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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Urban planning is not just about applying a suite of systematic principles or plotting out pragmatic designs to satisfy the briefs of private developers or public bodies. Planning is also an activity of imagination, with a stock of wisdom and an array of useful methods for making decisions and getting things done. This critical introduction uncovers and celebrates this imagination and its creative potential. Nicholas A. Phelps explores the key themes and driving questions in the circulation of planning ideas and methods over time and across spaces, identifying the contrasts and commonalities between urban planning systems and cultures. He argues that the tools for inclusive urban planning are today, more than ever, not solely restricted to the hands of planning bodies, but are distributed across citizens, a variety of organizations (what Phelps calls 'clubs') and states. As a result, the book sets the ground for the new arrangements between these groups and actors which will be central to the future of urban planning. By unsettling standard accounts, this book compels us towards more critical and creative thinking to ensure that the imagination, wisdom and methods of urban planning are mobilized towards achieving the aspiration of shaping better places.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of figures and tables
Figures
Tables
Preface
1 Introduction: what is planning?
Introduction
The urban planning imagination
Who plans?
History and the urban planning imagination
Geography and the urban planning imagination
Urban planning’s enduring appeal
The structure of the book
Notes
2 Imagination: what is planning’s spirit and purpose?
Introduction
Who plans?
Citizens
Clubs
States
Mixes of actors
The history and temporality of planning
Macro-historical change: empires, economic systems and states
Meso-level institutions of states
The micro-level
The temporalities of urban planning
The geography of the urban planning imagination
Bounded places: neighbourhood, city, region, nation, metropolis and megalopolis
Sites and neighbourhoods
Regional planning
Megalopolitan realities
National planning
Networks, flows and virtual urban planning
Cities as nodes within networks
Flows: the metabolism of cities
Virtuality and synchronicity
Conclusion
Notes
3 Substance: what are the objects of planning?
Introduction
Shelter
Cities without slums: seeing like a state
Housing as externality: club solutions to state failings
House as home: the latent informality of household desires
Health
Water, food and air
The infirmity of the city?
Mobility
Automobility and its systemic urban planning legacies
High-speed rail and aeromobility: the interplaces yet to come?
Virtual mobility and its effects
Sustainability
Environmental designations: the paradoxes of planning for the city and its other
Eco- and other city forms
Urban metabolism in an urban age of climate change and hazards
Economy
Economic growth: a state obsession
The circular urban economy
The alternative economies of clubs and citizens
Conclusion
Notes
4 Wisdom: what does planning teach us?
Introduction
Justice and equity
The tragedy of the commons and other wicked problems
Urban planning, externalities and land-value capture
Externalities
Private property, externalities, betterment and compensation
Unintended consequences
Planning failures great and small
Self-fulfilling prophecies of planning for mobility
Failures to plan with nature
Inabilities to control urban sprawl
Participation and the lack of it
Conclusion
Notes
5 Methods: what are the means of planning?
Introduction
City as organism: the art and science of urban planning
City as system: the predicting, providing and nudging of the state
Smart cities: the city as a mine of data
City as scenario: clubthink
Cities and citizens: participation in planning
Public participation
Communicative action and urban planning
Planning without statutory planning: agonism, co-production and radicalism
Mixes of methods for new urban planning imaginaries
Planning’s artistry
Experimentation
Planning rhetoric
Conclusions
Notes
6 Comparisons: what are the global variations in planning?
Introduction
Comparative approaches
Politics, political and administrative science
Geography and history
National planning systems and cultures
Planning systems: formal contrasts in law and administration
Culture: the local personalities of planning
Models of welfare and national economic development
Liberal markets
European welfare models
Predatory systems
South Asian democracies
Developmental systems
China
Born globals
Conclusion
Notes
7 Exchanges: what are the global connections in planning?
Introduction
The who, what and how of exchange
Nation states, empires and urban planning
Urban planning’s global iron cage?
The Europeanization of urban planning
Global urban planning governance?
Clubs: planning for extraordinary desires
The seductive power of urban planning
Urban planning by and for a TCC
Urban planning and the mediation of urban tastes
Pick-and-mix planning
Citizens: planning for ordinary needs
Conclusion
Notes
8 Prospects: what is the future of planning?
Introduction
The limits of citizens, clubs and states as urban planners
Citizens
Planning in the name of clubs
W(h)ither the state?
The city as laboratory: productive mixes of the urban planning imagination?
Conclusion: urban planning’s disciplinary dialogues
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Informal contrasts between types of planning systems
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Urban planning actors and mixes of actors
Figure 2.2
Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City
Figure 2.3
Four geographical metaphors
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Thirteen specializations and their overlaps in twenty-six accredited US planning...
Figure 3.2
Informal housing behind Thamrin Square shopping mall, central Jakarta
Figure 3.3
Melbourne’s Victoria Market and downtown
Figure 3.4
Renaturing of a storm channel in Bishan, Singapore
Figure 3.5
How to reframe economic development
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Graffiti on a Melbourne road sign
Figure 4.2
Pathways of urban development in the southeast of England
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Inside the planning gallery in Bandung, Indonesia
Figure 5.2
Los Arenales, Antofagasta, Chile
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For 苗田
and
Yulia Elizabeth Phelps
The Urban Planning Imagination
A Critical International Introduction
NICHOLAS A. PHELPS
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Nicholas A. Phelps 2021
The right of Nicholas A. Phelps to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2624-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2625-3(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
List of figures and tables
Figures
2.1 Urban planning actors and mixes of actors
2.2 Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City
2.3 Four geographical metaphors
3.1 Thirteen specializations and their overlaps in twenty-six accredited US planning schools
3.2 Informal housing behind Thamrin Square shopping mall, central Jakarta
3.3 Melbourne’s Victoria Market and downtown
3.4 Renaturing of a storm channel in Bishan, Singapore
3.5 How to reframe economic development
4.1 Graffiti on a Melbourne road sign
4.2 Pathways of urban development in the southeast of England
5.1 Inside the planning gallery in Bandung, Indonesia
5.2 Los Arenales, Antofagasta, Chile
Tables
6.1 Informal contrasts between types of planning systems
Preface
A good number of friends and colleagues have been implicated in yet another of my book-writing enterprises and this preface can only touch on some of them.
I must say at the outset that I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir of Polity Press. I thank Karina for keeping me on the straight and narrow and Jonathan for the invitation to write this book and for his insightful comments and persistence with my attempts to put together a cohesive framework for it. I thank Fiona Sewell for her cleaning up of my manuscript text. I am greatly indebted to readers of the original book proposal and reviewers of the first draft manuscript for their constructive comments. I have not been able to respond to all their suggestions, but I hope they see something of themselves in this book. Mark Tewdwr-Jones was a source of both enthusiasm and ideas at the early stages of writing and several of the chapters bear the marks of his thoughts. I thank Miles Irving for preparing the figures contained in the book.
Many of the ideas in this book were developed while I taught the subject of International Planning (which then became the two subjects, Critical Debates in International Planning and Comparative Planning Systems and Cultures) over the course of eleven years at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. These subjects formed a core part of the MSc in International Planning offered there and I am grateful to Claire Colomb, Nick Gallent, Nikos Karadamitriou, Claudio De Magalhaes and Susan Moore among others for their comradeship, and to the postgraduate students who passed through the programme for their participation and enthusiasm.
The book also contains more than a hint of Australia and Australian urban conditions in it. Some of the ideas were tested out on first-year Bachelor of Design students at the University of Melbourne without any apparent side effects. I thank senior tutor Dejan Malenic for his sterling efforts in helping with the day-to-day running of the subject. I am also grateful to academic colleagues at the University of Melbourne: Michele Acuto, Judy Bush, Stephanie Butcher, Patrick Cobbinah, Brendan Gleeson, Anna Hurlimann, Crystal Legacy, Alan March, David Nichols and John Stone among others for their unsuspectingly steering me in the direction of several new sources of planning inspiration. Elsewhere in Australia, Robert Freestone at the University of New South Wales and Paul Maginn at the University of Western Australia have been valuable sounding boards for my evolving urban planning research ideas. Jago Dodson at RMIT has helped join up a few of many Australian dots for me.
Further afield, Roger Keil at York University, Canada, and Fulong Wu at University College London continue to be sources of sound advice, and Dave Valler at Oxford Brookes University a great friend, co-researcher and co-author on urban planning matters. As visiting scholars to the University of Melbourne, Martin Arias (Universidad Catolica del Norte), Ben Clifford (University College London) and Andy Wood (University of Kentucky, Lexington) helped more than they will have realized.
The most important person helped just by being twice her amazing self.
Nicholas A. Phelps
Melbourne
Australia
1Introduction: what is planning?
Introduction
Modern urban planning has been defined in many ways that shed light on this multifaceted activity. Kunzmann (2005: 236) suggests that urban planning is ‘the guidance of the spatial development of a settlement’. The Commission of European Communities (CEC, 1997: 24) defines spatial planning as ‘the methods used … to influence the future distribution of activities in space … to co-ordinate the spatial impact of other sectoral policies … and to regulate the conversion of land and property uses’. To quote Magnusson (2011: 131), ‘to plan the city is to rationalize our activities in relation to one another within a confined space, but it is also to think of how that space is to be reshaped as a sustainably habitable, productive, comfortable and congenial place’. Just as there is a sociological imagination that exceeds questions of ‘personal ingenuity and private wealth’ (Mills, 1959: 10), so there has been and should continue to be an urban planning imagination at work in the way we settle the earth. Adapting dictionary definitions, that urban planning imagination might be defined as the faculty for forming ideas, images or concepts relevant to the task of city building where these need not be entirely new but instead are the products of an historical stream and geographical diversity of ideas, images and concepts. The ‘huge amount of energy expended on “planning” as demonstrated by the multiple types of plans at all levels’ (ESPON, 2018: 76) suggests that urban planning is an increasingly pervasive and indispensable activity – one that is a geohistorical stream of thoughtful and practical acts that carry valuable wisdom of what works, what doesn’t, what could be desirable and what is not.
‘Planning is both anticipatory and reactive’ (Levy, 2016: 6) and both aspects are found across several different styles elaborated in a recent review of European planning systems (ESPON, 2018). Regulative planning is legally binding while framework-setting planning typically involves non-binding policies. Strategic planning typically provides non-binding indicative reference points regarding future development, and visionary planning sets out agendas for desired futures in the form of normative principles. Planning’s regulatory aspect leads strongly in the direction of rules or codes regarding the use of land that shape ‘how places perform – socially, environmentally, and economically’ (Talen, 2011: 11). Codes and standards have long existed for building construction, the layout of entire settlements and streets and key spaces within them to ensure the safety and health of urban populations, but they are also carriers of societal values (Ben-Joseph, 2012). Rules shape places imperfectly and elicit great creativity directed at evading or distorting those same rules. Yet the drift in many parts of the world has been inexorably towards more regulation, despite the largely counterfactual question of whether non-planning, less regulation or zoning would be worse (Banham et al., 1969; Siegan, 1970). Of course, in the absence of the sort of imagination associated more with strategic and visionary styles of urban planning, the urban experience may become no more than a surrender to codes and their unintended and unanticipated consequences.
None of the definitions of urban planning and its associated imagination noted above are prescriptive about who is doing urban planning, since, as Wildavsky (1973: 129) noted, ‘planning must not be confused with the existence of a formal plan, people called planners, or an institution’. In this sense, the attempt to distinguish urban planning from non-planning – perhaps ‘the market’ – is futile: the two are inseparable.1 Urban planning is pervasive, as John Friedmann (1987: 25) noted when defining it as part of the public domain and as ‘a social and political process in which many actors, representing many different interests, participate in a refined division of labour’. It is to be found ‘at the very centre of the complex mass of technology, politics, culture and economy that creates our urban society and its physical presence’ (Rydin, 2011: 1–2). Thus, ‘many of the so-called market forces that the planning system takes as given are in fact caused by public policies to which individuals and businesses respond’ (OECD, 2017b: 17). The outcomes of planning past and present are made plain in the appearance of cities and patterns of settlement.
The pervasiveness of urban planning leads me to take a broad view of the range of activities, actors and associated ideas and methods that constitute it. Far from being empty, the injunction to plan concerns the unavoidable need for purposive thought and action as a way of responding to our being in the world; we all act, make plans for ourselves, and are acted upon by the plans of others. If, as philosopher Edward Casey (1997: ix) observes, ‘to be at all … is to be in some kind of place’, then the urban places that we have imagined, designed, planned and made for ourselves are the very expression of our being in the world. They express the uneasy tension between our own sense of self and our peaceful and productive coexistence with others. In this view, ‘plan making was an established art long before even a modest portion of human settlements could be regarded as urban’ (Silver, 2018: 11). Moreover, ‘place is as pervasive and important as language: we are place-makers and users, as we are language-makers and users’ (Sack, 2003: 4). In our inability as humans to accept reality (nature as it is/was), we engage in (urban) planning as a purposeful, future-oriented act of imagination. Regardless of whether it comes on a grand scale or in increments, at its best, urban planning is concerned with shaping good/better places, though it can just as easily – with lack of awareness and thought – lead to the production of poorer, bad or downright evil places (Sack, 2003).
We live in an urban age – an age where the majority of the world’s population live in officially defined urban areas. The United Nations (UN) has estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050 (United Nations, 2014). I use the term ‘urban planning’ rather than ‘spatial planning’ not to deny either the quantitative significance of vast expanses of rural and semi-rural lands that lie outside the world’s formally defined urban areas, or indeed to deny their relationships to cities, but to signal instead the renewed significance of developing the planning imagination in this urban age. The need for us to plan settlements in ways which are sensitive to the vast natural hinterlands from which they have been carved is more pressing than ever in an age in which urbanization is associated with enormous consumption of natural resources, the production of waste and greenhouse gas emissions (Camaren and Swilling, 2012). The need to do so in ways which recognize and leverage the historical and geographical interrelationships that inhere in thought and action distributed across an increasing array of actors has never been more pressing. This is the sense in which I speak of the urban planning imagination.
The urban planning imagination
The urban planning imagination is ever more distributed across a range of actors with differing geohistorical sensibilities. It is this that ensures that consideration of urban planning’s contributions and failures should adopt vantage points well outside those of Western Europe and North America. The way in which we think about urban planning, as professionals, educators, politicians, civic activists, business and association leaders and citizens, should perhaps be forgiving of urban planning’s inherent limitations but re-enchanted by its impressive and growing stock of knowledge, ideas and methods and the sense of possibility it carries with it. To plan – as to err – is human.
Urban planning has a geohistory and imagination that far precede planning as a modern profession, and range from indigenous Australians’ complex relationships to land to the cities of Mesopotamia, Imperial China, Athens and Rome and those of Latin and Meso-American civilizations, through to the cities built in the Renaissance in Europe and in, for example, the Philippines, Peru and Mexico under the Laws of the Indies – where in each case significant financial and human resources were devoted to city planning and building (Hein, 2018). Indeed, ‘many of these earlier interventions are still visible … They continue to shape practice in multiple ways, through governance structures or planning cultures, through inherent path-dependencies of institutions or laws and regulations, as formal references, or frameworks for design, transformation, and preservation’ (Hein, 2018: 2).
Who plans?
In this book I argue that if urban planning is part of ‘a refined division of labour’ (Friedmann, 1987) then it has become a more complex and distributed set of practices as the division of labour in society continues to evolve. The innumerable acts, the substantive concerns, wisdom and methods, and the most inspiring and powerful historical and geographical references for urban planning are apparent across a diversity of actors that I simplify here as citizens (individuals and individual households), clubs (corporations, civic associations, environmental groups etc.) and states (new, old, unitary, federal, liberal market, developmental etc.). The interest, influence and power to shape urban development outcomes are distributed very unevenly across these actors, with states and their planning pervasive but less powerful in certain respects than is often appreciated (McGlynn, 1993). The urban planning imagination speaks to and operates in and through ‘a patchwork of private, club, and public realms that both cohere and fragment the city’ (Webster, 2002: 409).
It may be particularly important to recognize the diversity of urban planners and urban planning practices found in and across citizens, clubs and states in the modern era, when it is all too easy to reduce urban planning – its imagination, its substantive concerns, wisdom and methods – to the institutionalized statutory urban planning of the global north in the past 150 years or so. To be sure, the institutions of statutory planning provide a store of wisdom: ‘precedent does offer access to a rich archive of prior human experience and creativity’ (Hoch, 2019: 99). However, much of the emotional intelligence that Hoch (2019) directs us to and which can provide new, practical, urban planning wisdom may rest with citizen and club actors to be mobilized in productive mixes between state, citizen and club, as I emphasize at points throughout the book.
Instead, then, the strengths and imagination of urban planning are to be sought in the increasingly dispersed nature of innumerable, more or less reflexive, acts by citizens, and in the name of clubs and states across sweeps of time and space that collectively describe the making of cities. If learning itself remains the most valuable resource people possess to prepare for the future (Hoch, 2019: 3), the future of the urban planning imagination will need to be open to the complex possible mixes or combinations of, or experiments among, citizens, clubs and states found in different parts of the world at different times. The positive contributions to city making of some of these mixes may seem unlikely, but we should suspend any prejudices we may harbour here regarding the essential properties or rationalities of citizen, club or state planning actors if we are to continue to offer broadly popular and tractable, if temporary, solutions to the unending stream of challenges that attend city making.
History and the urban planning imagination
An historical perspective on cities and urban planning is needed since, as Patrick Geddes (1904: 107) argued, ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’. The securing of shelter from the elements and the mobilization of ‘things to hand’ are central to the human condition of becoming. As with the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), the urban planning imagination must firmly locate itself within the stream of individual, club and state actions by which our cities are built. Acts of urban planning emerge as something ordinary in their immediacy and yet extraordinary in their longer-term effects. An historical sensibility – a reflexive sensitivity to the temporality of the city and urban planning itself – is vitally important to understanding the becoming of cities. Conservation of the natural and built environment is an important substantive concern of urban planning. History is important to excavating and understanding the failed or lost potentials of cities and associated urban planning imaginations. However, the backwards look can never be the majority part of urban planning, let alone its entirety. This is why I choose to define urban planning as an imaginative, future-oriented act even as it is cognizant of the past.
Urban planning is characterized by significant continuity as a result of particular, durable, administrative and legal traditions that inhere within societal cultures and, more recently, in the statutory basis of national and consequently local planning systems, as I discuss in chapter 6. Continuity is a product of the habits and conventions adopted and acquired by generations of planners – whether individuals, corporations or states – and which become fossilized in policies, plans and meanings and values attached to particular sites in what we understand as distinct urban planning cultures. At the same time, it is apparent that urban planning has been the subject of significant change. Urban planning activities and processes are subject to multiple temporalities or rhythms (Abram, 2014) from the long term of scenarios, to the mid-term of forward or strategic spatial planning, to the short term of decisions on individual development proposals. Indeed, there is a sense in which change may be the only constant of urban planning. Histories reveal both important changes in the substantive concerns of urban planning over time in single places and historical slippages in these same concerns from one place to another. It should be clear, then, that the history of urban planning is not linear – heading inexorably in the direction of ‘progress’. History repeats itself in terms of how the substantive concerns of urban planning come into and go out of view, and how the wisdom associated with urban planning is valued or undervalued.
Geography and the urban planning imagination
It is in place making and shaping that the definition of urban planning I have in mind has an inherently geographical aspect to it. The planning imagination must be a geographical one in its attention to the uniqueness of places. Geddes (1904) considered geographical method as fundamental to the comprehensive understanding of cities and their urban planning, drawing on geographical notions of the unity and coherence of places or regions, not least because ‘it takes the whole region to make the city’ (Geddes, 1904: 106). Seeing the city in these terms has been part of a modern planning tradition of the past 150 years and it ‘often seems a messy, conflict-ridden and threatening enterprise because it seeks to “integrate”, to connect, different areas of knowledge and practice around a place-focus’ (Healey, 2007: 13).
It is clear both historically and in the present that our cities have never been, and can never be, entirely closed or disconnected places. They are shot through with physical, virtual and remembered references, relations and connections to other places. It is vital, then, for the urban planning imagination to bring to bear a perspective on the seemingly general or universal nature of our urban existence. This sense of the partial convergence on more or less universal elements of urban planning is familiar to us in the shorthand term ‘globalization’.
If urban planning is an activity involving the shaping of places, then it is an act of imagination that must seek to reconcile these two geographical perspectives. It is a thoughtful activity in and through which what Doreen Massey (1989) termed a relational or global sense of place might be mobilized. Thus, in chapter 2 I will elaborate how a geographical perspective reveals the ‘betweenness of place’ (Entrikin, 1991) as both unique and bounded but also permeated by more or less common (cultural, economic, social, environmental) processes and relations. This geographical perspective reveals both the distinctiveness of different planning systems (chapter 6) and some of the elements of convergence and exchange among them (chapter 7).
Urban planning’s enduring appeal
Urban planning emerges as an activity that has adapted to changing societal needs and desires, retaining an element of imagination while acting to bind a variety of actors and their interests in efforts to address the substantive challenges associated with human settlement around the globe.
The urban planning imagination’s geohistorical sensibilities make it a particularly powerful and integrative means for solving the complex problems of city building, since these reveal themselves as ones of (spatial) interdependence and indivisibility and (historical) uncertainty and irreversibility (Hopkins, 2001). The urban planning imagination – as something distributed across citizens, clubs and states – emerges as pervasive but more suitably modest (Hoch, 2019: 48) than it has at times been presented as being in statutory practice and university training issuing from the global north.
My celebration of urban planning is not one that rests on the thought that urban planning is somehow an unconstrained act of imagination; it is not. Rather, as I note in chapter 6, urban planning systems and cultures are nested within broader institutional and cultural frames while being an indispensable part of, or foil to, them. As Magnusson (2011: 132) observes, ‘Planning has always been a way of rationalizing politics by rendering it governable.’ Indeed, urban planning has had ‘greatness thrust upon it’ at various junctures. These include, for example, the aftermath of war in the United Kingdom (UK), when urban planning was briefly the means by which the modernization of society was to be achieved (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020), and the present, with urban planning emerging as the most suitable arena in which to address the effects of climate change and search for sustainable development (Davoudi et al., 2009). At its best, urban planning continues to manifest something of society’s collective conscience in connection with what Rittel and Webber (1973) explain are ‘wicked’ problems.
It has been said that urban planning is a dialectical process (Gleeson and Low, 2000) whose tensions are reconciled in moments in time and place. Often a particular visual (map, diagram, sketch), technique (forecasting, overlays), method (scenario building, collaborative or communicative processes) or principle (sustainability) captures the imagination. At these moments the incredible global mobility of urban planning thought and practice becomes visible. It is conceivable in a world now considerably sped up that those moments in which urban planning gains purchase will be too fleeting to be meaningful. Yet, in other respects, the speed of change makes urban planning an even more important enterprise in the present age, though one in need of rethinking as a joint exercise drawing sustenance from the distributed and pervasive nature of urban planning itself: drawing strength and imagination from the substantive concerns, wisdom and methods found across a range of actors.
The structure of the book
The sketch of the urban planning imagination presented here is one of variations on reasonably common themes: one in which there are not only contrasts between cities and nations but also common pressures upon them, much exchanging of ideas and no small measure of similar – though by no means identical – policies and practices developed and deployed. These contrasts and commonalities are visible across places – cities and nations – and across time in the same place. Geographical and historical perspectives are essential to the study and appreciation of urban planning. To the extent that any individual, white, global-north-rooted male can obtain the knowledge and muster the powers of expression required for a critical international introduction, my short discussion of the urban planning imagination cannot be anything other than partial.
In the following chapter, I begin by offering a partial answer to the question ‘who plans?’. I define urban planning actors in terms of citizens, clubs and states before going on to note the ever more mixed properties of the urban planning imagination apparent within and across these sets of actors. I then depict the close links that planning as a discipline has with the study of history and geography. The urban planning imagination is something which unites historical and geographical sensibilities and animates them with a sense of normative purpose towards the shaping of better/good places. It is a body of thought and practice that is uniquely and purposively integrative and synoptic in its aspirations. In this it has rarely been completely successful, for the shaping of better/good places is a task and work necessarily never quite finished. As one of the most criticized and insecure of disciplines, planning can hardly escape a sense of its own fallibility. If this is one lesson painfully learned, it is one that other disciplines might do well to incorporate a little of.
Chapter 3 sets out some of the substantive concerns – shelter, health, mobility, sustainability and economy – that urban planning has had to address. These appear as enduring issues for urban planning thought and practice to deal with. Nevertheless, the precise nature and severity of individual issues and their pecking order continue to alter over time, shaped by circumstance.
Chapter 4 reminds us why urban planning has a value. It has a continuing value as a stock of inter-generational knowledge dating back even to humankind’s first settled relationships to nature. There is more than a sense of lessons not learned, things forgotten, wheels being reinvented and history repeating itself here. However, the stock of urban planning’s wisdom continues to grow in ways that will help us with the challenges of place making that lie ahead.
Chapter 5 discusses some of the methods associated with urban planning. Something of the enormous imagination of urban planning is again showcased here, from the details of techniques used in particular instances, to the long-term ‘informed speculation’ associated with ‘what-if’ scenarios, to the ways in which we can seek to mobilize the intimate local knowledge and intensely felt needs and desires of citizens. This multiplicity of methods is further evidence of the integrative and synoptic potential of urban planning thought and practice.
Chapter 6 seeks to illustrate one aspect of urban planning’s geographical sensibility by drawing attention to the variety of different systems and cultures that exist. Urban planning thought and practice reside within and take their cues from the broader culture and institutional arrangements of societies. The variety of urban planning systems and cultures is itself a stock of accumulated knowledge and expertise, the surface of which has barely begun to be scratched in the extant academic and practice literature. Its full significance is exposed when one realizes that it is the driver of the sorts of international exchanges that I discuss in chapter 7.
Urban planning thought and practice have long been exchanged. City plans have been copied, ideas for unrealized cities have provided inspiration, and particular policies or techniques of planning have been adopted widely. To add to this, apparently similar urban forms and principles of urban planning have developed in synchrony in different parts of the world. What are we to make of this? To me, this signals the power of the urban planning imagination. Urban planning has appeal because it is needed. It has seduced and continues to seduce. How we reflect on and mobilize this power will be important to urban planning in an urban age.
I conclude in chapter 8 by considering the future of urban planning in the present age. This is a future of the mixing of actors, the knowledge and wisdom they bring to substantive challenges, and the methods they make use of when drawing from historical and geographical vantage points. It will need to be a progressive mix with purpose rather than one that produces lowest-common-denominator outcomes, an incompatible pick and mix, or partial and exclusive combinations of citizen, club and state urban planning imaginaries.
Notes
1
Much of the critique of modern urban planning as everything and nothing (Wildavsky, 1973), difficult to define (Reade, 1983) or no better than non-planning (Banham et al., 1969) is based on a very narrow view of planning as statutory planning.
2Imagination: what is planning’s spirit and purpose?
Introduction
The planning imagination has been at work in the way we have built cities, but what kind of imagination has been apparent, across which actors, to what ends, and what might that imagination look like in the future? The urban planning imagination is not the exclusive property of one set of actors. Urban planning’s spirit and purpose (Bruton, 1984) will be found in new and productive mixes of imaginations regarding present and future urban planning challenges.
We should not confuse the future orientation of the urban planning imagination with a loss of historical perspective, for planning needs to ‘broaden its preoccupation with space, and to take consideration of time’ (Wilson, 2009: 232). History plays into the present and future of urban planning in complex, non-linear ways in which the imaginative aspects of planning make it ‘a kind of compact between now and the future’ (Abram and Weszkalays, 2011: 8). Geography is part art, part science (Entrikin, 1991). Likewise, ‘making plans for places is more craft than science’ (Hoch, 2019: 4). Indeed, ‘plans are unique forms of public policy. Both art and science, they embody a vision of the future for which there is no proof’ (Hanson, 2017: 262). We should not confuse the ordering of settlement space with the inexorable contiguous growth of a city, since the decline and abandonment of cities has a long history. Relational senses of place have flourished within which the city can be understood not merely as a bounded place but also as a node within networks of places or a nexus of flows or virtual connections. These sensibilities reveal the uniqueness of places and the commonalities produced through connection.
This geohistorical sensibility describes urban planning’s value to societies, capitalist or otherwise. The imagination of urban planning exceeds that of history or geography in that it has a normative aspect – the desire to produce better (or good) urban places. The urban planning imagination is a force for integration and inclusion in a world in which we can all too easily grow further apart. We would have to invent it if it did not already exist.
Who plans?
By way of simplifying the story, I refer to three sets of urban planning actors: citizens (as individuals or households), clubs (e.g. multinational enterprises (MNEs), associations of mutual interest, private enterprises) and modern nation states (their local governments and the international interstate system). Recognition of the different actors central to urban planning throughout history implies nothing essential of the motives, the substantive interests or expertise, the wisdom, the geohistorical sensibilities, the sophistication of the methods involved, or the outcomes achieved. The motivations that lie behind acts of urban planning can be obscure both at the time and afterwards and are rightly open to scrutiny, debate, argument, objection and protest. It should also be clear that the urban planning of clubs and states is hardly any less varied in its motives and outcomes than that of myriad citizens. There is as much variety within each category of urban planning actor as there is between citizens, clubs and states. There is yet more variety to uncover in the ‘experimental’ overlaps in the imagination, substantive interests, wisdom and methods of actors – as depicted in figure 2.1. Much of this experimental variety has yet to be recognized, let alone unlocked, as I discuss further in chapter 8.
Figure 2.1 Urban planning actors and mixes of actors
Our settlements are the collective creations of citizens, clubs and states. They are triumphs (Glaeser, 2011) but they are not free from the significant conflicts and imperfections I discuss in chapter 4. Cities are made in our own image and are the physical expressions of both our better and our darker nature. The damage done to the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Straits Islands is testimony to the brutal power of urban planning to deny ancient ways of being-in-place in the process of colonial settlement (Jackson et al., 2017). Elsewhere, in China, planning has been more positively connected to the preservation of ancient urban civilization (Morris, 1994).
One set of these actors can predominate in the planning of cities. The earliest cities of Mesopotamia might be considered concentrations of many citizens. In Europe the city emerged as a club – a municipal corporation – to shield citizens from the powers monopolized by new nation states (Frug, 2000). Cities continue to emerge within the nation-state system in many privately developed new town clubs across the global north and south. Finally, cities have manifested as states. Minus some of the civic ideals, the ancient city states of Athens and Rome have their modern-day counterpart in Singapore.
The balance of these actors in the making of individual cities has varied over time. The historical evidence of a mix of actors notwithstanding, I suggest that new combinations of actors may become the defining feature of urban planning as it is emerging, and we will need to better understand the possibilities for these combinations rather than be led by prejudice regarding the motives or capacities of citizens, clubs or states.
Citizens
Some form of spatial awareness, organization and planning has been vital to survival, since to dwell in a place is to have regard for ‘things to hand’ (Heidegger, 2010). This is the existentialist sense in which planning precedes rationality rather than being guided by it (Hoch, 2019). These individualistic urban planning tendencies are an irrepressible aspect of human nature. The mass expression of need for shelter across the global south may instead be latent in the highly regulated planning systems of the global north. Regardless, ‘citizens correctly assume that they know something about planning without having studied it formally’ (Levy, 2016: 94).
On the one hand, then, the continuing concern in the global north to define and protect the planning profession as primarily a statutory activity seems out of place when marginalized peoples – in the global north and south – take into their own hands the task of organizing their housing and, by extension, their immediate neighbourhoods and cities (Miraftab, 2009). The lay knowledge and emotional intelligence of citizens are things we might reasonably wish to better incorporate into the planning of our cities (Hayden, 1997; Hoch, 2019). Yet it is as well to remember that ‘Citizens, like elites, can be misguided and self-serving’ (Fainstein, 2010: 32), whether in NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) protests against development or in opportunistic capturing of the spoils of urban development. In the absence of political will and bureaucratic resources to address vexed issues of compensation and betterment (chapter 4), local government planners can appear powerless to shape equitable outcomes from the development of cities.
It is important to recognize citizens as a distinct set of actors in the building of our cities. As ‘users’, citizens have an intense interest in the city form and function even if they are perhaps the least powerful of actors shaping it (McGlynn, 1993). ‘A viable notion of empowerment of the poor requires an appreciation that empowerment is functionally an individual process that deepens with time if individual efforts are consciously embedded in more collective forms of … mutual empowerment’ (Pieterse, 2008: 7–8). Indeed, citizens often participate in groups or clubs of diverse complexion and influence (Levy, 2016: 98), and it is these collective or club forms of mutual empowerment I turn to as a second category of urban planning actors.
Clubs
Access to the public realms we most associate with the city is uneven because most of these spaces generate an inclusion/exclusion problem, derived from some need to ration use or from the costs in time and money needed to access them (Webster, 2002: 398). New York is the setting for numerous private public spaces (Kayden, 2000) and the reality is that ‘most public realms serve particular publics and are better conceived of as club realms’ (Webster, 2002: 398).
There is a diversity of entities planning, producing and managing urban space that could be lumped together as ‘clubs’. They range from the worst forms of for-profit enterprises, to business-as-usual for-profit enterprises, to radical and socially and environmentally progressive communal experiments. There is nothing essential about these clubs in terms of the aesthetics or equity of their contributions to the built environment or the methods by which they seek to achieve their ends.
At their best, clubs present viable and innovative contributions to city building. Garden Cities and new towns across the world have been planned and delivered through corporations that provide urban services in the form of club goods. The Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn in the UK were innovative and successful – developed in an orderly way over the business cycle, providing for schools, hospitals and parks without seceding from the rest of the urban system. Yet the same ideas have been part of the perpetuation of systemic inequalities conceived in apartheid South Africa (Skinner and Watson, 2018).
At its worst, club planning has detracted from cities and reveals ignoble motivations – of free-riding, cost cutting and reneging on promises. New master-planned communities developed by private for-profit corporations outside Jakarta in Indonesia, Johannesburg in South Africa, Santiago de Chile or Buenos Aires in Argentina might be efficient ways to deliver some urban services, but they are barely connected to the existing urban fabric or to one another by adequate road or rail infrastructure, and are sufficiently impermeable to be examples of the secession of socio-economically homogeneous segments of the population from their urban hosts.
Just as citizens can become empowered in clubs, so the ultimate measure of clubs as actors is whether they can find some of their better nature in a ‘club of clubs’ by which they can continue to make contributions to urban society.
States
Local and national states and the interstate system can be considered a third set of distinctly modern urban planning actors. Although ‘the act of conscious town building … has extended over millennia … Town planning … was different, resting as it did on notions of extension of public control over private interest in land and property’ (Cherry, 1996: 17). Statutory urban planning – the legally prescribed processes by which plans are enabled, made, revised and subject to scrutiny, appeal and enforcement – has a power that the planning of citizens and clubs can rarely match. Although full of unintended and unanticipated consequences, urban planning by states has become indispensable to the continued functioning of capitalism (Scott and Roweis, 1977); so much so that it is statutory planning that we most associate with urban planning. Urban planning in this incarnation expanded its remit from one of ameliorating the worst excesses of citizen and club planning – as a protector of the commons and of the ‘public interest’ – to the point where its basis in private property rights has become obscured (Blomley, 2017).
Nation states are a recent form of societal organization, dating to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but statutory urban planning itself took another two and a half centuries to become a distinct and important activity. Much of the repertoire of urban planning taught in planning schools pertains to the unique moment (Graham and Marvin, 2000) – a mere century and a half – in which states have assumed much of the regulatory and visionary burden of urban planning. Nation states ‘see’ from above (Scott, 2000) whether building new capital cities (such as Brazilia) or demolishing, redeveloping or extending existing cities.
However, even within this short history of statutory urban planning, different historical and geographical vantage points make it a difficult enterprise to generalize about. The early ‘experimental’ urban planning undertaken in the name of empires was one of brutal theft and segregation. Yet it was also invested with some nobler aspirations that have today been lost. In the improvement works undertaken in colonial cities, for example, ‘the term “trust” carried with it an implied association with the public good rather than private profit making. Later … in the twentieth century, it was supplanted by the terms “board”, “corporation” or “authority”, although the functions remained similar’ (Home, 2013: 84).
Where once, in the global north, statutory urban planning was central to the building of new societies and commanded popular and political support, its value is now questioned. Even so, the inability of some nation states to exert authority and provide security over their territories often plays into poor urban planning outcomes. In some African nations the state has been absent from knitting together the self-building of citizens and the limited publics of club communities with any residual sense of the public interest (Parnell, 2018). Thus, familiar aspects of statutory urban planning remain on the agendas of supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU), international interstate organizations such as the UN, and innumerable non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that feed off the international interstate system.
Contrasts can be drawn among national planning systems and cultures which reveal some of the global diversity of statutory urban planning and citizen and club engagements with it (chapter 6). Equally, it can be invidious to apply labels to nations, especially when these speak with language issuing largely from the global north.
Mixes of actors
The urban planning imaginations of citizens, clubs and states continue to evolve in complex ways which generate overlaps in figure 2.1. Statutory urban planning processes remain an inescapable reference point for understanding how the urban planning imagination is shared across actors, as chapter 6 confirms. In the United States (US), the majority of urban planning in the early 1900s was by consultants. The rise of the local government planner in the US, as elsewhere in the global north, took place after the Second World War and with the extension of cities. Even so, perhaps as many as one third of professional planners in the US are consultants today (Pollock, 2009). In Australia, consultants are disproportionately accredited when compared to their equally numerous public sector counterparts (Elliott, 2018: 27). Consultants produce much of the evidence base used in planning in liberal market economies (Batey, 2018). The division of labour in which the imagination of state planners mingles with that of citizens and clubs continues to evolve. Across the global south, the numbers, training and resources of state planners mean that they struggle to exert influence on the actions of citizens or powerful club interests. Clubs have the substantive foci and often the human and monetary resources to compete with or augment the urban planning of states; finding productive engagements between these two sets of actors will demand imagination. In an age of greater individualization of politics, risk and uncertainty (Beauregard, 2018; Beck et al., 2003), it is citizens that often emerge as those with an imagination born of ‘the need to act’ (Bhan, 2019: 13) in a world where club and state planners can appear paralysed.
Citizens might typically be thought to possess an imagination for the short term and the fine grain of the built fabric of cities. However, across global south cities, citizens have necessarily expanded into collective and longer-term actions for their respective neighbourhoods, their city and the global commons in light of the failures of clubs and states. If ‘planning is a contested field of interacting activities by multiple actors’ (Miraftab, 2009: 41), a purposeful urban planning mix might have significant potential at the intersection of state and citizen actors shown in figure 2.1. This potential has existed in the case of statutory planners working for more equitable outcomes in Cleveland in the US (Krumholz, 1982) and may yet be produced in the experiment with localism in the UK (see chapter 5). It exists in the emotional intelligence that has been little appreciated by academics and practising planners (Hoch, 2019) but which is vital to recognizing and empowering marginalized citizens.
The urban planning imagination of club actors has typically been visible at the middling scales of neighbourhoods, districts or self-contained settlements and in the middling time frames relating to the build-out of communities over several decades. Turning the undoubted resources and customer or special interest focus of planning by or for clubs to more consistently socially just, sustainable and inclusive ends remains a challenge and opportunity for the urban planning imagination. Club actors span the spectrum from for-profit developers of new communities with a keen appreciation of broad segments of consumer tastes to associations with an intense focus on and skill in advocating for minority interests, and we ignore either of these capabilities and imaginations at our peril. At the intersection between citizens and clubs are, for example, not only the socially minded Baugruppen housing developments (chapter 3) but also any number of less deliberative home-owner associations of gated communities.
Nation states have typically master planned at neighbourhood and city scales and offered strategic national spatial plans while simultaneously regulating with land-use and building codes at the finer grain most familiar to citizens. Nevertheless, many states across the global north and south now struggle with, or have retreated from, big-picture planning. Of the actors considered here, it is the state that appears least able to deal with the complex challenges of place making in the present. And yet ‘it is in relation to the state that social change is articulated and enacted’ (Roy, 2018: 145); it is precisely in those intersections between the urban planning imaginations of states, clubs and citizens shown in figure 2.1 that new urban imaginaries are to be found. The combinations of states and clubs in figure 2.1 find expression in the charrette method (chapter 5) and in the design competitions for publicly owned or acquired land in Scandinavian countries (chapter 4). Some of the cities that are most referenced at present – Dubai, Singapore – are powerful but limited amalgamations of club and state imaginations. Vacuums in statutory planning capacities in the global north and south are filled by the exceptionalism of master-planned club communities (Roy, 2005). The city is both a problem for and a prompt to government; questions of citizenship and the state come together in the city in ways which may yet see global south urban planning imaginaries increasingly take root across the global north (chapters 5 and 6), not least since the domestic and international diasporas that constitute some communities mean that citizens are ever more at the centre of networks, flows and virtual connections, through which the urban planning imagination can be mobilized with states and clubs in methods that resemble social learning (Bollens, 2002).
The overlaps in the imaginations of actors at the centre of figure 2.1 might be considered a ‘sweet spot’ – one that promises the production of new urban planning knowledge called for in the ‘southern critique’ (Bhan, 2019; Lawhon et al., 2020) of the universal relevance of global north urban planning approaches. States and clubs have much to learn from citizens with respect to the appropriateness or frugality of urban planning interventions (chapter 7). The sharing and production of new knowledge among citizen, club and state planners can increase the options and negotiating skills open to the former (Anzorena et al., 1998) and generate pragmatic solutions to complex problems of ordering urban space, such as land sharing (Angel and Boonyabancha, 1988) and participatory budgeting, that have wider application (Carolini, 2015). At its best, the intersection of imaginations shown at the centre of figure 2.1 may see citizens, club and state actors share their respective expertise, unlearn some of what they thought they knew, and let go claims to exclusive substantive interest, wisdom and methods. However, we should guard against easy assumptions. At its worst,
