Planetizen's Nate Berg posits that Burning Man, the yearly freak festival in the Nevada desert, has become "a highly planned, intricately organized and fully functioning city" of 50,000 people.
Berg presents the piece as a journal, his record of his visit to Burning Man last year. After arriving late at night, he wakes to find a 160-block city laid out around him:
"With so many people living together on federal land, outside the jurisdiction of any local government and without any services, Burning Man has necessarily taken on the form and functions of a city. To turn the "party in the desert" into a city, albeit one that exists for only one week at a time, organizers have developed a set of operational and physical guidelines. With its high-resolution urban plan - which resembles the prescriptive master plans of designers like Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier - and its departments created and run by volunteers, Burning Man feels like a slice of modern urban life, and in some ways an improvement."
FULL STORY: Burning Man and the Metropolis
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Let the year-round party commence.
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This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
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UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research