Jane Jacobs’ book “Death and Life of Great American Cities” is often described as a major attack on planning. It is ironic therefore that it was probably this book above all other things that got me into planning…
I was moved to recall this by a post (some time ago now) on Undernews about Urban Planning and New Orleans (found via Kevin Carson’s excellent blog)
The problem with urban planners is two fold. First, they work for the wrong people, the government, rather than for the citizens. As local governments have become more corrupt and more beholden to the interests of a small number of developers and other businesses, urban planning has inevitably come to reflect these perverse priorities.
Second, urban planners believe in sweeping physical solutions to social problems. The idea, Richard Sennett has written, goes back to the 1860s design for Paris by Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Sennett suggests, bequeathed us the notion that we could alter social patterns by changing the physical landscape. This approach was not about urban amenities such as park benches and gas lighting or technological improvements such as indoor plumbing but about what G. K. Chesterton called the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."
Smith’s stricture quoted above is probably accurate enough about the UK too, although a major driver here was a concern for public health. Major rebuilding in the Haussmann manner for us waited until the 1960s rather than the 1860s, but with rather less success – certainly aesthetically and almost certainly socially too.
Smith’s post contains at the end a great checklist of ways to do it better. I particularly favour this one:
Get everyone involved. Keep the planning open and welcoming. Plan for everyone and with everyone. Don't just use the best known local civic organizations. Even elementary school children can help plan a community. Seniors and the disabled have perspectives that get easily ignored. And asking alienated adolescents what they would like is a lot smarter than finding out later what they don't.
One of the things I rapidly learnt when I started work in planning was that many planners are indeed rigid and authoritarian- but by no means all. Many know they are not doing a good job but are forced into a procrustean bed of rigid regulation. It is easy to say of course that they should get out – while some do just that, others stay on and fight as best they can from within.
The hardest thing in life is to learn which bridge to cross and which to burn.
It isn’t getting any better or easier though. This government’s increasing centralisation – despite its rhetoric – means that planners in local government have less and less time, less and less freedom to work with people rather than simply duck and run to the next job.
A major problem is that many planners and most of government still see planning as a technocratic process – moreover as a process that can come up with answers. In practice however most problems facing planners – at least in the circumstances that faced Jacobs and that face planners in most big cities today – don’t have solutions or pat answers that can be delivered simply by spending enough money. They are wicked problems [edit: second link updated] that change every time you attack them.
Some problems are so complex
that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided
about them. (Laurence
J. Peter again)
Big money generates political kudos (or the converse if you are in opposition) but not answers – something Jacobs told us in 1961 and that Christopher Alexander has told us time and time again since.
Smith again:
Some just released data on Washington DC gives part of the answer. Few places have spent more money and placed more political and psychological emphasis on physical planning as a human solution than the nation's capital. Over the past quarter century or so, billions have been spent on 'economic development' including a massive new subway system, two restorations of Union Station, two convention centers, a major new indoor sports stadium, downtown urban renewal, a redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue, increased tax breaks and financial benefits for developers, as well as numerous smaller projects. Yet according to new figures from the Center for Budget Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, the income of a typical citizen in the city's lower economic quintile has grown exactly $382 in real dollars since the 1980s while someone in the top quintile now earns $70,382 more. Further, there are fewer jobs for DC residents and sales tax revenue - a reasonable indicator of 'economic development' - has barely kept up with inflation.
This isn’t just a criticism that can be levied against the planning system. I posted some time ago about similar failings in the centralised welfare system:
An excellent book called Urban Renaissance by Dr Dick Atkinson looks at the failures of welfare reform. He estimates that about 30% of the population live in neighbourhoods experiencing problems - poor educational achievment, physical decay, unemployment - usually all at once. Something like £100,000,000 are spent in every neighbourhood of about 15,000 people every year. By any standards that is a huge sum. Despite that some of these communities are still in dire need and have been since the 1960s.
Atkinson offers a real alternative. It depends on politicians giving up the power they have accumulated over the years and trusting local people to decide on what they need. Projects like New Deal for the Community and Neighbourhood Management are supposed to do that of course, but with some honourable exceptions they don't seem to be working. Atkinson proposes not a Welfare State, but a Welfare Society where communities in neighbourhoods organise themselves and take control of their own surroundings.
Although I have never worked in the US planning system, over the years
I have corresponded with many US planners via USENET and the like. One major
difference to the UK system appears to be its focus on rigid zoning and the
need to use eminent domain powers (Compulsory Purchase in the UK) to make
anything happen. Most of the 1960s disasters in the UK were only possible
through CPO too of course! Like the US, the UK system worked for many years on the same idea of
separating ‘incompatible uses’ but much less rigidly and because the UK system
has much more discretion built into the development control process there are
always numerous exceptions and variations. I used to see this a something of a
problem because of the loss of consistency, but now I see it as the prime strength of the UK
system (even though large sectors of development are still controlled unnecessarily).
The typical US outcome of large tracts zoned exclusively for two storey family housing would be pretty
much impossible in the UK system - and it should stay that way.
It appears to me that the US zoning system was developed as a way to
plan without planning under the guise of avoiding excessive interference in
property rights. Paradoxically, it is in practice far more restrictive in its
effect than the UK system, which is based on the fundamental idea that
development rights belong to the state. (Effectively the right to develop land
was nationalised by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.)
In the eight years 1943-1951 five major Acts were passed: Town and Country Planning (Interim Development) Act, 1943, which extended planning control to all land and made it effective in the 'interim development' period before schemes became operative; the Town and Country Planning Act, 1944, which enabled local authorities to tackle their war damage; the New Towns Act, 1946, which provided for the creation of New Towns by means of Development Corporations; the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, which established a new and comprehensive planning system; and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949.
Add to this the impact of community associations I touched on here and the rights of your average US homeowner look pretty restricted compared to the UK position.
