Instant gratification – to see results quickly to ones satisfaction – is culture. It’s a type of mentality. It’s a way of life. It reflects our way of organizing and interacting with one another.
It can be seen in most aspects of our dominant culture, in the likes of gambling, technological gadgets, food preparation, all-in-one stores, key-ready family houses, complete vacation packages, numbers-based vs. values-based election promises, war declarations, and, naturally, in the never-ending search, sale and consumption of “silver bullets”, be it slimming pills, happy pills, erection pills or a solution to any other instant symptom-based problem at hand.
Whatever urge considered, holding off the urge to achieve instant satisfaction instead of a delayed but promised greater satisfaction is no little challenge.
Urban Planning that Satisfies
Trends in current urban planning takes increasingly place within the built boundary of cities. After decades of intense land development at the undeveloped fringes of cities, now the pendulum is swinging towards rearranging past land uses, increase job and population density and thus also changing the flow of people and services within and between the urban boundaries. It can be labeled Smart Growth, but to city planners it’s in the end a matter of City Building. Immigration is the driving factor, which brings both opportunities and challenges to all cities inside and outside of the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
Now, there are typically 4 actors in this drama.
- Land owners and building corporations
- The City bureaucrats
- The City Councillors
- The Public
Often the case is that everyone wants what’s best for the City. That’s a good starting point. However, new planning requires new solutions, which require new consumer tastes and products, and new public acceptance. Getting the majority of people (consumers and established residents) to respond positively to the desired changes is one challenge, and getting the drivers of change to responsibly bring about the change (socially, economically and environmentally; i.e. respect community character, public spending and environmental carrying capacity) is the flip-side of the coin.
It’s within this paradigm developers, planners and residents must meet at the middle ground to both reach the objective of smarter growth patterns. Time and education are two major components in this regard. The foreign must learn the local realities and the local must learn the larger context. Instant gratification is however not a likely result to such a process. Thus, to all who want to be part of the change – the march to the ocean for salt was done by foot (a Gandhi metaphor) – and this transformation will likely change participants as much as it changes their neighbourhood.
The danger is to lose the patience, settle for the quick satisfaction and miss the opportunity to reach a twice as good outcome (that’s a marshmallow metaphor). This goes for all parties, naturally. As the video illustrates, that’s easier said than done…
