T25 Croydon

What came out from presentation on Town Centre of Corydon is the power of vision and participatory process.

On one hand Corydon is an effect of a post World War 2 vision. Council purchased kilometres of Victorian land and developed Courbusian style city centre of towers and massive roads. Vision accomplished. However years later the Corydon Town Centre is out of fission, it’s a subject of jokes, and it simply is not for people. The same old problems of scale and lack of connections through 6 lane highways are applied here in a concentrated form. Adding to that is that those blocks from 50’s and 60’s are looking quite tired and boring. Croydon needs doing up, but how?

Good crazy ideas came about in 1993 when 15 architects were invited to reinvent city centre, they talked about public realms, tramline, new library complex, lakes instead of tower blokes, new uses for old department stores and art on top of car parks. None got immediately implements yet their legacy lives on. These ideas stimulated some minds. Those papers must lay around in Corydon council. I can imagine every now and again a planner looking at them thinking: Oh Yeah!

Yet another vision was recently requested. Vill Aslop, a strong visionary, made sense of Croydon in 2008. In his own bendy style he put forward and idea of what Corydon is about but. Also this vision most likely will not see a day light but its role is satisfies. It generated enthusiasm greater than any Masterpalns would able to collect.

Vision is a powerful thing to initiate processes of change and participation is a way forward. Masterpalns follower the vision. Proposals, and details are left to planners. And planners in Cordon are a clever bunch of people. They carry the vision but others own the land. So they sit the land owners and talk to them. They sit them again in one room, are late for meeting and let people talk. This way in East Corydon for example, 4 owners of land in conflict managed to do develop a plan with unified objective and at the same time council got a step closer to accomplishing their vision.

I like the way Vincent presented the planning process. I bet this work is really hard but it sounds quite poetic and possible when spoken of visions and participation.