Is Urban Planning Dead?

At the American Planning Association National Conference in New Orleans a couple weeks back, I participated in a session on the provocative question: “is planning dead?” The event was organized by the staff of the Colorado-based organization PlaceMatters. A small group met to discuss the question at an “unconference” session near the convention center. They were kind enough to post a live blog and summary post about the event. I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a slightly more developed version of what I discussed.

First, in one sense, conventional planning is alive and well. U.S. cities continue to create and implement comprehensive plans and zoning regulations in the same ways they have since the advent of planning in the 1920s. There have been two notable changes. First, the size and complexity of plans and regulations has increased. As an example, the city of Austin, Texas has identified 67 plans, policies, and regulations adopted in the city since completing their last comprehensive plan in 1978. Secondly, although it’s not commonly recognized as part of planning, the historic preservation movement has had a tremendous impact on planning in urban areas. Preservation regulations are generally modeled on planning and zoning controls. New planning tools such as form-based codes, design review, inclusionary zoning, and other innovations share the same regulatory approach dating back to the 1920s, one that is rooted in the city’s “police powers” to create regulations for the health, safety, and welfare of the population.

Outside of this creeping expansion of proscriptive, regulatory planning, there have been alternative developments. Community development organizations and bottom-up initiatives have introduced new models of participatory planning. They should not be overlooked, but in most places city governments retain their central role in urban development. Although the process of creating plans has changed substantially, elected officials retain the final authority to modify or reject plans and development proposals. In its most advanced forms, the community development movement relies on government resources and permission to achieve their goals. (Cobbling together grants and subsidies, “pushing through” projects, etc)

Planning theorists have proposed several new models for the field, however none have significantly effected professional practice.

• Paul Davidoff’s concept of advocacy planning is still widely discussed and taught. He proposed planners should follow the approach of the legal profession, providing each community with resources to create their own plan. However, the model has many well-known criticisms. Who gets a planner, and how are they paid? How does the government decide which plan will prevail? How should large-scale investment decisions be made?
• John Friedman articulated a philosophy he referred to as “non-Euclidean” planning. He argued planning should be iterative, normative, creative, and based in social learning. Although this certainly describes some of the most innovative examples of planning, it is unclear how it could be followed to reform the role of government. Although containing provocative ideas, it requires further development and integration with a broader theory of governance before it can be readily applied.
• Finally, one of the most influential developments has been the ‘communicative turn’ advocated by a variety of planning theorists. Adopting the theories of Habermas, this group focuses on the work of planning as shaping views and collecting information through processes of dialog. It also forms the theoretical basis for the consensus building approach, where stakeholders are brought together to discuss contested policy issues. In their new book Planning With Complexity, Judith Innes and David Booher provide a comprehensive statement of this philosophy and attempt to integrate it with theories of governance. They advocate for an adaptive, collaborative, distributed, and nonlinear government. Just published earlier this year, it remains to be seen in what ways these ideas can be translated into concrete practices.

I think planning can take two — perhaps contradictory — directions.

First, planning can celebrate the dynamism of the private city. Under this scenario, the field would pull back from detailed plans and regulations, seeking ways to encourage private actors to produce the desired ends. The strategy need not concede to private interests, but would seek to make public benefits predictable, transparent, and simple. It would entail the courage to voluntarily limit what powers planners would exercise. In turn, governments would take an even bolder approach to the framework of urbanization: shaping streets, lots, infrastructure, and markets.

Second, planning could re-assert government’s role in shaping the city through empowerment, not regulation. Experiments in participatory governance and budgeting could point the way towards a future where governments function as miniature development states. In this context, planning would be focused on structuring processes to involve citizens and organizations in governance in new ways, and sparking entrepreneurship and innovation.

After the intellectual fall of the rational-comprehensive model of policy analysis, critics have often held the problem with planning lay with its methods. If planners didn’t posses any special skills or methods, the argument goes, what claim to legitimacy do they have? I argue this collapse of a sphere of professional authority unveiled a deeper, more fundamental crisis: of democratic legitimacy. Both of my “directions” share a critical evaluation of the legitimate power and structure of government. As a field embedded in structures of governance, planning cannot be reformed without a vision for a reformed and revitalized urban democracy.

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Placeblogs and the Nonplace Urban Realm

Communications technologies were supposed to doom urban community. After all, with high-quality, free, instantaneous communication with people from around the world, who cares about talking over the fence with the neighbor, or joining the local bowling league? Ironically, the Internet, the world’s most widely available communications medium, has sparked some of the most narrowly focused local forums that have ever existed: community or placeblogs, listservs and hyperlocal journalism projects focusing on specific neighborhoods, blocks or buildings. Although many thinkers predicted the collapse of urban community, planner and theorist Melvin Webber had a more nuanced view. In his prescient 1964 essay, Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm, he predicted the growth of new urban realms, but also the persistent importance of urban places that may explain this resurgent localism. (1)

How did communications transform urban life? To Webber, urbanity is participation in cultural, social, and economic transactions. In the future therefore, “urbanity is no longer the exclusive trait of the city dweller … increasingly the farmers themselves are participating in the urban life of the world.” Webber concludes, “as accessibility becomes further freed from propinquity, cohabitation of a territorial place [...] is becoming less important to the maintenance of social communities.”

Webber defined a set of loosely geographic realms. The local realm, defined by in-person interaction is the world of our physical neighborhoods, grocery stores, and other people we encounter personally. People with more specialized interests participate in higher realms, perhaps a metropolitan realm through a citywide organization, occasionally the national realm during professional meetings, even, for the example of the business leader or the elite scientific researcher, the world realm. All this would fundamentally transform urban place, creating an entire nonplace urban realm that had barely existed before. “The place-community represents only a limited and special case of the larger genus of communities, deriving its basis from the common interests that attach to propinquity alone.”

In the early days of the Internet, it looked like this was happening. Common-interest communities formed on chat rooms and listservs, regardless of the actual location of participants. The term cyberspace itself suggested an ethereal place both everywhere and nowhere, a sort of alternate universe to place-based community.

Was Webber right? After all, he predicted social changes “are expanding the range of diversity in the average person’s associations and are inducing a parallel reduction in the relative importance of place-related interests and associations.” The dissolution of tight bonds around physical community is real, and documented by research in the vein of Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone. American’s don’t live in tight-knit, clannish urban neighborhoods anymore. Although perhaps partly caused with by less sociability, a major cause must be our growing involvement in interactions at other realms: staying in touch with family spread around the world through Skype, keeping up with professional networks through email or conferences, even forging online-only interest-based communities.

Then something unexpected happened. Just as the Internet became more ubiquitous and widely used, it began to work to reinforce place-based communities. People with similar interests could find each-other through services like Meetup.com. Although made famous by its effective use by political campaigns, the most dynamic Meetup groups have interests more narrow and permanent than politics: knitting, beach volleyball, classical music. Thousands of local blogs, termed placeblogs by Lisa Williams, have popped up in cities across the country, and forums and listservs connect neighbors.

Why the interest in the local? Webber hypothesizes that even the world leader must work in the local realm at least some of his time, and some people still live their lives in the local realm, rarely interacting with people outside their neighborhood. If you added up all the aggregate person-hours, he speculated, you’d find still by far the majority expended in the local realm, even if time expended at higher realms has increased significantly. Thus, even in a postmodern world of global communications, local, place-based communities remains an important locus of activity. After all, Webber points out, “Those who live near each other share an interest in lowering the social costs of doing so, and they share an interest in the quality of certain services and goods that can be supplied only locally,” including traffic on the streets, garbage collection, children’s facilities, and public nuisances. I would argue that as a realm of deliberation and disagreement, the local realm is different than similar-interest networks at higher realms. After all, if you get into a disagreement with professional contacts you can simply quit the group. The place-based community, by virtue of the difficulty of moving and the necessity for close interaction, is difficult to quit and difficult to change. Most significantly, unlike the others its participation is not voluntary; everyone must live somewhere, and cannot easily escape the positive and negative attributes of their surroundings.

Furthermore, place-based communities have unique characteristics. Ignoring issues of segregation, they’re the urban realm where you’re most likely to encounter people different from yourself. The small physical scale of the local community also means its one where an individual can have a tangible impact, whether lobbying city government to install a streetlight or conducting a simple neighborhood cleanup. The national and global realm seems more difficult for the individual to change than ever, with its swarm of politicians, policy experts, corporate and special interest groups. The place-based community, on the other hand, offers the individual a refreshingly tangible venue in a fragmented world to make a difference. In addition, the great personal stakes combined with greater say provides increased motivation for participation.

45 years later, the theories of Melvin Webber seem more relevant than ever. Even in the face of growing nonplace urban realms, the place-based community retains the role as an important venue for interaction, consumption and conflict. However, paradoxically, the Internet can be used to form or reinforce local, place-based communities even while it facilitates the growth of nonplace urban realms.

(1) Webber, Melvin M. “Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm.” In Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Webber, et al, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.

On Small Step for Social Data?

When swivel.com launched in 2007 I was excited: at last, a company set themselves to creating a user-friendly platform for exploring data. However, something disappointing happened: the core software of the website hasn’t evolved much. The problems I identified in an early blog post, such as not highlighting user-created charts and the limited customization of the visualizations have not been addressed. Growth of the user community has been modest, with apparently 14,287 users today. Recently the company has launched Swivel Business, which I explored after requesting an invitation. Sadly, this application works more like a web-based version of Excel, with less emphasis on visualization and data sharing – what made the original tool unique. In April the company announced they’ll be merging both tools into one website – let’s hope it captures the best parts of both.

IBM’s Many Eyes, a similar website, has been somewhat more successful. It boasts some 70,000 datasets and allows users to experiment with a variety of sophisticated visualizations. However the site’s navigation and interface seems a bit clunky, and seems to obscure the best quality data. The site also lacks the ability to easily download or extract data, or compare between datasets.

The newly-renamed Socrata.com stands to finally crack the difficult space of social data sharing and exploration tools. For one, the website has de-emphasized visualizations and focused on data access. Ironically, even in the data exploration business I think this is a good move. In the rapidly evolving world of visualizations, developers are working on a host of platforms and approaches. Google has purchased some outright (see Gapminder) and quickly rolled them out as gadgets. By avoiding the visualization fray, Socrata can focus on a robust and flexible platform for storing and sharing tabular data.

The tool allows users to upload datasets with basic metadata, download it in a host of formats (CSV, PDF, EXL, XML, JSON) and embed it in a webpage. The embeddable applet includes the all-important search and sort functions, required to explore any dataset extending beyond one or two screens deep. Here’s an example of the embeddable applet, using a dataset I analyzed for a previous post:

The system automatically recognizes several type so fields: text, number, money, checkbox, percent, and boolean (?). The site’s not perfect, but provides for the first time a robust, free platform for sharing tabular data. Although very new, you can already find Socrata widgets sharing White House salary data on WhiteHouse.Gov, or Oklahoma’s suburban growth. Only time will tell whether Socrata stands to become the go-to website for sharing data.

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Opening the Archive of ‘Fake Omaha’

The online magazine Triple Canopy has published an article by my friend Neil Greenberg about his �Fake Omaha� project. Illustrated with photos of some of the street maps of the fictional city, the article includes �transit schedules, redevelopment reports, internal memoranda, intra-office communications, and remarks prepared for public officials � in order to provide a sense of the city to outsiders and illustrate its redevelopment efforts ��

I profiled the project in an interview with Neil in December 2007, and as this passage describes the project isn�t so much about a simple street map of a fictional city, but an entire fictional planning scenario:

[Neil Greenberg:] � Like you mention, real cities are not perfect. They do contain disappointments and mistakes and challenges. For 50 years, millions of people blithely accepted the idea that suburbs would flourish forever and cities would all die. Let us not underestimate the demise of that conventional wisdom. It�s a very exciting time to be involved in planning. Today, we have a unique chance to re-create vibrant, sustainable cities and regions.

That won�t, however, happen in one step. What intrigues me is the transition. How do we come to terms with decades of poor planning? Where do we make the best of existing infrastructure � and where do we have to start from scratch? How do we learn from prior attempts at redevelopment? What do we want our cities and regions to look like in the future? Why is the need to think ahead so obvious to some and so lost on others?

The �flaws� built into Fake Omaha are exercises in dealing with these questions. In transforming our metropolitan areas � particularly stubborn ones like Detroit � we�ll have to face challenging and unpredictable circumstances. It will take a portfolio of small victories before an entire metro area turns the corner. That�s exactly what I�m doing in Fake Omaha. At 60th Street and Fallbrook, what was once a faltering strip mall is now a farmers market. Along Bishop Street and Charlotte Street, neglected four- and five-story buildings are being renovated into mixed-use commercial and residential space, in the same neighborhood that used to bulldoze those very buildings to make a few more parking spaces. Through all of this, the transit system has risen to the forefront: what was formerly a bus service for the poor and the weak has become an indisputable driving force of smarter, more valuable regional development.

Read my interview of Neil or his article in Triple Canopy: �Boom, Bust, Burn, Blame: Fake Omaha�