Downtown Oklahoma City 2020
For months now we’ve had discussions on OKC Central in which we’ve scrutinized different plans for a potential MAPS 3, asked difficult questions and discussed differing visions on what downtown should look like in the future.
Today this blog takes a different direction.
I’ll still be delving into the daily events, happenings and items of interest involving downtown and the urban core. But when it comes to MAPS 3 and the future, I’m going to be silent. From here on out, this blog will instead feature guest posts from people of different backgrounds. And I’m going to ask each person to write on the same topic: What should downtown Oklahoma City look like in 2020, and how can this vision be best achieved?
The next couple of months may very well be a critical turning point for downtown. I look forward to seeing how this new discussion evolves.
Thank you for joining our conversation on OKC Central. We encourage your discussion but ask that you stay within the bounds of our commenting and posting policy.
Comments
I’ve already received the first guest blog posts … OKC Central is about to be more interesting and more edgy than ever before. There are people who are daily readers of this blog, who make a difference downtown, who I consider to be friends, who won’t like everything that’s about to follow. But I belive the discussion that follows will prove to be cathartic for all, and will expose everybody to ideas and visions never before aired in public.
Well city leaders are even more likely to read the postings of other city leaders and/or people with a good track record of interesting ideas.
So, instead of reporting that the people that designed Core to Shore has no planning or design experience, and their design is set in stone to become Core to Shore for the city.
Why don’t you do some investigating and see that the Design cCommitte that did the Core to Shore is a group with people wwith business degrees but no architecture, planning, landscape architecture, or environmental design experience.
You have the power to put in the paper how the poor design of core to shore was kept out of the actual planners hands.
Do some investigating! I will gain some more respect if you can put some names with the committee that brought core to shore together. Show the people of OKC!
Curt, I’m a bit confused by your assertions here. As I recall, Core to Shore planning included architect Anthony McDermid, urban design and architectural professor Hans Butzer, and as I recall Planning Director Russell Claus and his staff were very involved in the sessions as well.
That’s not to say their work wasn’t flawed. Certainly there are many critics.
I’ve got no problem, however, getting and posting the list of people who participated in the planning.
If you know something that contradicts all this, let me know.
I’ve always hoped that OKC and Tulsa could each become great cities with their own qualities, personality and vibe.
From what I have heard the original Core to Shore was hypethetical, and just showed what all could be included. Some people in sales in the Urban Design department in the OKC planning department have acted like the layout is set in stone. Everyone else in the planning department knows it is a bad design that it doesn’t flow well and is a horrible design, but nobody has the balls to stand up and say so.
Curt, I assure you that the main 3 planners with OKC ties had credentials..the best in the community. The problem is it got hijacked by a planning firm that came in with things any city would love to have already in mind, came to OKC briefly and only studied traffic patterns and existing development, then altered their McMasterplan and voila, you’ve got Core to Shore, they collect their money and run..to the next city.
I have a lot of respect for McDermid and Butzer, and the two are great architects. Butzer did a great job with the Skydance Bridge. I just think they might have been more interested in creating opportunities for dazzling urban design rather than creating a functional, free-flowing masterplan. The the planning firm are the evil culprits behind C2S in my opinion. And btw, C2S isn’t bad. It’s a vision that will make downtown a lot better, and in all honestly, its detrimental potential will be far outweighed by its positive change. The problem though is that the detrimental potential is far too great for us to not fix the mistake we are about to make so that we can truly get the best plan out of this.
As for Steve’s comment on Tulsa, I’d say that’s setting the bar pretty damn low these days. I used to have a lot of admiration for Tulsa, and things were looking up and dirt was moving on a lot of projects up the Turnpike but as of right now..dead. I have never seen it deader in downtown Tulsa before.
I just know what I heard from people in the Planning Department in OKC. They don’t like the design either. They know it can be much more functional.
I’m going to have to agree with Curt. There is a lot more behind thes scenes than you realize or know about. The City and City Leaders aren’t exactly innocent for allowing “creative thinking” to rule. Here’s one for you, what does ODOT STILL have an off ramp coming into and dead ending in the “Central Park?” Why isn’t ODOT keeping the highway depressed as originally promised, and is now slightly below grade where it dissects the park, thus disjoining it and eliminating the potential FOR it to connect all the way to the river. If it was underground as originally promised, FYI there would be no need for Skydance Bridge BTW.
The reason they had to raise the level of the highway is because they didn’t realize how high the water table is. They planned the highway without doing proper soil/water table research.
Reading the words “Downtown Oklahoma City 2020″ immediately made my mind jump to a blog that I was linked to a couple months ago… http://envisionokc2020.blogspot.com/ …which comes from a *dramatically* different future outlook. It made me wonder if anyone who will be guest blogging will be from that sort of background? (ie that the downtown we need to be working toward needs to be able to handle a potential future where gasoline is scarce)
Very journalistic of you, Steve.