All illustrations by the author; some completed while at Ford, Powell & Carson Architects & Planners, Inc.

Master planning is a bit of an oddity.  It is done by many types of professionals, including many who have no special training in planning.  There are many approaches to the process, perhaps in part because of that mix of experience and perspective on those who practice it.  And there are few design disciplines which routinely result in so little reality -- a great deal of master planning results in work products which are ignored as a matter of course.

 

I've been master planning for nearly fifteen years in a variety of settings, from the fairly traditional, like university campuses, to the rare, like urban planning along the San Antonio River, to the unconventional and specialized, like phasing studies for residential construction.  What I've learned is that planning is not a product.  It's a process.  The meaningfulness of that statement is the key point.

So you have a campus.  Great.  If so, you probably also have a lot of people who work there, and a number of different types of facilities, or different corporate divisions, or some other rational structure for your organization.  Whatever it is, if your organization is large enough or complex enough for a campus, you need a master plan.  So what are the salient points of data needed for a master plan?  You might think that the details that I haven't talked about -- what you do, how you do it, etc. -- are critical.  Well... yes.  You're not wrong.  But without something far more basic, a master plan founded on those kinds of things is a useless document.  No, the most important consideration is vision.

 

Vision.  It's a vague, business-y word that looks great in a brochure, which sets off alarm bells.  But any successful leader will tell you that it's the one thing you have to have to make progress.  Organization is important too, and we'll get there, but you start with a vision.  In the terms of a physical master plan, that means a set of goals which represent how you want your physical environment to support what you do, whether it's educate students or make widgets or brew coffee on a Tuesday morning.

 

The more planning I do, the more deeply I understand that the ability to coherently and inclusively articulate what you're trying to accomplish is the very heart of planning.  Pretty drawings, exhaustive catalogs, and an understanding of the terrain are important.  But because a master plan is ultimately a creative act, those aren't the core of things.  Creation of the future covers a host of sins in the present.  No, the truly essential part is talking about and deciding on shared values, and stating them in a way which guides decision-making.

I can make one guarantee at the beginning of almost every master plan: you won't build it the way it's drawn.  No matter how carefully and meticulously a planner examines the situation, and no matter how good he or she is at anticipating changing conditions, it is no more possible to nail the future with a master plan than it is to predict stock prices.  Because of this, great plans are frameworks, not static images of the future.  

 

Great plans adapt to variable requirements; they leave space for reality to change or to be more fully described as time goes on.  Poor plans lock organizations into particular sequences of events or specific understandings about what the future will be like; when circumstances change, they are invalidated.  Great plans have the flexibility to be adapted to a changeable future.  This means that a great master plan is -- usually -- an expression of a set of core ideas.  It does not deal with details, nor should the means of communcation be proscriptive.  It deals in principles.  

A great vision doesn't dictate circumstance.  A great plan is built on a great vision.  That's it.  That's the key.  The process must start with building that vision, then the plan itself is a solution for that goal.  Unless the vision itself is invalidated by the future -- in which you probably have bigger things to worry about than an outdated master plan -- then the reasoning of the master plan will be sufficiently sound that it will last, even if it needs a little retooling.

 

If you accept that vision is critical, then the master plan is really two things: first, a process by which that vision is originated, validated, and developed; second, a tool to communicate and market that vision to the people who will execute it.