Are city master plans, like New Year resolutions, doomed to fail?

Historically, the culture of making New Year resolutions dates back to ancient Babylon, a people who made promises to their gods for the New Year. The promises themselves often had to do with concrete yet easily achievable tasks such as vowing to return borrowed farm equipment. To date, world over, towards the end of a calendar year, it is common practice for people to prepare for the upcoming New Year, often with a list of resolutions on how one plans to make the next twelve months much better. It is seen as a perfect time to dream big, look back, recalculate, realign our dreams and set new targets as we prepare to flip the next new page in our lives. Indeed a bag full of ambition that can best be captured as a New Year gift by us to ourselves wrapped in the audacity of hope. But, are New Year resolutions the road to success or a recipe for disaster? Recent research has shown that new-year resolutions may not be an effective antidote in our lives. The time and energy spent drawing new goals and keeping us on our toes to tick the checklist often times presents a scene for frustration. Sooner than later, distraction sets in and the realisation that the desired consistency and practicality of coping with new resolves is a taller order than we imagined, easily pushes one into the abyss of self criticism, which consequently consumes any remaining energy to continue searching for success. Believe me or not, the statistics are bleak: only 8% of people who make New Year’s resolutions stick to them, and those who don’t usually abandon them as early as January. According to Jonah Lehrer, author of ‘How we decide’, willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out. Lehrer writes that New Year resolutions are the wrong way of changing behaviour and advises that it is much better to appreciate the feebleness of the human mind. The idea of setting goals is always essential for everyone who is visionary since it is intended at helping them achieve their dreams. It is the disappointment at the realisation of one’s lack of capacity and ability to achieve their goals that sweeps away their hope. Just like New Year resolutions, the excitement around city conceptual master plans tends to override the importance of a sincere promise to a city. Master plans are generally ambitious and tend to go off a city’s capacity to implement them posing a jig saw puzzle that is challenging to solve. Continued failure to implement master plans just like in new year resolutions can easily lead to a lack of belief in self and our capability to continue improving. In this sense, they end up being the cheques we cannot cash. With time people have opted to avoid the disappointment that comes from New Year resolutions by planning and setting systemic targets through out the year. Research has also shown that those who set targets at whichever time of the year and are more likely to achieve them. Logically, instead of having one abstract goal at the beginning of a new year, people ought to think of specific small steps they can take every day that will have the same even better result in the long run. City master plans are always important as a store of aspirations for our urban future. Naturally, aspiring for something is better than not aspiring at all! The biggest problem I see with master plans is the pressure a city puts itself into to implement them! Often times we forget to align our urban dreams with our long-term visions and contextual capacities. An emerging voice across urban planning disciplines offers an alternative strategy for effective urban planning as the use of strategic urban projects, which compares to setting targets at whichever time of the year; ‘small steps’ that are most likely a true promise to a city; realistic, sizeable and contextual making them easily implementable. These projects begin to impact the surrounding areas positively catalyzing development. Instead of struggling to achieve that abstract image of that complex city that we must build in a given number of years, the city is able to actualize projects based on the real economic capacities at particular points in time. This way, a city is able to execute projects when it needs to and is ready to, which is a more realistic way to urbanize contrary to the pressure and chaos that can come alongside effort to implement ambitious city master plans. One undisputed fact is that realistic goals always get achieved. The writer is an architect and urban designer with keen interest on the dialectical relations between Architecture and Society. josemwongeli@yahoo.com

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Are city master plans, like New Year resolutions, doomed to fail?