Fort Trumbull - Alan J. Plattus: The Planner

The Editorial Board invited participants in the Jan. 28 Fort Trumbull roundtable to write some of their own thoughts about the discussion and what they would like to see happen next. Read the full package here.

It might seem strange to suggest that a city can plan its way out of a controversy that appears to have been created by planning in the first place, but I believe that is a real possibility, and opportunity, for New London at this time.

Planning at its most contentious can, as the citizens of New London know all too well, pit neighborhood interests against economic development goals, citizens against government, public against private, and even neighbor against neighbor.

It is no accident than many of the most effective and familiar planning and community organizing strategies are grounded in advocacy-based and even adversarial techniques and rhetoric. Nevertheless, planning can also be a means and an occasion for diverse constituencies to sit down together and discover common interests and goals that can be materialized in the form of win-win opportunities for city building.

For better or worse, these opportunities sometimes only emerge in the wake of, and actually as the result of, contentious and divisive proposals and processes that awaken everyone concerned to the need to rediscover common purpose and work together towards shared goals. Thus planning and community building can be seen, like almost everything else of long-term value, as a slowly developing process that goes through inevitable stages not unlike adolescence, maturity and eventually exhaustion and renewal.

It is in that spirit that one might suggest that the time has finally come to revisit not the controversy and pain of the Fort Trumbull saga, but rather the concrete and practical ingredients of the plan that will move that site forward, and turn it back into an organically integrated and productive part of the local community and economy.

Re-opening that discussion is, first and foremost, an opportunity for more members of the community to participate and develop a stake in the redevelopment of Fort Trumbull, in a way that was simply not possible in the atmosphere of the initial stages of the project. This will require open minds on all sides of a very large table, since the goal cannot be revenge, punishment or vindication.

Nor can one automatically assume that the current plan is either thoroughly worthless or definitively complete, but rather something like the starting point of a detailed discussion that may confirm some aspects, update others, and give the whole plan a level of concrete, three-dimensional reality that will allow everyone concerned, including potential developers and investors, to actually see the vision that the community has for the future of Fort Trumbull.

At best, this will involve not only vision and visualization, but also a frank description of what the streets, buildings, open space and waterfront of this historic and prominent site are intended to be for future residents and visitors, beyond a simple collection of uses and infrastructure.

As a frequent visitor with family ties to New London, as a student of cities, as an urban designer working all over Connecticut, I see Fort Trumbull as a huge and unique opportunity, not just a page in planning history that, in any case, now needs to be turned. This site could and should be both the economic development engine that was originally intended, and also the highly livable, walkable, transit-oriented downtown neighborhood that it once was.

But if it is to be a real neighborhood as well, then residents and businesses together must be prepared and able to recognize and use it as such. This should be the over-arching goal and challenge for any new planning process, and I would be eager and honored to participate in such a process.