![]() “They negotiate with corporations on a development agreement for each project” which dictates that the developer must include or fund certain pieces of public infrastructure. “To streamline and speed up the permitting process for the Strip, Clark County set up a special team of planners: the High-Impact Projects team,” says Stefan Al, associate professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a forthcoming book on the Strip. More local-government mechanisms have indeed engaged in recent decades – but mostly to facilitate the Strip’s demolition, rebuilding and upward expansion. We negotiate development agreements to mitigate impacts such as traffic, water sewer and public safety.” While other projects throughout the Valley do provide an economic benefit to the state and county, it is not at the same level as the Strip properties.īermudez highlights the need for close cooperation with private companies in order to address the challenge of “how to adequately provide services to such a concentrated area … The Strip is only four miles long, and the number of pedestrians and cars requires us to work very closely with the resort hotels and other businesses to provide for the adequate movement of people and cars. Because of the tax and gaming revenue generated from these projects, the entire State of Nevada benefits. “On the Strip, we routinely review multimillion to multibillion dollar projects. ![]() “There is a difference between the planning of the Strip versus other parts of the Las Vegas Valley,” Mario Bermudez, Clark County’s zoning planning manager, tells me. The Venetian hotel, complete with gondoliers in striped shirts. The place has, if anything, gone much further over the top, presenting visitors with streetside spectacles unthinkable in the era that Venturi, Brown, and Izenour were writing about: elaborate fountain shows at the Bellagio electronically choreographed to pop hits canals dug into The Venetian hotel, complete with stripe-shirted gondoliers a 541-foot replica of the Eiffel tower at a casino-hotel called, simply, Paris. More than four decades on, however, anyone setting foot on the Strip will soon realise – with relief or horror – that nobody remotely describable as a “tastemaker” has yet taken over. It gets them worrying: “What will happen to the Strip when the tastemakers take over?” But they also noted that, while the Strip originally “just grew”, they were seeing the emergence of “the usual building and zoning controls” and even a “Strip Beautification Committee”. “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza,” the trio declared, having a grand old time enumerating the freakish architectural mini-movements that had emerged there, from “Miami Moroccan, International Jet Set Style” to “Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic” to “Bauhaus Hawaiian”. ‘Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.’ Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian The repulsion eventually fuelled a great aesthetic controversy in 1972, when the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas, which dared to approach the built environment of the Strip on its own terms. The dominance of this laissez-faire approach to architecture and urbanism produced, over the following decades, a flamboyant, unapologetic, gambling- and entertainment-driven pseudo-city that observers found compelling and repulsive in equal measure. Economic diversification always has been limited, so the attitude too often has been that if someone wants to build, unless it’s a real problem, let ’er rip!”Īnd rip it has. In the early 1930s, says Green, “the building of the Hoover Dam and the nascent tourism industry turned Las Vegas into a city dependent on federal projects and visitors. “For the most part, builders have been free to build as they please.” ![]() “It seems to me that urban planning has had nothing to do with the Strip,” says Michael Green, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and co-author of Las Vegas: A Centennial History. Architect Robert Venturi in Las Vegas in 1966.
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