressure to immediately jump into drawing up ideas was intense. The developer, committed to creating a place-based design, slowed the team down so that the assessment team could engage them in a facilitated process to translate the story framework into design and process principles and concepts. Over the next several days of work, these became touchstones for an intense but creatively exciting design process, serving as sources of inspiration, as well as means for reconciling technical and engineering issues as they came up.

The result was a live/work commercial/cultural center that provided recreation as well as biological treatment for drinking water. The potential for economic as well as biological and ecosystems services are obvious. The ecosystem services become central to the project, allowing continued stewardship and a continual reminder of its central importance.

As one of the developers noted, this was truly design by discovery rather than design by decision.
Perhaps equally important, was the potential this process offered to the community of McAllen. A shared story framework—one developed out of a deepening understanding of place, enables us to create our own stories within it. It is a means for keeping the storying process alive in how we shape our community, define our identity and determine what we are uniquely able to contribute.

By engaging McAllen with its own story, using a pattern framework, this relatively small scale project gave them the basis for continuing the storying process, building from the patterns they seek to embed as they continue on the wider process of recreating the physical form, image, character and sense of place of their community.
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comment by Harry Davis:

It is time to engage Rochester, NY in this process. It is time to do away with the political, money grabbing destructive habits of our current government.

If you are against ren square and are for High Speed Rail in Rochester with inter-modal transportaion, then you already support Harry Davis for City Council.

High speed rail is the biggest economic development for upstate New York in 150 years, since the Erie Canal.

It is time for CHANGE.
Harry Davis or Rochester City Council