We got a fortuitous break 13 years ago when renowned New York architect Mario Gandelsonas looked past the tacky gasoline stations and car dealerships that blemished the downtown area and picked Des Moines to sketch out his vision of what an ideal American city’s urban center ought to look like.

Gandelsonas’ vision for the great American city, developed through years of academia and study of society and history, wasn’t spelled out in heavy tomes, the planning documents that are briefly talked about, then relegated to the back of a shelf to gather dust. Rather, he passed it along in sketches and strengthened it in conversations, making civic leaders think bigger, and in longer time frames. He called it a “vision plan” for lack of a better term; now, that phrase has slipped into the vernacular of urban planning in the same manner as buzzwords like “beltway” and “sustainable development.”

Gandelsonas came back to Des Moines last week and revisited developments he helped convince leaders were possible a decade and a half ago. Smiling like a proud father over the West and East Gateway projects, downtown housing developments, the Iowa Events Center and the rest of the Capital City Vision Projects, the Temple for the Performing Arts restoration, Principal Financial Group Inc.’s plan for a Riverwalk to showcase the Des Moines River, the improvements at Gray’s Lake, the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway extension that carries traffic through downtown instead of around it, and other big-league-city developments, he said Des Moines has done good.

Good, yes, but not good enough. Des Moines is not yet where it needs to be. To get the city there, he challenged leaders to think about growth and development in metropolitan terms, not as a process to be taken up by individual small cities making up a larger whole. A vision for the entire metropolitan area, he said, is crucial to making Greater Des Moines the modern city of 400,000 that it aspires to be.

He must have been reading our mail. Without a comprehensive vision encompassing the whole, inequities are perpetuated and the area is deprived of the stimulus needed for organic growth. Regional planning is as important to regional governance as the physical joining of local governments themselves.

When people like Gandelsonas offer the kind of advice that can further our goal of becoming a world-class small city, we should listen. Without his vision, downtown in the evening would still be the deserted, desolate place he walked through 13 years ago, when the sight of a pedestrian seemingly out of his element yielded stares and, Gandelsonas swears, caused a minor traffic mishap.