Expert: Broad appeal needed

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Oct 24, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A national planning expert said Thursday night that downtown Baton Rouge needs to broaden its appeal — aiming for something between the vision of Aristotle and Henry Ford — as it begins the second decade of a major downtown initiative, Plan Baton Rouge.

The downtown districts of river cities should embrace their rivers and lure a wide diversity of their residents, something Alex Krieger said Baton Rouge is on the way to achieving but has yet to accomplish fully.

Krieger’s Boston-area firm, Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, is leading a team of six firms that will spend the next eight months building a $500,000 blueprint for growing a diverse, vibrant downtown Baton Rouge that features far more people living at the city’s core, with more shopping and transportation alternatives.

That said, Krieger praised the first decade of Plan Baton Rouge, launched in 1998, which helped spur $1.7 billion in public and private investment in the past 15 years.

Krieger spoke at the Marcia Kaplan Kantrow Community Lecture Series, held by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, one of the sponsors of Plan Baton Rouge. His address came at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts, which Krieger called one of the best development projects in the U.S. in the past decade.

“Good Lord, how can you improve upon that?” he said of the Shaw Center. “By building three or four more — one of our first recommendations.”

Krieger made that remark somewhat in jest, but he urged the city to offer incentives that will lead developers to build upward and create a higher density of dwellings, offices and shops.

“The best cities on the planet are dense and compact,” he said, but they provide all the options needed for people to live and work.

Quoting Aristotle, Krieger said the Greek philosopher counted those unfortunate enough to be “cityless” as low on the scale or humanity — or above it, suggesting the deities.

Some two millennia later, Henry Ford opined, “We shall solve the problem of the city by leaving the city,” Krieger said, adding that cars made it possible but they complicated commutes.

Said Krieger, “You might say we destroyed the cities by leaving them.”

Reinvestment with sensible transportation access is rebuilding downtowns. The key challenge for Baton Rouge is to fill in voids in shopping and services and housing, he said, with quality public facilities to match.

Baton Rouge also needs to embrace the river, rather than build away from it, he said.