Don't Plan On It: Centralized city planning is not the answer...

[vanshnookenraggen]

From Slate:

Don't Plan On It
Centralized city planning is not the answer to the problems facing America's cities.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2010, at 6:58 AM ET


A year ago, President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Office of Urban Affairs whose stated goal is "the development of a comprehensive urban policy." The director, inevitably referred to as the urban czar, is Adolfo Carri?n Jr., who is trained as a city planner and who has talked about the need for cities to develop their own "smart plans."

According to Carri?n, smart planning involves a combination of walkable communities, mass transit, and bicycle paths, and who could argue with that, except that in the last 40 years, our faith in centralized city planning has changed radically. In short, we've lost it. The last binge of planning in the 1960s produced urban renewal, city expressways, and acres of housing projects from which many cities are still only partially recovered. Urban renewal destroyed rather than repaired inner-city neighborhoods, expressways promoted urban blight, and the projects proved environmentally and socially dysfunctional. The result was collective NIMBY-ism?no planning in my backyard, thank you.

The forces shaping our cities today are not municipal agencies but private organizations such as park conservancies, downtown associations, historic-preservation societies, arts councils, advocacy groups, and urban universities. Entrepreneurship also plays an important role. In projects large and small, real estate developers have replaced city planners and bureaucrats as the chief players on the urban scene, restoring neighborhoods, attracting residents to downtowns, helping to create the amenities that keep them there.
The important lesson is not that city planning is unimportant but, rather, that urban development should not be implemented by the public sector alone and that in a democracy, a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace. (That it may turn out to be a messy vision, lacking a grand aesthetic, Jane Jacobs long ago acknowledged.) The federally funded HOPE VI program, which has spent more than $5 billion since it was launched in 1992 and which mixes social housing with market housing, has demonstrated that when public agencies collaborate with private developers, the result can be affordable homes that avoid the stigma traditionally associated with public housing projects. Almost all cities have business improvement districts, quasi-public organizations that were founded to oversee street cleanliness and public safety; in Philadelphia, the BID is also active in planning and urban development. Some cities are experimenting with multi-use zoning, which permits different uses to coexist in the same buildings, leaving the precise mix to market demand. Another interesting innovation comes from Montreal, where the provincial government is building a new $260 million concert hall. Instead of holding an architectural beauty pageant, the government announced a development competition to select a consortium that would not only design and build but also finance, manage, and maintain the hall over 30 years, leasing the building back to the orchestra.

The simple truth is that successful city-building is less about big moves and more about perseverance and day-to-day management. In the present economic downturn?as tax revenues diminish and cities face fewer jobs, no new construction, fewer tourists, fewer conventions, and less state funding?older cities will struggle to repair and replace aging infrastructure, and new cities will be challenged to maintain their growth. Talk of economic stimulus packages raises the temptation to undertake large publicly planned projects again. This temptation should be resisted. The lessons of the last 50 years should not be forgotten. To rephrase that great city planner, Daniel H. Burnham, make no big plans, only many small ones.

 

[Patrick]

This guy is one of my favorite authors. Anyone read City Life? Its not brilliant, but it is entertaining. One of my favorite reads, due not to the writing but rather to the subject matter.

I agree that city development should take place as informed by the market place, rather than a centralized vision of planners. However, if I had to choose between the top down centralized version of planning or the participatory democracy type of planning, I would definitely choose the centralized view. So planners made mistakes with urban renewal (even this premise is not accepted by all outside the planning profession), this doesn't mean the opposite (dispersed decision making) should take place. It merely means that centralized planning should be better informed by certain aspects of the anticipated effects of its decisions. participatory democracy puts power not in the hands of the public, but in the hands of interest groups consisting of NIMBYs who lack a grand or unified vision. If everyone in town participated, that would be another story. But they don't. even in small towns, 50,000 people is far too many to directly involve in planning decisions. Unless towns are to be broken up into tiny municipalities of 5,000 or fewer residents, each functioning independently, I think some sort of centralized planning is required. Now, what form exactly it should take is an entirely different question to which I have not an answer. I know this is not in direct opposition to what Witold is saying, but it bothers me a bit when people immediately assume all centralized planning is bad. It has caused a lot of good, too.