EDITOR’S PAGE

I HEARD once of a writer “who imposed order upon chaos and lived as if it were true.” It occurs to me that city planning works in much the same way. Those who succeed at it surely understand – deep down at the level where the unconscious feeds the intuition -that life, cities and people have within themselves a dynamic that will not be directed down anybody’s one true way.

This is why more Dallas planners than I care to remember have raced right off the track and crashed into oblivion. Enchanted with the elegance of their own ideas, they became runaway trains and were sabotaged, finally, by powerful forces with too much to lose to go on any longer.

It is the same today. There are energies here that will express themselves no matter what the master planner says. We have a persistent frontier allegiance to the rights of private property, including the rights of homeowners. City Manager Charles Anderson knew what he was doing when he delayed replacing Jack Schoop, who resigned as planning chief several months ago. Realizing that the process matters as much as the person, Anderson has taken a careful approach to filling this slot. What is needed, he says, is not simply an experienced planner, but a skilled negotiator who can accomplish an accommodation among the opposing interests that converge on key zoning decisions. It’s also essential to Anderson that the new planner understand the bottom line of development. A sound idea. Chances are that this will save time and prevent unnecessary conflict.



PLANNERS DON’T HAVE TO CRASH AND BURN



Anderson’s idea of hiring a planner who will also serve as an assistant city manager responsible for transit and zoning makes a lot of sense. If Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is approved by the voters in the August election, it will grow increasingly important for City Hall to maintain a vital connection with the transit authority. Someone will need to make sure that transportation follows development in a workable pattern. It will be equally nec-essary to guide high-rise growth along major traffic arteries; this new density will improve the economics of rapid transit.

This liaison with DART and the Dallas Transit System would be a natural role for the assistant city manager responsible for planning and transportation. Not only would the arrangement improve the coordination of vital decisions, it would also signal that planning is to be an integral part of the city manager’s office, not an esoteric exercise that occurs on a distant planet and catches everyone by surprise when it reaches the real world.

Nowhere has process proven to be more valuable than in the Dallas2,000 program, where groups throughout the city were asked to imagine how each area of Dallas will look by the end of the century. The results were not startling: Most people could foresee dramatic growth to the north, stagnation to the south, problem pockets in the west, stability in the Park Cities and near North Dallas and increasing urbanization in Oak Lawn and East Dallas. But the program failed to formulate the framework for future action that had been hoped for, and today, many people choose to bury Dallas 2,000, not to praise it.

Someone who sees it differently is Fred Brodsky, a relatively new developer in Dallas, who participated in the program. This project was the first time he had done anything in the city outside his own work, and he was fascinated by the process, which put him in touch with neighborhood people for the first time. As a result of that experience, he is now trying to buy land for a light industrial park in southern Dallas, something he says he would never have had the nerve to risk if it hadn’t been for Dallas 2,000. So, chalk up at least one success for the program.



OAK LAWN: MODEL FOR THE FUTURE?



The truth is that we already have a planner at work in Dallas -Jack Diamond of Toronto, who is devising a blueprint to guide the future growth of the Oak Lawn area. Under contract to the City of Dallas and the Oak Lawn Forum (a group of residents, business people and developers), Diamond and his associate, Kevin Garland, are holding extensive meetings with members of the community. Their preliminary ideas have been well received, and with good reason. Diamond’s vision of Oak Lawn respects the internal logic that is already implicit in the area: high-rise commercial development along Central Expressway, Woodall Rodgers and Harry Hines; medium-size office buildings along Lemmon Avenue; low-rise condominiums near the Mansion hotel; and Turtle Creek preserved as Dallas’ great natural show-place.

There are two critical keys to Diamond’s plan: keep the density on McKinney Avenue and Knox Street down to an intimate scale by changing current zoning, and hold the line in the residential neighborhood between Oak Lawn Avenue and Hawthorne so that this area can remain an enclave for middle-income families. If he succeeds with these two points, other aspects of the plan will follow and the result will be an urbane community in which we all can take pride.

Oak Lawn may well be the model for future Dallas planning, and Jack Diamond (or someone with similar skills), working with the city and the neighborhoods on a contract basis, may be the right catalyst to help things happen in a creative way. This might take some of the pressure off the assistant city manager in charge of planning and make that person more of an orchestrator and less of a lightning rod.

It may sound strange at this point togive Chuck Anderson an A-plus for planning when we still have no planning director, but that’s what he deserves. With patience and subtlety, he’s helping Dallassearch out a style that will mark this city inthe imagination of its people.