Is this true? If so, it ran counter to my sense that while the implementation of plans lagged behind, planning itself was a lively profession continuing to produce plans nationwide. I thought I would answer the question by looking at two samples: the nation’s 25 largest cities by population, and the 101 municipalities in metropolitan Boston.

Do Big Cities Plan?

I decided to begin by reviewing the top 25 incorporated U.S. cities by 2010 population. For each, I found the website of the city’s planning office, and recorded the date of the most recent general or comprehensive plan if one existed. Although there is some variation (in particular, some do not contain future land use maps but only emphasize general policy and strategy), in no case was there any ambiguity about whether a plan aspired to be comprehensive.

Out of these 25 cities, 23 (or 92%) had a general or comprehensive plan. Four cities are currently preparing new plans or major plan updates. I then calculated the number of years since the plan was approved (plans currently underway were scored at 0 years). For the group, the with an average time since adoption is only 7 years. Ten cities, or 40%, had plans that were underway or approved less than five years ago. Seventeen cities, or 68%, had plans underway or approved less than 10 years ago.

The two cities without plans approved in the last 20 years were Chicago and Boston, however incidentally both metropolitan regions recently completed regional plans.

Do Smaller Cities and Towns Plan?

If big cities produce plans, what about smaller places like cities and towns? After all, big cities have large, sophisticated planning departments with the resources and capacity to produce comprehensive plans.

Last year I completed a similar survey for the 101 municipalities in the state-designed Boston region served by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. In this case, I reviewed and updated an existing database listing the year of the last master or comprehensive plan.

Among this group, 73% had completed plans, with an average time since adoption of 10.2 years. The towns in the Boston metropolitan region vary widely by size. Perhaps the larger cities are planning, but their smaller neighbors are not? Surprisingly, the data show the reverse is true. Among municipalities with populations less than 40,000, 76% had completed plans. Only 59% of towns over 40,000 had plans (including Boston itself). Among the towns that had completed plans, many were within the last 10 years.

Sound and Fury … Signifying Nothing?

A grand theory explaining the purpose and function of these plans has eluded the urban planning field. Although, as Prof. Kayden implied, cities do have legal incentives to create and update plans, this procedural requirement does not explain the lengthy and elaborate processes and plans that are produced.

One naive view holds the role of planning is to design the physical form of the city. Although critics point out many of their proposals are not carried out, those who look carefully find that some of their ideas are eventually implemented (see for example Brent Ryan’s careful analysis of plans in Providence, Rhode Island). However, ideas not proposed in plans are also implemented (including dozens of stadiums, ballparks, and porkbarrel infrastructure projects), lending credence to the political scientists’ focus on power and decisions, not the source of the ideas.

Others have analyzed planning from an economic point of view, arguing planning can increase welfare by providing information to coordinate private land development, or address issues like public goods, externalities, prisoners’ dilemma conditions, and distributional concerns. (See Klosterman 1985)

Finally, contemporary planning theory has stressed the ability of deliberative processes to change individuals’ views and perhaps also institution through “collaborative rationality.” However, this approach can soon stray from the subject of planning — cities and the human and natural systems they encompass. Another strand emphasizes the “wicked” nature of problems addressed by plans, and argues problems like these need to be addressed with a combination of analysis, deliberation, and design.

Planning’s remarkable persistence, extent, and diversity suggests planning activities are serving some purpose. With cities facing great uncertainty and unprecedented problems, it seems more important than ever to untangle the origins and effects of planning to maximize the benefits from this widespread activity.

Historically, data sources for urban planning have remained relatively stable. Planners relied on a collection of well-known government-produced datasets to do their work, including statistics and geographic layers from federal, state and local sources. Produced by regulatory processes or occasional surveys, the strengths and limitations of these sources are well known to planners and many citizens. However all this is beginning to change. Not only has the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey introduced a bewildering variety of data products, all with margins of error, three interrelated categories of new data are growing rapidly: crowdsourced, private, and “big” data.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION & CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS AND PAPERS

PLANNINGTECH@DUSP 2011

Friday, April 8, 2011
11:30 AM – 6:00 PM
Location: MIT Building 9

DESCRIPTION

New technologies are transforming how we communicate, expanding access to data and information, and revolutionizing how we understand and navigate our cities. Join a diverse groups of practitioners, scholars, students, and citizens for a half-day conference on the impact of these changes on the field of urban planning. Held one day before the start of the American Planning Association’s National Conference (also in Boston), this will be an opportunity to meet innovators from around New England and the across the nation.

The event will include discussion of urban modeling, urban sensing for planning, planning support systems, meeting technology, social media and Web 2.0 tools, and gaming for participation.

REGISTRATION

Register using the following link. Registration is free:
http://planningtech11.eventbrite.com/

PRESENTATION INFORMATION

Participants have four options for presentations:
- Lightning Talks – presenters will have 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, advance automatically.
- Paper Session – Presentation of a paper, submitted two weeks before the conference. Should be no more than 5-10 pages.
- Presentation Session – Presentation without a formal paper, A/V materials optional.
- Idea Session – A facilitated conversation on a topic. Will be finalized on the day of the conference.

If you would like to present, submit the presenter name(s), presentation type, and proposed presentation title to rob.goodspeed at gmail.com by Friday, February 25. The timeline for presentations is below.

Friday, 2/25 – Title and Abstracts due for presenters
Monday, 2/28 – Accepted presenters notified
Monday, 3/28 – Papers and final presentation titles due
Friday, 4/8 – Conference day

For more information see the conference website:
http://web.mit.edu/rgoodspe/www/planningtech/
Or contact planningtech at mit.edu

The expansion of the Internet has made possible amazing examples of the collaboration of large groups of people, a phenomenon often called crowdsourcing. Projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap have created new types of encyclopedias and maps. Other projects have coordinated thousands of volunteers to perform major outreach events, such as cleaning up garbage in Estonia or coordinating relief efforts for disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti.

As examples have proliferated, city planners have begun to explore whether the web can be used to tackle urban planning problems. Reviewing some well-known crowdsourcing examples with a focus on urban planning, I will describe four distinct models of crowdsourcing. Understanding these different models and their relative merits is required to integrate successful models of public sector crowdsourcing. The four types are crowdsourcing are:

• Soliciting solutions to problems
• Coordinating many individuals to achieve “collective intelligence”
• Novel combinations of incentives, processes, and staffing to achieve organizational goals
• Peer production of public goods

Some projects have used crowdsourcing as a way of soliciting innovative designs to a problem online. In Salt Lake City’s Next Stop Design project, Thomas Sanchez and Daren Brabham led a team which held an online design competition for a bus stop in Salt Lake City. In a recent article for the journal Planning Theory, Brahbam argues crowdsourcing should be viewed as a new type of public participation. He cites as an example the company InnoCentive, which operates a website where corporations post technical problems and “solvers” compete to win cash prizes for the best solution. “In essence, any urban planning project is predicated on a problem.” Brahbam writes, “Typically that problem is how best to accommodate changing populations with different infrastructure, all while considering the interests of residents, developers, business owners, and the environment. If a problem can be framed clearly, and if all the data pertaining to a problem can be made available, then that problem can be crowdsourced.”

In Melbourne, Australia, Mark Elliott and a team of collaborators took quite a different approach to crowdsourcing for a project completed in 2008. Partnering with an official city planning process, Elliot’s group created a wiki so the plan could be written in the same way as Wikipedia is – through the contributions of hundreds of different authors. In his doctoral dissertation, Elliott proposed a theory of “stigmergic collaboration.” Stigmergy is a theory developed in the natural sciences for a “mechanism of indirect coordination between agents,” such as the ways ant colonies can work in highly coordinated ways without a central authority. Elliott argues this type of cooperation and collaboration is made possible through technologies that create a “localized site of individualistic engagement” that reduces demands placed on participants.

A recent paper by MIT researchers argued crowdsourcing projects should be viewed as innovative arrangements of components, what they call a genome. Through a detailed analysis of the organizations Linux, Wikipedia, InnoCentive, and Threadless, the authors conclude each share a common set of ingredients which fall into four categories: the goal to be achieved, the structure or process of achieving the goal, incentives, and staffing. They observe these projects combine the components in different ways. For example, in the case of Linux, the crowd contributes new software code through collaboration for recognition, but only a small group decides which modules are included in each release through a hierarchy. In the case of Wikipedia, although the crowd creates articles, but the website uses voting and administrators for other decisions, such as whether to delete an article.

Finally, many have speculated that crowdsourcing should move beyond the realm of ideas. Citing examples of massive cleanups and emergency relief efforts, they argue city governments should use technology to crowdsource the production of public services. Instead of the government being the sole provider of certain public services, such as filling potholes or cleaning graffiti, could they simply coordinate citizens to help each other? I am skeptical of such claims for a number of reasons. Governments are subject to unique political and institutional arrangements which make collaborating with citizens difficult. Even if these barriers can be overcome, the flexibility of purely private organizations may be required for a successful project. However, even if governments can’t crowdsource their core functions, there may still be a need for a different approach in this new world. Bas Kotterink, a researcher in the Netherlands, argued in a lecture last summer that the expansion of private crowdsourcing may mean governments should take on expanded roles facilitating innovation, monitoring, and enforcing basic values such as privacy.

Although sharing similarities, each of these models contains distinct assumptions and approaches. Successfully using crowdsourcing for urban planning may require another approach entirely, taking into account the unique characteristics of each city and project. By describing some of the diverse approaches used thus far, I hope this article will help provoke ideas and innovation.

Originally written for APA Planning and Technology Today

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.

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.

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.