A new Sun story reexamines three past General Plans from 1964, 1974 and 1985. Each in its own way points to the cultural biases and social movements of its decade while simultaneously acknowledging the unique history and natural features of Sonoma Valley and the City of Sonoma.
Our modern culture loves to predict the future; we data-mine to forecast trends, computer models simulate climate change, algorithms govern buying and selling stocks, bonds, and commodity contracts, exit polls pick election winners, and the odds on sports betting are generated daily. It has always been like this, though in the distant past, oracles of the day examined the innards of sacrificed animals or noted the direction of flying cranes. It’s all about the data.
In some sense this love of predicting the future is the essence of creating General Plans. The problem, of course, is that the future is not written yet and our ability to predict it is limited by the reach of our current knowledge and limits of imagination. Thus the three General Plans in question seem “dated.” It’s notable how little of any plan actually has been implemented, perhaps because we consider what we know today always better than what we knew yesterday.
The 40-page, Sonoma Valley General Plan of 1964 is filled with photos and illustrations, and in large part anchored by the vision of a system of modern freeways. Highways 121, 116 and 12 were all envisioned as major four-lane freeways connecting the North Bay with Routes 101 and 80. If constructed, this auto-centric approach would have transformed Sonoma Valley into something resembling Walnut Creek. Farmland would have disappeared and been replaced by huge housing developments and shopping centers. The current discussions about greenbelts and UGBs would not be happening. In a sense, it’s a cautionary tale about assuming present values are reliable elements in planning for the future.
The 38-page, 1974 Sonoma General Plan, visually dry and uninteresting, nonetheless focuses substantial attention on the environment and the city’s natural features. In this way it anticipated the ecology movement by at least a decade. Creeks in town, for example, are treated as valuable assets to be protected and preserved, rather than put into underground pipes; a good example of this sort of approach can be seen today in the short stretch of Third Street East off MacArthur where the seasonal creek runs right down the middle of a split street. Somewhere along the line, however, engineers got the upper hand and rather than opening up our creeks we channeled them in concrete.
Interestingly, the 130-page, 1985 Sonoma General Plan is highly technical, dominated by urban planning theory and organized like a science project. A hierarchal system of values and bureaucratic language dominates its content, combined with complex tables and computer-generated maps. It’s a good demonstration of the way in which society has been fragmented into specialized areas of expertise often incomprehensible to the average person, and its style presaged the present age of government acronyms and urban planning professionals.
Ultimately, what we see in our past conceptions of the future are our own limitations, and herein we find our lesson, namely that the future’s found in our fullest understanding of the present.
The Sun Editorial Board
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