Jenny Walty

I've shifted my focus somewhat to focus on what it means for me as an artist and a professional to live in New York, so I thought it would be a good idea to get a Masters in Urban Planning. I'll be putting up some of my academic writings here and will start with this paper for my Intro to Urban Planning class: "The Failure of Planning for the 21st Century."

Following America’s victory in the Second World War, planning had to contend with unprecedented demographic and economic growth in America. After years of depression, war and lack of investment in infrastructure, industry was working double shifts to satisfy the growing American market for consumer goods. The doors of academia were flung open by the G.I. Bill to produce a new professional class. These modern men were promised fast cars and the freedom to zoom from their residential suburb to the city on a daily basis while climbing the corporate ladder.

The result of fifty years of post-war land use and transportation policies guided by this vision of individual mobility as modernity has generated profound challenges to American life in the 21st Century. Developers took advantage of generous Federal subsidies for highways and infrastructure to build extensive commuter neighborhoods on the urban fringe. The long-term effects have been traffic congestion, air pollution, costly infrastructure needs and a high-level of energy consumption, because the low densities of suburbs can’t support mass transit. Federal housing policies subsidized homogenous neighborhoods of expensive single-family housing—and with them racial and socio-economic segregation—by guaranteeing credit to home-buyers to move out of central cities. The municipal structure of planning authority was compartmentalized, leading to constant conflicts over high infrastructure costs, a lack of infrastructure, and inequitable distribution of Locally Undesirable Land Uses. (Downs, 1989)

Planners were developing and redeveloping huge areas in structural and cultural conditions that allowed them to disregard the consequences. Planners may have been successful in lowering density, but American planning failed to create the utopian cities they envisioned because the bureaucratic structure of planning authority at the municipal level did not account for long term or regional effects, and because the specialization of the field led to a cult of expertise and disengagement. As the cities decentralized and population moved to the fringe, city authorities were callously bulldozing through vibrant communities to make space for planners’ flawed craft.

Planning has always been a municipal affair, and Section 701 of the Housing Act of 1954 reinforced local authority by requiring that each municipality create a general plan to receive Federal housing subsidies. The general plan was meant to estimate future needs and advise local elected officials who retained control of the process. But there was confusion between the new requirement for a general plan and the entrenched practice of zoning (Godschalk and Kaiser, 2000). Planners were employed by municipalities primarily to administer zoning and zoning exemptions.

But zoning decisions can be made independently of a comprehensive plan. When elected officials sit down to make a decision or negotiate a plan, they are only responsible to the current citizens of their city, not future residents, and are not able to address issues that require regional solutions. For example, suburban zoning often excludes multi-family dwellings and exports development costs across jurisdictional borders (Meck, Wack and Zimet, 2000). Development planning, “is not a rational, linear process based on technical knowledge and a systematic balancing of public interests; rather it is a political process subject to influence, emotion, and interests that are not only narrow but also often transitory.” [emphasis mine] (Godschalk and Kaiser, 2000). A few states recognized the problems presented by localized development policies and subsequently restructured the planning process to take place on a statewide or regional level. But the majority of states have allowed planning to continue under municipal authority.

While the legal structure certainly had an impact on the success of planning, the profession also played an increasingly specialized role in the municipal bureaucracy lacking any connection to the various planning disciplines. As Jane Jacobs so viscerally put it, trying to explain how the city functions to experts with “fractionated” responsibility, “is like trying to eat through a pillow.” (Jacobs, 1961) Planners made decisions that affected thousands of people as well as the economic status of the city, but the profession retreated to the position of technical expertise that was protected by their municipal role. “It is impossible for [experts] to discard unfit tactics…if the alternative is to be left with confusion as to what to try instead and why.” (Jacobs, 1961)

For example, in the 1950s and 60s planners put their faith in mathematical models and a four-step process to represent current transportation behavior and project it into the future. Planners used the early computers to make computations based on the four-step model to predict travel demand and plan service improvements. But, “dependence on technical approaches can foster two false notions: first, that every … problem has one ‘correct’ solution; second, that … planning does not involve value judgments.” (Black and Rosenbloom, 2000) Under prolonged scrutiny, it became clear that the technical modeling used by planners to make decisions about traffic was based on assumptions that did not reflect the way travelers actually behave. Individual behavior varies according to a complex series of circumstances and is affected by incentives and disincentives, i.e. government policy.

Neither ordinary people nor elected politicians could understand how planners justified their projects. Planners, on the other hand, could easily dismiss objections as uninformed and unscientific (Black and Rosenbloom, 2000), and in the process failed to take into account people’s lived experience in cities and the value of social capital in their lives. Planners caused so much chaos and degradation of city life that it provoked a “highway revolt” of citizens who lobbied to re-orient the planning process to creating space for people instead of cars. When cities were faced with true crisis in the 1970’s planning finally started to change.

Oregon is an example of this change, following the 1973 Oregon Land Use Act, which requires that planning process begins at the state level. Land use in Portland, Oregon’s largest city, is determined by a democratically elected Metro Council that is responsible for growth management, transportation, land use planning, solid waste management, regional parks and green spaces, and technical services for the entire region surrounding the city of Portland. In order to limit sprawl and provide an incentive for gradual redevelopment of the central city, Portland’s Metro Council implemented an Urban Growth Boundary (Godschalk and Kaiser, 2000) and encouraged high-density development around public transportation. Portland is now regarded as one of the most vibrant growing cities in America, proving that planning authority can be successfully restructured to address the challenges facing us in the 21st Century.

A number of European cities have made ecological sustainability a primary objective, enabling various disciplines to work together and find synergies to “close the loop.” The structural differences between America and Europe are important to note. “Historically stronger planning and land use control systems are helpful, as well as generally stronger and more proactive roles afforded to [local] government.” (Beatley, 2003) Both structural and cultural differences in Europe led to sustainable cities before being extremely affected by the global climate crisis. European cities have more flexibility in the face of this challenge because they took the opportunity to invest in the infrastructure prior to the need for it.

While many American cities are ahead of Federal or State requirements to address sustainability issues, I don’t know if twenty years will be long enough to solve the twin problems of thinning suburbs and the aging infrastructure of growing cities. While technological advances will provide some solutions, planners should not solely rely on technical expertise. Planners should observe and study the innovations that well up from communities and be advocates for these solutions. As Web 2.0 changed journalism, politics and performance media, urban planning could be a site where community networks are able to access the power of the state.