Recognizing 'what is'

The charrette is hardly an unknown planning technique. But I have never heard of it being done for an "existing unplanned truck stop...so it can develop over time into a small town and benefit from a planned high speed railway that will stop near the site" in Brokelandsheia, Norway. The effort is described here on the web site of INTBAU, which conducted it.

Two aspects are immediately striking: that the site is somerthing as prosaic and usually (and snobbishly) overlooked truck stop and that it appears to be a somewhat informal, spontaneous, and hitherto officially-unsanctioned place. 

The proposal maintains all existing buildings, and proposes that a system of streets, blocks and squares be created that allows each landowner to maximise built volume in a manner that supports street life, rather than each competing with each other. The town centre is a new square, developed on the site of a parking lot, in front of the two oldest buildings on site, a truckers restaurant and a small shopping building. It encompasses some existing residential building while indicating locations within the existing site that can be developed to avoid waste space. All this is acheived with the same number of car-parking spaces as the existing, unplanned development, and with a minimum of disruption to existing expensive infrastructure.