Justifications for and against urban planning

For planning!

the shape of cities, the way we move in them and between them, how transportation, food systems, natural resources are planned will become more relevant (now & in the future) with climate change as policies and investments are made in sustainable cities/neighborhoods

-Emily

Here is a photo of the “rhino”-shaped city plan in Sudan. [Source link]

The City as Spectacle

Southern Sudan Reveals Plans for Animal-Shaped Cities

Last September, Southern Sudan’s government revealed a plan to rebuild its ten urban centers. The cities would be designed in the shape of fruits and animals, including a rhino, giraffe and pineapple. The Ministry of Housing considers the plan unique and innovative; others criticize the $10 billion price tag in a country still recovering from war. Proponents say the plans will rejuvenate an impoverished and war-weary region; critics argue that financial and human resources would be far better dedicated to basic infrastructure rather than fanciful urban design.

“The advantage is that there will be uniformity of planning. It will be very easy for future generations to follow our thinking, what we wanted to put in place, because we are not planning for now, we are planning for tomorrow,” said Daniel Wani, the under-secretary of Southern Sudan’s ministry of housing and physical planning.

Jemma Kumba, the minister of housing and physical planning, said: “Juba is made up of slums and the plans would bring order to the city’s chaotic layout.”

Nora Petty, an aid worker for the Malaria Consortium NGO in Juba, said: “It doesn’t seem like the government of Southern Sudan should be using its resources or staff time on these projects when the people there lack basic services like healthcare and water.”

In my opinion, this is a case of wildly misguided priorities in planning.

Corinne

We are architects … We serve customers! …. I can’t just decide myself what’s being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them. Look, I went to city planning school at Harvard and I discovered that you never got to change a fucking thing or do anything. Urban planning is dead in the US.

Frank Gehry, as quoted in “Frank Gehry: ’Don’t call me a starchitect’,” The Independent, Dec. 17, 2009.

Gurgaon, and other cities without planning? →

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/asia/09gurgaon.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&hp

“Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

And that is where the problems arose. HUDA and other state agencies could not keep up with the pace of construction. The absence of a local government had helped Gurgaon become a leader of India’s growth boom. But that absence had also created a dysfunctional city. No one was planning at a macro level; every developer pursued his own agenda as more islands sprouted and state agencies struggled to keep pace with growth.

“We have to keep up,” said Nitin Kumar Yadav, the local HUDA administrator. “That is our pressure.”

Gurgaon had been marketed as Millennium City, yet it had become an unmanageable city. For companies that had come to India in search of business efficiencies, the inefficiencies of Gurgaon presented a new challenge they would have to overcome on their own.”

Questions I have:

Any other examples?
Will Gurgaon eventually develop planning? Should it?
Most major cities were once chaotic slums full of pollution, health issues and inequality, should developed countries criticize when they faced similar issues at some point in their history?
And can technology aid in the development process, helping citizens create the places they want? (See: http://voiceofkibera.org/Voice of Kibera is a citizen reporting project based in Kibera, Nairobi.)

Also: http://iamgurgaon.org/index.htm
-Cory

Economic Crisis and the Call for Planning

During the Great Depression, advocates for the nascent profession of city planning asserted that the time of crisis was precisely the right time for comprehensive planning:

“The world-wide economic depression has revealed more clearly than ever before the advantages of carefully prepared comprehensive plans, in charge of honest public authorities, which have in some instances actually guided construction of public works so effectively that unemployment has been reduced and needed improvements secured without loss or waste.” — Hubbard, Henry Vincent. 1932. Editorial: Planning Must Continue. City Planning (American City Planning Institute; National Conference on City Planning) VIII (4):228.

He [Haussmann] set to work at once, and the less friendly of his critics declare that the governing idea of Haussmannism was more political than social. In clearing vast spaces for the erection of handsome Squares where formerly had been only filthy slums, in piercing spacious boulevards through tortuous lanes and alleys, the Prefect, it was said, was actuated by the desire of establishing prolonged strategic lines and military means of communication which render revolutions in the future impossible.

“Baron Haussmann’s work: What he has to say of it in that new volume of his,” The New York Times, July 20, 1890.” (Note: one of the more famous historical examples of the complex and hardheaded motivations for planning.)

“Residents of New London , Conn., from left, Jim Guretsky, Chris Brown, Foe Hammer and Christopher Pasquale, affected by the city’s move to evict them under eminent domain, protest in front of the state supreme court building before a hearing to resolve whether New London has the right to evict them, in Hartford, Conn., Monday, Dec. 2, 2002. (AP Photo/Steve Miller)”

“In this Dec. 20, 2008 file photo, Chinese residents threaten to kill themselves by drinking rat poison if they are forcefully evicted from their home, hold bottles during a protest in Beijing, China. Five prominent Beijing professors have asked the central government to change a key regulation concerning demolitions and relocations in China’s cities, amid widespread concern that such projects lead to violence and social unrest. The struggle for urban land in China - heightened this year by a massive government stimulus plan that eased bank loans for construction - is increasingly violent as thousands of citizens lose their homes to new projects. The banners read: “Forceful demolition. Seven lives, who cares? So much corruption” and “No human rights, depriving us from our life. Forcing a happy family to the path of death.” (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel, File)

For most planners the question, Why plan? is answered quite simply: because planning is good. Good usually is not defined theoretically, but rather on a case by case basis. It is most often synonymous with necessary (if planning does not occur things will get worse), rational (by gathering and analyzing data planning produces superior decisions and outcomes), or efficient (planning results in solutions which minimize costs and maximize benefits). In general, the goodness of planning derives from its presumed ability to increase public welfare. Such definitions, though not incorrect, are insufficient to provide an adequate justification for planning. They fail to resolve a fundamental question: Is planning more likely to promote public welfare than not planning? Planners presume that the answer to this question is unequivocally affirmative.

Unfortunately for planners, that presumption is not always shared by the public for whom they are planning. Planning encroaches on what traditionally have been individual rights. Those reluctant to have their freedoms constrained by the dictates of planners argue that planning unambiguously reduces their personal welfare and probably reduces the welfare of society as a whole. Other professions, such as medicine and engineering, are not plagued by the incredulity of their clients. In fact, the presumption is in the opposite direction: doctors and engineers are assumed to provide benefits to society and are encouraged to practice their professions.

Planners are not supported by such a consensus. They are embroiled in a conflict about the basic legitimacy of planning. …

-Terry Moore (1978): Why Allow Planners to Do What They Do? A Justification from Economic Theory, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 44:4, 388.

Reconsidering Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of American Planning

Construction Potential. Below are excerpts from an essay critiquing Jacobs, and also challenges the role of planners to think beyond the status quo.

For who, if not the planner, will advocate on behalf of society at large? All planning may be local, but the sum of the local is national and eventually global. If we put parochial interests ahead of broader needs, it will be impossible to build the infrastructure essential to the long-range economic viability of the United States — the commuter and high-speed rail lines; the dense, walkable, public-transit-focused communities; the solar and wind farms and geothermal plants; perhaps even the nuclear power stations.

Where were the planners?

….“We’re too busy planning to come up with big plans.” [13] Too busy planning. Too busy slogging through the bureaucratic maze, issuing permits and enforcing zoning codes, hosting community get-togethers, making sure developers get their submittals in on time and pay their fees. This is what passes for planning today. We have become a caretaker profession — reactive rather than proactive, corrective instead of preemptive, rule bound and hamstrung and anything but visionary. If we lived in Nirvana, this would be fine. But we don’t. We are entering the uncharted waters of global urbanization on a scale never seen. And we are not in the wheelhouse, let alone steering the ship. We may not even be on board.

Tools and processes introduced to ensure popular participation ended up reducing the planner’s role to that of umpire or schoolyard monitor. Instead of setting the terms of debate or charting a course of action, planners now seemed content to be facilitators — “mere absorbers of public opinion,” as Alex Krieger put it, “waiting for consensus to build.”

Planning in America has been reduced to smallness and timidity, and largely by its own hand. So it’s no surprise that envisioning alternative futures for our cities and towns and regions has defaulted to nonplanners such as William McDonough and Richard Florida, Andrés Duany and Rem Koolhaas, and journalists such as Joel Kotkin and James Howard Kunstler. Jane Jacobs was just the start.

For the full article, see below.

Campanella, T.J. (2011, April 4). Essay - Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning. Places. Retrieved from http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-and-the-death-and-life-of-american-planning/25188/

Olivia L.

“Why plan? That’s an important question for a planning skeptic like myself. I’m not at all convinced that conventional public urban planning has much value, despite (or because of?) spending eight years on a city planning commission. Yet, I don’t consider myself an “antiplanner”. I’m happy to leave that role to my friend and virtual colleague Randal O’Toole at the Cato Institute. (He even runs a blog called “The Antiplanner”.)
Urban planning has a role even though, IMO, on balance, its application has had a negative impact on communities and cities. Notably, even the free market (and Nobel Prize winning) economist F.A. Hayek recognized a role for planning in his classic book on political economy The Constitution of Liberty.”

- Samuel Staley, 2008.

source, and link for full text: http://www.planetizen.com/node/30091

The greatest diversity and identity in a place, whether a regenerating field or urban wetland, or a cohesive neighborhood community, often comes from minimum, not maximum interference. This does not mean that planning and design are irrelevant or unnecessary to a world that if left alone would take care of itself. It implies, rather, that change can be brought about by giving direction, by capitalizing on the opportunities that site or social trends reveal, or by setting a framework from which people can create their own social and physical environments and where landscapes can flourish with health, diversity, and beauty.

Michael Hough, “Principles for Regional Design”

An early professional justification for planning (from ASPO, 1959)

Here is an early statement of the merits of planning, asserting that planning provides a more rational and efficient process (and therefore improved outcomes). The implication is that the public will appreciate the value of planning once they better understand planning. A bit of circular logic at play?

“To demonstrate that planning pays, it is almost necessary to say what planning is. Once planning is defined and its definition understood, its value is almost self-evident. In one way, planning is its own justification. The difficulty in showing the value of planning, therefore, lies not so much in lack of proof of value as in lack of understanding of what planning entails.” Source: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF PLANNING OFFICIALS, “Planning Pays,” Information Report No. 123 (June 1959). [link]

The Generic City - R. Koolhaas

The Generic City (Essay linked) by Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas has a very calm, Taoist attitude towards cities. People get the places they want. Cities and humans are constantly evolving, so there is no need to plan:

“The Generic City presents the final death of planning. Why? Not because it is not planned - in fact huge complimentary universes of bureaucrats and developers funnel unimaginable flows of energy and money into its completion […] But its most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is planning makes no difference whatsoever. Buildings may be placed well (a tower near a metro station) or badly (whole centers miles away from any road). They flourish/perish unpredictably. Networks become over-stretched, age, rot, become obsolescent; populations double, triple, quadruple, suddenly disappear. The surface of the city explodes, the economy accelerates, slows down, bursts, collapses. Like ancient mothers that still nourish titanic embryos, whole cities are built on colonial infrastructures of which the oppressors took the blueprints back home. Nobody knows where, how, since when the sewers run, the exact location of the telephone lines, what the reason was for the position of the center, where monumental axes end. All it proves is that there are infinite hidden margins, colossal reservoirs of slack, a perpetual organic process of adjustment, standards, behavior; exceptions change with the biological intelligence of the most alert animal. In this apotheosis of multiple choice it will never be possible again to reconstruct the cause and effect. They work - that is all.”

Summary of Generic City: Hands off. Let cities grow organically. Stop drowning them in Round-Up. Let some of the weeds grow, you never know, you might develop a taste for them.

- Cory

P.S. I have a reputation to uphold. First.