Something we didn’t plan for

By Patrick Wirtz

Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 12:38 p.m.

Learning from Las Vegas is the title of an iconic book that first gave some positive recognition to the cultural significance of our market-driven landscape. But Janet O’Neill begs to differ. O’Neill, president of Britain’s Royal Town Planning Institute, was in town last week for the national conference of the American Planning Association (APA), and had this to say: “I wouldn’t think I’d take much back home [from Las Vegas]. We’re so far ahead.”

The convention brought 6,000 city and regional planning professionals to discuss issues ranging from growth impact fees and public art to transportation corridors and nature preservation districts, in a town where all of the above seem to be in short supply.

Of course, O’Neill’s snooty answer may have come because she was still reeling from being in Vegas for the first time. She says that the connection between public policy and environmental concerns is much further developed in Europe than it is here. In the U.K., development is tied to transportation. The national government sets land-use standards that encourage developers to build only if connected with public transportation networks and to construct within established areas instead of destroying the surrounding open space. Sound like Las Vegas?

Actually, local planners sure hope so. “Las Vegas is more progressive than they thought, particularly in the use of planning technologies,” says Las Vegas city planner Peter Lowenstein.

Planners attended tours through the Valley; Henderson made the strongest impression. Elizabeth Tyler, a community planner in Urbana, Illinois, thought the city displayed “thoughtful, balanced growth” and had “gotten the right extractions from development,” while William Morris, village manager of Ruidoso, New Mexico, was also “very impressed” by the bike paths of Green Valley and the revitalization of Water Street. “It’s not in-your-face,” he said, meaning that it is not the Strip.

Still, the consensus among APA attendees was that while their communities share the same issues facing Las Vegas, including rapid growth and water management, the scale here is in a different league. Further, the planners have the impression that very little planning, of the sort that typically restrains development, actually takes place here. “When we’re talking about planning,” asked Mitchell Silver, director of planning in Raleigh, North Carolina, “are we talking about the same things?”

In the case of CityCenter, maybe not. During a video presentation on the green bona fides of the huge casino-hotel project, a series of construction shots accompanied by heroic music was interrupted by a quiet interlude of a forest floor (wet, green and clearly not anywhere near Nevada) with the words “... with a commitment to sustainability” before returning to the muscular construction shots.

APA planners were aghast that the “planning” stage for the monster project, from conceptualization to approval, took only five and a half months—the crowd murmured audibly. Construction began in the summer of 2006, and the resort will open by November 2009. “A typical fast track,” said Bill Smith, president of MGM Mirage Design Group, without a hint of irony.

Workshop attendees were hesitant to uncritically praise the project—one whose speed and lack of opposition suggests that planners are not as essential here as they might like to think they are elsewhere. Still, Americans tend to appreciate large-scale ambition, and even the APA crowd reserved a sense of respect for the audacity of CityCenter, and by extension, Las Vegas.

When Smith described the new Cirque du Soleil show at CityCenter as being Elvis-based, a voice in the crowd blurted, “Elvis is coming back for the opening, right?”