EDITORIAL - End scatterbrain downtown overhaul

No one can accuse Clifton Yap, the architect and planner, of inconsistency. And his ideas are quite sensible. Mr Yap has been on what, for him, and to us, an old theme: the vision of an environmentally sustainable and aesthetically pleasing downtown area of the Jamaican capital.

Last week, in a speech to the Rotary Club of Trafalgar, New Heights, and subsequently in an interview with this newspaper, he lamented the absence of integrated planning for the renewal of Kingston's old business district, as well as sketched a vision for the area.

But his ideas have to be considered against what downtown Kingston has become and in the context of Jamaica's circumstance of rapid urbanisation. The development, more than 40 years ago, of the New Kingston business district and others further north accelerated the exodus from downtown. Enterprises abandoned downtown's Georgian buildings for uptown's mid-rise and high-rise structures. And the middle-class families that had hung on to their bungalows in the adjacent communities joined to the trek to the new suburban centres.

As urban blight set in, downtown grew hard and gritty. Crime flourished. The business district became an area only for daytime enterprise and those who lived downtown stayed mostly because they couldn't do better.

In the circumstance, the entire Jamaica has paid a significant price: in the cost of criminality, in abandoned infrastructure, in the forced investment in new ones, and, ultimately, in the underutilisation of a great piece of real estate - a waterfront that happens to be the world's seventh largest natural harbour.

Like Mr Yap, we believe that there is great potential and social value in the resuscitation of downtown. Others say the same thing. There is a sporadic flurry of activity, suggesting that people may be serious. But the effort is not sustained, and there appears, even when things happen, an absence of coordination. The upshot: The absence of a shared vision for downtown and, perhaps more significant, diminished marginal utility from the dispensed energy.

Or, as Mr Yap observed: "Our main problem is that every agency is a law unto itself. Nobody coordinates on what they are doing for development. Everybody has their own mandate and they are carrying it out. They are spending money; the end result is disaster."

That, unfortunately, is our sense of the downtown project: Every time an agency finds itself with some resources and can muster the energy, it rushes off, with great fanfare, to do something. We see the result in stillborn, partially completed, or ill-conceived projects.

There is, for instance, the white elephant that is the downtown transportation hub, the incomplete rehabilitation of North Parade, the absence of work on the Ward Theatre, and the limping resuscitation of the market district. There is, too, the failure to integrate the rehabilitation of downtown's residential communities with the plans of the business district.

This broad conversation should begin if we are to more efficiently and creatively use the limited resources available to Jamaica. For instance, many downtown communities, like many of Kingston's older urban communities, possesses basic infrastructure that are in need of rehabilitation. Might it be useful, say, to steer some of the National Housing Trust's capital to the rehabilitation of these inner-city homes rather than greenfield developments?

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