China envy

"One of the reasons China is so successful is that Aaron Peskin isn't there. They're far more capitalist than we are these days. They want to get things done. Here, things don't happen." - Jeffrey Heller

In the early fall, I spent half a day touring San Jose, CA with an urban design professor from a leading Chinese metropolitan university. We came back to Berkeley and had a late lunch, in the course of which he noted how important an example San Jose would be for secondary and tertiary cities in China, "which are about to make the same mistakes that San Jose made a generation ago." It's not the pace of development that matters, but the quality of the result. As China makes its way up Maslow's pyramid, development is less about raw numbers, which is why Shui On's Xintiandi project in Shanghai - mixing new with restored old - is being widely emulated. SF is not exactly at Maslow's peak, but it's high enough up that we can legitimately ask why its glacial, nominally consultative entitlements process still produces crap. In a city where relatively little gets built, wouldn't it make sense to set the quality bar higher? Yet we don't. Projects like the Infinity and One Rincon Hill earn a pass because "they're not that bad." If that's our criterion, why all the agony? Maybe it would be better if SF's buildings were subject to recall. (The Heller quote is from the SF Business Times, 5-12 March 2010, pages 21-22.)