The Art (and Science?) of Designing Urban Planning Processes

In June I published an op-ed in the Detroit News describing my research on urban renewal in Detroit in the 1940s. I concluded with the observation:

The voices of citizens affected by renewal must be heard. Dramatic, large-scale projects can have harmful and unexpected consequences. The history of urban planning has shown success occurs through a careful process of building consensus, detailed analysis and cooperative action.

In response Marja Winters, the city’s deputy director of planning and development, wrote an editorial arguing the process has been highly participatory, involving 28 city-wide meetings and 10,000 citizens, and large numbers of participants said they agreed they had had the opportunity to share ideas and opinions.

(As an aside: She objected to a line which read “The plan calls for closing neighborhoods, cutting services and cultivating new industries.” I agree with her criticism: the words aren’t mine, but those of a Detroit News editor. The manuscript I submitted read: “The Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing’s roadmap for the city’s future — has proposed dramatic solutions: closing neighborhoods, cutting services, and cultivating new industries.”)

I have not attended the Detroit Works public meetings or examined the process, so I cannot critique it in detail. The first major policy initiative coming out of the process was announced in July, but amounted to the selection of some priority areas for city services. The proposal left some puzzled. Where was the grand vision, or bold proposals? Perhaps there is no need for “planning” at all, just better urban management? (See “Questions dog Detroit Works plan: Advocates want to see long-term strategy“)

This situation and Winters’ article raises interesting questions: is all participation alike? Can the design of the process affect the outcome? What models exist for planning for “shrinking cities”?

It is common for major urban plans or policies to be developed through quite elaborate processes. For example, I collected this diagram that was circulated in the early stages of the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan:

In general, their design is left up to professionals who draw upon professional experience. Most process designs characterize several aspects: problem definition, deliberation and participation, analysis, policy design, and decision-making. Under each of these, details include:
- The number, type, mission, membership and missions of committees
- What expertise and analysis is required, and how they are involved
- The timing, nature, and purpose of broader participation such as meetings, surveys, and online engagement
- How decisions will be made.

One of the cleares descriptions of how processes are designed for local contexts comes from Barbara Faga’s book Designing Public Consensus. After several case studies, the book presents the following public process plan as a starting point:

This way of thinking is not unique to urban planning. As the field of risk assessment has become embroiled in value-laden controversies, experts have had to re-assess their approached. In 1996, leaders in the field proposed an analytic-deliberative model that seeks to tightly link the needed analysis with involvement from affected parties.

Perhaps the most common process theory for large-scale planning is scenario planning (PDF), adopted from methodologies invented by the private sector for corporate planning. Although providing guidance for how thoughtful “scenarios” can be used to consider options for the future, scenario planning’s participatory logic is underdeveloped.

The crowning achievement of process thinking in public policy may be the consensus building approach (CBA), a method for resolving dilemmas often associated with Larry Susskind, a MIT professor of urban studies and planning. This negotiation methodology has strict requirements for the nature of the problems where it can be applied, how stakeholders are identified and included, and how negotiation should move forward. However it’s not clear how this approach — designed to intervene in acrimonious public debates about clear problems or decisions — applies to the problem of urban planning.

If there is an art to process design, can there be a science? It is rarely studied for a variety of reasons. First is the argument that process doesn’t matter. It could be that the outcome is the same regardless of what is done, or the real decisions that matter are being made elsewhere — by powerful elected officials or market actors. Second, from a social science perspective, studying them is maddeningly difficult. There are too many confounding variables and no clear to measure. What would you measure, and how? For this reason there are many descriptive case studies that steer clear of specific details. Lastly, analyzing processes requires a different form of knowledge than found in most research. Instead of theory that describes reality, we need a theory of what would happen given a certain sequence of events or actions.

Theory aside, how do you plan for Detroit? A good process would focus first on the goal. What is the “problem” in Detroit, anyway? It could be too much land, too few jobs, high crime, or a lack of revenue for government services. Although they are related, tackling any one means clarifying what the priorities are.

The most direct case for Detroit is the Youngstown 2010 project in Youngstown, Ohio. This process involved large-scale participation and a vision and plan adopted by the city council which anticipates significant changes to accommodate a permanently reduced population. Here is the process diagram from Faga’s book:

Where Detroit Works — or any other large-scale planning in Detroit — should go depends on what the local stakeholders seek to accomplish. Although any process must be locally tailored, the process designers aren’t starting from scratch. The models described above can be used to design a process that reflects both values and practical needs to involve the public, detailed analysis, and come to agreement on a solution to public problems.

How Should Detroit Plan for the Future?

The Detroit News published an op-ed I wrote about lessons learned about urban renewal from my undergraduate thesis.

Detroit is facing big problems: declining population, budget deficits and a stagnant economy.

Discussions about fixing the city has generated dramatic ideas, including the Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing’s roadmap for the city’s future. The plan calls for closing neighborhoods, cutting services and cultivating new industries. But even with the best of intentions, if city leaders don’t learn from the city’s urban renewal mistakes of the past, Detroit will be doomed to repeat them.

Although Detroit’s population has declined by more than 1.3 million since 1950, the problems of how to make tough decisions remain unchanged.

The Detroit News: “Citizens Need Voice in Renewal“Detroit_News_RGoodspeed

ArborUpdate.com Shuts Down

The website ArborUpdate.com, which I helped found in Summer 2004, has decided to shut down. The last post includes a number of interesting comments discussing the website’s history. I created the website, which operated as a non-hierarchical editorial collective, to discuss news and civic issues in Ann Arbor.

Since it was founded, personal blogging has proliferated and competing websites have appeared in the city. Most notably, after 174 years the city’s daily printed newspaper the Ann Arbor News shut down in June 2009. At its close, newspaper company launched AnnArbor.com, a blog-like website with comments and a small core of full-time writers.

I think there’s a lot to learn from this case. One of the most important lessons is something Lisa Williams (of Placeblogger.com) mentioned to me during a conversation we had last fall. She said longevity alone isn’t necessarily a good measure for success of online citizen journalism projects. Given changes in the internet and broader media landscape in Ann Arbor, it seems right to shut down the site. I trust the community members will work to ensure what it achieved will continue somewhere online: a source for information about local issues and a venue for (mostly) civil discussion.

Detroit and the Limits to Urban Decline

Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent yearly fluctuations, created the current landscape of the city and shape possible responses.

The numbers quantifying the cause of urban decline in the American Rustbelt are staggering. Between 1980 and 1990 alone, the Northeast and Midwest lost 1.5 million manufacturing jobs and $40 billion (in 1998 $) in aggregate manufacturing worker earnings. During the same time period, central counties of the 28 metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast regions lost 1 million manufacturing jobs. (Kasarda, 2001) The industrial jobs, generally secure and good-paying, constituted the core of the urban economy. Their departure was magnified many times as it rippled more broadly through the economy, as the service jobs supported by the core industries disappeared. African Americans were particularly hard hit. Millions of jobs left, but new jobs were not easily accessible and often required high education levels. These so-called spatial and skill mismatches resulted in skyrocketing jobless rates among central-city blacks. One economist found that by 1990, four fifths of young inner city school dropouts were unemployed. In Detroit, by 1990 Detroit was 79% black and the surrounding suburbs 79% white. For the uninitiated, Thomas Sugrue’s excellent Origins of the Urban Crisis contains a detailed history of the origins of economic decline.

Metropolitan Context

Before I plunge into an analysis of the City of Detroit’s housing stock, it should be noted that the majority of jobs and people in the metropolitan area live outside of the city limits, and also that within the city there exists many middle class and even upper class neighborhoods. Although containing vacant land and buildings, the city presents the visitors a strange combination of energy and investment with decay and abandonment. (Captured well in this blog post) The map to the right, produced by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), shows the vast scale of the metropolis — only the green central municipality is the City of Detroit.

Housing in Economic Decline

Economists theorize that the rate of urban decline is largely determined by the durability of the housing stock. In short, even if the jobs are gone the physical persistence of homes mean people will continue to live there. In a shrinking city, first the households size decrease as the declined population is spread more thinly among the surviving buildings. After reduced household sizes, the market begins to abandon houses. Homeowners may move to the suburbs or out of state, retaining title to the property. Some default on mortgages or fail to pay taxes, resulting in thousands owned by various units of government. In Detroit, tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots are owned by the city, state, county, and other public agencies.

The vacant structures are dislike by the remaining population. They shelter criminals and drug users, packs of feral dogs, and pose a physical hazard through collapse and lead paint. A strong demolition policy has become an article of faith for city politicians. “Unbuilding has surpassed building as the city’s major architectural activity,” quipped one architect. Between 1978 and 1990, the city issued 9,000 building permits and 108,000 demolition permits. All told, between 1970 and 2000, over 161,000 houses were demolished, a figure one journalist points out constitutes more than the total number of occupied dwellings in the city of Cincinnati today. Nonetheless the city’s severe lack of funding meant demolition could never keep up with abandonment. The U.S. Census estimated in 2006 that fully 23% of the housing stock still standing, or 85,951 units, were vacant. Since 1970, the city has had a net loss of housing units every year according to SEMCOG permit data:

Economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko observed in a 2005 paper that the maximum rate of decline for housing seems to be about 1% per year. Without speculating the causes of this speed limit to housing decline, they observe that no matter how fast the jobs disappear, the housing stock rarely declines at a faster rate. I created a graph showing the number of housing units from 1970 to 2008. The U.S. Census counts show a greater decline than is reflected in the construction and demolition permits, a discrepancy caused by unpermitted activity, record-keeping error, and perhaps different definitions of housing units. However, I defer to the U.S. Census to establish starting and end points. The annual net changes from housing permits are inflated 11% so that the total matches the observed change from U.S. Census data over the same period. This method captures the variability shown above, while ensuring the starting and ending points match the Census. Superimposed on the results is a fixed 1% annual decline from the 1970 housing units.

The correlation is striking. If we extend beyond, we can see what the formula predicts. Again, this is not a projection, but simply an extrapolation of a 1% rate of decline from the 1970 Census. The true rate of decline may vary from the formula thanks to public policies, such as public demolitions, or arson. Of course, at any point if the city started growing again we would expect the actual number of units to level off or even increase.

Planning For Decline

How public authorities can plan during decline is an important and under-studied issue. The Shrinking Cities project has sparked discussions around this topic, and officials in Michigan have become leaders by virtue of their unique circumstances. The Genesee County Land Bank in the Flint area (which has experienced similar decline, albeit at a smaller scale) has become a national leader. Their approach is that a government agency should obtain full title to abandoned properties, demolish or stabilize them, clean the lots, and then sell them back to the private market in a controlled way. By limiting the supply the government can realize market, or above-market prices for vacant land and buildings. There have been discussions for creating a similar land bank for Detroit, or Wayne County, and this 2006 report by students at the University of Michigan is an excellent examination of the issue. Of course, for the land bank model to work some private-sector demand must exist for land, and revenues from property sales must cover the costs of program administration. In the absence of a demand for land for new housing in Detroit, any hypothetical land bank would have to find buyers interested in land for commercial, agricultural, or other purposes.

Another approach with a lot of energy is urban agriculture. One of the most ambitious plans for large-scale urban agriculture was developed by students at the University of Detroit-Mercy. Their Adamah plan proposed resurrecting a buried stream, and creating a dairy, tree farm, vegetable gardens, shrimp farm, and wind power. Although nobody has attempted it as the scale envisioned by the plan, today in Detroit 220 family gardens, 115 community gardens and 20 schools participate in the city’s Garden Resource Program. When BLDG Blog’s Geoff Manaugh published a conceptual proposal for converting vacant property in Philadelphia into agricultural land, it provoked this comment:

“i live in west philadelphia, where there are already dozens of ‘abandoned’ lots in my immediate neighborhood that are being used for both small and large-scale gardening. they have it going on up in northern liberties, too. these were started up without the benefit of instructions from some blogger in his ivory tower. it seems that some things just aren’t brilliant ideas until some mouse-pusher who has never stepped out from his/her fluorescent office ‘imagines’ it.”

The same is true to a lesser extent in Detroit, where even un-planted fields can begin to resemble cultivated ones:

Most troubling is the relationship between economic decline, physical abandonment, and social problems. Economists argue the low housing prices in the city will attract those with low levels of “human capital,” creating a cycle of decline. “If low levels of human capital then create negative externalities or result in lower levels of innovation, this becomes particularly troubling because a self-reinforcing process can result in which an initial decline causes concentrated poverty, which then pushes the city further downward.” The barriers to overcome this cycle of economic decline are great, and renewal in Detroit will mean not only increasing numbers of jobs and residents but a reversal of decades of compounding problems.

Resources
> LOST Magazine: Dissapeared Detroit
> Southeast Michigan Council of Governments
> Planning for Detroit’s Tax-Reverted Properties: Possibilities for the Wayne County Land Bank

(Cited: Kasarda, John D. “Industrial Restructuring and Changing Location of Jobs.” in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, Volume I: Economic Trends. R. Farley, ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). Glaeser, Edward L. and Joseph Gyourko. “Urban Decline and Durable Housing.” Journal of Political Economy 113:2 (2005).)

The Paradox of Cheap Parking, in Real Time

Last spring, I heard about an interesting dataset about Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for four years as an undergraduate student. Busy with the flurry of activity leading up to my completion of graduate school, I stored it away to look at later. After all, real-time information on cities is hard enough to come by, let alone on the simultaneously ubiquitous and fascinating topic of parking.

The Data
The parking lots and structures in downtown Ann Arbor are operated by a quasi-public organization, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Together with their parking vendor, last April they implemented a system that provides real-time information about the number of parking spaces available in several lots and garages through digital signs at each garage and through their website. An old Ann Arbor friend Brian Kerr wrote a simple script to scrape that page every 20 minutes and record the number of spaces available at each facility. After letting it run for about two weeks, he posted the data file online. Subsequently a local blogger interviewed the DDA’s IT manager about how the system was implemented, and even posted some charts encouraging visitors to match the chart with the garage. The data sparked a bit of interest on local blogs but the conversation soon died out.

At the time of the completion of a recent parking study in 2007, the DDA operated lots and structures containing 5,770 parking spaces in downtown Ann Arbor. These facilities are concentrated in a relatively small physical area, as shown in this map from the study:

For my first pass at the data I thought I’d look at just one garage, indicated by the arrow above. As is shown, the Maynard Street structure is near two movie theaters, a busy commercial district, and one block from the University of Michigan Central Campus Diag, with many classroom buildings and a large auditorium. The first chart is the number of spaces available in just one day – Monday, April 7, 2008:

The first thing to notice is that the garage is never full during any 20-minute measurement. Although the technical capacity of the garage is 797, the garage flat-lines at 618 (perhaps due to long-term permits or construction). The garage is only filled over 90% of this reduced capacity for one 40-minute period, from 1:40 p.m. to 2:20 p.m, or roughly 2.7% of the entire 24-hour period.

Expanding the time frame for the next 7 consecutive days reveals this pattern:

The spikes correspond with the midday rush, and the garage only fills once, around 1:00 p.m. on Friday, April 11th. This seemingly dry data can tell a rich sociological story; everyone rushes in just after nine, with various people lingering around into long into the evening. In a sense, the curve represents a unique DNA of the local land uses and the preferences and customs of their auto-using patrons, residents, and visitors.

Observations
Based on the data we can make a couple observations. First, the vast majority of the parking lots and structures are almost totally empty the majority of the time. This means they represent a huge amount of inactive urban space. A common rule of thumb is each structured space takes up 300 square feet of floor space for the bay and associated aisles and ramps. If we use this standard, the same floor area in this garage could be 239 apartments (assuming they average a generous 1,000 square feet). Certainly good design would demand a residential structure be taller or configured differently on the site. However, given the extremely fickle use of the garage now, a residential use would mean more people physically at the site on average than are now.

Second, from the chart above we can see that parking demand at the DDA’s prevailing price structure is very spiky, with extremely high demand only at limited times. (This garage costs $.80 an hour, or $175 for a monthly permit) It would seem logical for the DDA to use variable or tiered pricing to create a market incentive for a more efficient use of their space. For example, parking overnight could be inexpensive given the very low demand, with parking around the midday peak much more expensive. Even a modest form of performance parking may change this observed pattern.

Overparked?

Despite nearly 5,800 spaces the DDA continues to develop more parking, this October publishing on their website details about a proposed underground lot near the library boasting green design. How will the city know when they have enough parking? After all, parking policy guru Donald Shoup points out one can rarely provide enough of something that’s under priced. The proposal for the new garage advises readers to “review the findings of the 2007 Parking Study to learn why vehicle parking is needed even with extensive investment in alternative transportation.” Unfortunately the 2007 Parking Study doesn’t exactly settle the matter, including as one of its final recommendations “Maintain a formalized process for determining when new supply is needed.” The study, by the alternative transportation experts Nelson/Nygaard, is chock full of state-of-the-art policy suggestions (including variable pricing discussed above) but avoids the sticky question of determining how much is necessary. Perhaps it’s because like other seemingly scientific questions in urban planning the answer is not scientific but value-laden and political. (A similar question: How many freeways and/or lanes do we need?) And in Ann Arbor, the people want more parking.

Parking in the Real-Time City
In another vein, publishing this real-time data (especially on a still forthcoming mobile format) could itself have profound implications for the transportation system. Could real-time data allow people to avoid full structures and make use of the resource more efficient? The Washington, D.C. suburban rail station lots tend to fill up early, and I’ve heard stories of people driving downtown stopping at each station to look for a spot. What if the space was beamed to their home computer or car? (The more important question might be, “How much parking should they provide to begin with, and what should it be priced?” One suggestive study I saw of San Francisco’s BART concluded replacing parking with offices would boost the agency’s riders and revenue) If the DDA makes summary data available on the website, it would make costly data collection unnecessary for this data point. All citizens would know exactly how full or empty the garages were, and the DDA would be able to observe the impact of pricing or policy changes in real time.

> Previous parking posts: The Urbanists’ Panacea: Parking Reform, Are Expensive Parking Meters Fair?, more
> Homeless Dave’s Interview with the DDA’s Stephen Smith
> Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority

Michigan Campus Activism Guide Published

Although it has been a while since I’ve written about the University of Michigan, I thought I would note the publication of a book by my friend and U-M senior Mollie Bates. An Art and Design senior, in collaboration with the progressive paper the Michigan Independent, Mollie has designed and produced an 80-page, full color book on progressive campus activism at the university titled The Michigan Independent’s Guide to Campus Activism. The book features detailed descriptions of activism from 2003 to 2007 (Students Supporting Affirmative Action, The College Democrats, Voice Your Vote and The Coke Coalition), historical information dating back to the 1960s, and a how-to guide for future activists. I had the opportunity to peruse a copy this summer and was duly impressed. You can get a copy of the book by getting in touch with Mollie at mollie.bates at gmail.com. She informs me it will eventually be available for purchase online, and I will update this post when that happens.

> Preview the book on Mollie’s online portfolio

Almost everyone has had a printer at one time or the other. This is the age of lexmark printers. Throw away the old ones, and get new printer accessories and start printing right away.

‘It’s Fun To Be In the O-R-D-E-R’

For those accustom to my usual topics about urbanism and D.C., permit me a brief digression about a University of Michigan “leadership” society with a controversial history, that recently re-named themselves from Michigamua to The Order of Angell.

The Ann Arbor blog Left Behind in the Fishbowl has posted what appears to be a copy of lyrics of a song written to be used during initiation rituals by Michigamua/Order of the Angell, titled “YMCA (Pride 2008)”. Whether or not the document is authentic of a sophisticated parody, it makes for hilarious reading.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Michigamua/Order of the Angell because they just inducted new members. Readers of this blog will know I think the group should be abolished since it is a shameful blemish on the history of the University of Michigan, but I won’t belabor the point. I think my views are a quite reasonable conclusion based on my research. It seems some basic history is a good starting point.

1. At its founding, the group created an elaborate invented mythology using their views of Native American culture, which they proceeded to use for nearly 100 years.
2. For 90 years of their history most internal communication (including all newsletters) was in a stylized speech (see below for examples)
3. The group first admitted women in 2000
4. The organized had privileged space in the Michigan Union from the 30s until 2000, had close relationships with administrators for many years, and even at one point had a special university account for their finances. For years, they used university property outside downtown Ann Arbor for special events.
5. They agreed to abolish all references to native American culture in 1989, however the tower occupation revealed numerous objects and a wigwam retained by the organization

Whether it is even possible — or even desirable — to whitewash this history with a quick name change I think is an open question. This is not to mention the appropriateness of having such a group with such an elitist past (and present) claiming to act “for Michigan.”

Here are the new members, from the Daily:

“Pride of 2008″
-Sarah Banco – Women’s soccer
-Lindsey Cottrell – Women’s soccer
-Steve Crompton – Dance Marathon
-Lindsay Davis – Women’s golf
-Alessandra Giampaolo – Softball
-Sam Harper – College Democrats chair
-Michael Hart – Football
-Jen Hsu – Co-chair of the Michigan Student Assembly’s LGBT commission
-Nellie Kippley – Women’s gymnastics
-Matko Maravic – Men’s tennis
-Doug Pickens – Baseball
-Randal Seriguchi – VP of the National Pan-Hellenic council, MSA
-Sejal Tailor – Multicultural Greek Council president
-Alex Tisdall – ROTC
-Tyrel Todd – Men’s wrestling
-Alex Vanderkaay – Swimmer
-Zack Yost – MSA president
-Michael Cromwell – A capella
-Nicole Wojcik – Marching Band
-Anup Shah – IASA
-Rohan Patel – Dance Marathon
-Kelly Sanderson – Women Engineers
-Gervis Menzies – Residence Hall Association

Here’s some images I pulled from my collection:

Newsletters from the 1940s

Class of 1966

Induction ritual photo and account from 1960s

This letterhead was used well into the 1970s. Ironically, this copy contains notes from a meeting where negotiations with Native American students was discussed.

Note, donations from this 1980s fundraising letter are payable to a “University of Michigan — Michigamua Account”

Objects discovered in the “wigwam” during 2000 Student of Color Coalition occupation.

Recent News
> Michigan Daily: “After seven years, group recognized by ‘U’ once again”
> Michigan Daily: “The secret society that lived: New name alone can’t cover blemishes of a shady past”
> Michigan Daily: “Jim Toy Viewpoint: To build a bridge” (Community member describes why he is working with group)

Resources
> Native American Student Association — Michigamua “Guide to Understanding”
> The Order of Angell Maize pages entry
> The Order of Angell website
> Michigamua Members: 1999-2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 (For previous years just drop me a line, I have a printed directory going all the way back to 1902)

More
> Previous Michigamua Posts