Redesigning America
Changing the face of the country, one community at a time
Archived article from Oct 15, 1999
By Douglas Frank
Rutgers urban planner Anton Nelessen once planted a bush and a tree on a barren strip in front of his Route 18 apartment to add a little greenery to the freeway. The action was a benchmark statement in a career devoted to battling the growth of strip malls and congested highways.
"Sprawl has ravaged the landscape of suburban America," proclaims Nelessen's Web site, www.anavision.com. "And citizens are clamoring for better-designed neighborhoods that recapture the sense of community that defined the American dream."
In person, he maintains that, while large single-family homes, preapproved years ago, will continue to be built all over the country, the current trend shows that people younger than 29 and older than 52 are attracted by the services and ambience found in more urban areas. The younger folks, he says, are looking for a hip place to live, and the older ones are tired of cutting grass.
"If you want to attract the suburbanite to the city, plant flowers and trees. All this green will attract birds, and if you attract birds then you will get suburbanites," says the associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, only half jokingly.
Besides his appointment at Rutgers, he is also head of A. Nelessen Associates Inc. in Princeton, where he now lives. And he learns about people's quality-of-life preferences from a patented process he developed himself.
Nelessen's "visioning process," called "Design by Democracy," employs photographs and computer wizardry to simulate what a redesigned section of city or town might look like versus what it looks like now. He shows these simulated designs to residents, who then indicate their particular preferences in a Visual Preference Survey and Community Questionnaire that is specifically tailored to help neighborhoods define and realize their common vision for the future.
It is a process that has made him successful in dozens of places in the United States, Europe and Africa.
"We use a bottom-up approach to urban planning," he declares. "By changing the old process of master planning to a more interactive process, implementation happens instantaneously. In Milwaukee, for instance, some things were already changing even as we were developing other parts of the plan. We would come out one week with a recommendation, and six to 10 weeks later it would be in action. We were being taken seriously, because it was a direct interactive process with the movers and shakers in the city.
"Ours is not a top-down process where an all-knowing consultant proclaims something and everyone follows because he must know best because we're paying him so much," Nelessen says. "That old process didn't work. Too many times we developed these plans and they didn't go anywhere; they wound up on a shelf someplace."
Rather, he recommends that planners "find out what the community at large and its leaders are thinking first, then proceed to study and make proposals."
He has used this approach for more than 85 projects since 1987 in counties and cities in Florida, Wisconsin, Maryland, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Nevada, Indiana, Tennessee, Oregon, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa.
Among the more recent projects:
--The redevelopment plan for downtown Milwaukee was recently approved by the city council and the planning staff. It encompasses 330 blocks and includes the elimination of part of a major freeway, some 13,000 new housing units, about 7 million square feet of nonresidential uses, a new transit facility, the Milwaukee Museum of Fine Arts, an international Harley Davidson Museum, a huge entertainment/virtual reality complex and three new hotels.
--A visioning process for San Antonio has just been completed. The planning process tested the acceptability of a range of transit options, including major bus enhancements and the imposition of a light-rail system for commuters that would be installed over an existing railroad line.
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