Urban Policy and Planning

In this chapter…

• Put the history of urban policy and planning to our usual time periods.

– That’s it, really…

Planning History…

• As we saw in earlier chapters, many regions of the world had preferred ways to layout cities (mostly derived from religion), and people fulfilling a role equivalent to urban planner today

• However, urban planning as a discipline really began in Europe, eventually spreading to the US and then the rest of the world

• Major formative eras…

– The beginning was Renaissance/Baroque era, where cities were rebuilt to show of power of the state/church

• This included new geometric walls/free-fire zones, new ornate palaces, gardens and cathedrals,

– The walls especially constrained development well into the 19^th century, when they were eventually taken up for rail lines or parks

– Then came the era of competitive capitalism, where eventually the ideas that Haussman put into place in Paris come to dominate

• As we saw, some of these ideas begin to spill over to the US in the form of the City Beautiful movement

– Modernism eventually takes it place in the 20^th century, first in Europe but also too in the US after WWII

• In the US, planning comes into tension both with individual private property rights and not wanting to strangle business with regulation

In Europe…

• Though we will talk mostly about the US, some key planning differences between Europe and US are…

– Support for high density and compact form: a legacy of medieval beginnings and strict growth boundaries

• In the US, it would be impossible b/c of zoning to build something that looks like Europe

– Complex street pattern: Part medieval wacky streets downtown, part Haussman’s preference for radial arteries, part legacy of organic roads to nearby farm towns

– Town squares: Usually in front of cathedral or guildhall, where major functions were held (or under communists, were mass rallies were)

• Now most have tourist facilities and open-air markets

– Low rise skylines: Part pre-elevator constructions, part limits imposed to make firefighting easier, part aesthetics

• High-rise are confined to suburbs or redevelopment districts

– Bustling downtowns: Since people use transit which converges there and are densely packed, people still shop, live, work, eat and work downtown, which usually has several distinct districts (shopping, banking, entertainment, etc.)

Beginning: Philanthropy and Reform

• Again, to restate, the environment in 19^th century cities, for everyone, was horrendous with fire, disease and mob violence

• Movements to attempt to clean up these environments started with the British Poor Law Boards/Health of Towns Associations, started by Edwin Chadwick

– This movement put out position papers and did some model development, but with only 5% profit returns, did not get many builders

• Next came private philanthropists, like George Peabody (60,000 units in London) and the Guinness Family, who built worker housing with modest profits but which made for a healthier environment

– The idea was that if you completely ripped off the poor and expanded slums, everyone was unhealthier and many workdays were lost

Beginnings (cont.)

• However, the first big idea was Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement

– It took ideas from earlier 19^th century planned communities (mostly company towns) like Robert Owen’s New Lanark,, Alfred Krupp’s Margerethenhohe, George Cadbury’s Bourneville and W.H. Lever’s Port Sunlight

• Basically it was to combine the best of the countryside (green space) with the best of cities (amenities), with more manageable sized cities in a polycentric urban system

– Tried to build self-contained towns on about 6000 acres, away from other cities, with only 1000 acres built up, the rest in green space (including a central park with civic buildings) including a greenbelt that stopped sprawl and allowed rec space and farming

» Jobs would be along a circular rail line at the edge of town

– First one was Letchworth; also some Garden Suburbs like Hampstead Garden

– In the US, it inspired the previously mentioned Radburn

• But also importantly, it inspired Clarence Perry’s idea of the Neighborhood Unit, for walk-able city living

– A neighborhood would be160 acres, bounded by major arteries, with retail clustered at major intersections on the periphery, with the 10% parks and a community center in the middle with an elementary school, library and churches

Beginnings (cont.)

• Scottish Biology Professor, Patrick Geddes, was first who tried to apply “science” to urban issues

– His main contributions were the introduction of the “survey” of all buildings and people to understand the urban inventory AND the idea that cities were part of their regions, and that urban problems were best solved as regional problems

• Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives drove action in the US on slums, leading to a Tenement House Commission in 1900, which decided that building codes (instead of public housing) would be the US response.

• This led into the Progressive Era, where charity led the way on urban planning, followed by paternalism

– One major feature was the Settlement House, in which women volunteers ran childhood and adult education classes, usually with love but sometimes to corrupt or mean ends

• It was out the Settlement House the idea to separate the poor into the deserving and undeserving began to take shape

– Another feature is the park building boom, not just to relieve crowding and provide aesthetics and recreation (and for the first time, children’s playgrounds); but to bring about changes in social morality, to make everyone more temperate and thoughtful

• With Boston’s Emerald Necklace (the first Metropolitan-wide park system), nascent urban planning became institutionalized in Park Boards for the first time

– It was also an urban planning that was very environmentally determinist – in that, if the landscape could just be made right, society would fix itself

• Beaux Arts/City Beautiful Movement was born of the same idea, that a grandiose environment would make American cultured like Europe. Started city planning commissions

1920’s through New Deal

• First National Conference on City Planning was held in DC in 1909, influenced by ideas of Geddes

– Lacking consensus, instead of tackling problems like slums and community discord, worked on what has been called the “City Practical”, which focused on arranging land use and transport corridors for maximum economic benefit

• This was something that business got behind, because even though it was expensive, it would help long-run profitability

• Out of this also comes Mumford’s Regional Planning Association of America, to counteract the chaos of development where, unless something was done, we would get “more and more of worse and worse”

• It was the RPAA that influenced much New Deal policy, a time of great policy experimentation based on newly emerged social sciences

– Got the National Resources Committee, Civil Works Administration, Public Works Administration to provide frameworks and grants for urban infrastructure improvement

– Also Works Progress Administration, which constructed highways and parks; and Resettlement Administration which tried to make the Greenbelt cities

Fordist Planning

• In Europe, focus was on postwar reconstruction, social engineering and economic renewal; in US, it was on economic growth

• In Europe, planning was the result of three movements: urban reformers ala Geddes, rural landscape preservationists, and the industrial lobby (Patrick Abercrombie in UK had ties to all three)

– The results: Greenbelt to stop sprawl and save agricultural lands; slum clearance in central areas; New Towns beyond the Greenbelt to decentralize industry

• Multiple New Towns popped up around major cities in Northern Europe

– In Eastern Europe, different goals: weaken largest cities, improve infrastructure, and end disparity between rural and urban livelihoods

• Their New Towns grew around new factories and helped create an urban system, not just a primate city

• In US, this was the era of labor peace, where high wages were paid to help make gains in productivity and increase the size of markets

– This was the era of continued highway building and increased spending on collective consumption (like schools)

– An interesting feature of this era was the role the courts had in shaping urban policy by forcing desegregation then integration (changing the all important school boundaries), ending restrictive deed covenants, and increasing minority voting rights

Fordist Planning (cont.)

• Federal Policy

– During this era, lots of grants in aid to states (although Dems wanted in spend on central cities; Republicans on suburbs and Sun Belt). These include

• Housing Act of 49, to clear blight

• Housing Act of 59, support comprehensive planning

• Federal Highway Act of 62, mandated transport planning; Urban Mass Transit Act of 1970 helped non-automobile vehicles

• Economic Opportunity Act of 64, supports neighborhood based groups to deliver services

• Head Start to get kids in school; Demonstration cities, both of which tried to end “poverty environments”

– As “rational” as planners tried to be, US has lots of pork-barrel politics that remade projects and the many layers of approval required to get a grant hurt innovation (because it had to be acceptable to wide-numbers of reviewers)

Fordist Planning (cont.)

• Evangelical Planners

– Starting out with the right intentions to make cities better places, came a generation of big planners in the US: Robert Moses (NYC), Edmund Bacon (Philly); Dave Loeks (Twin Cities); William Ryan Drew in Milwaukee

• They believed strongly in the power of (their) design and environment to change society, as well as rational quantitative social science

– They led a major expansion of the number of plans, and helped broaden the educational focus of the discipline beyond design to regional economics and civil engineering

• However, especially Moses, while initially admired for their technocratic breadth and zeal, came to be despised for the huge changes they could make in a neighborhood’s fortunes, their unwillingness to listen/compromise AND their focus solely on “rational” highways and infrastructure, ignoring the desires and habits of the actual citizens they were supposed to protect

– In emerging urban social and cultural geography of the 1970’s and 80’s, planners become enemy number 1 (even if planners are no longer quite like this)

Neo-Fordist Policy and Planning

• This was the era of Federal Government step-back from solving the problems of cities (even under Carter), to deregulate and make way for markets (which theoretically would make all better off)

– Thus privatization proceeded in cities in the 1980’s, and the era of civic entrepreneurialism, combined with this deregulation, saw unprecedented corruption in HUD, which lost some $4 billion in shady deals, and lots of speculation on land and development in the Savings and Loan collapse

• Also the property rights movement began to challenge regulation through both legislative and judicial channels, pecking away at civil, environmental and health rights

• Anti-government feeling penned in planners, who were attacked from the left for their inhumanity and from the right for interfering in markets

– So the profession loses all hopes of ever making plans again, and focuses mostly on routine activities (code enforcement, traffic/infrastructure management), with most big splashes made with an eye towards job creation (such as the failed effort to create urban enterprise zones)

• That is why Miami 21 is unusual, it is a pretty big rethink in an area where systemic thinking is lost to focus on a few special districts

• In cities, the emerging mantra becomes “mixed use” zoning, which allowed the creation of set piece downtown stadium/retail/office/condo/nightlife developments (but now is associated more with the pro-mass transit/walking crowd, who wants human scale, livable neighborhoods)

Neo-Fordist (cont.)

• In suburbs, it is cluster zoning, where some non-residential features are added/persevered (like historic structures or golf courses/nature trails) along with large housing tracts – a pairing called Planned Unit Development

– Although increasingly, mixed use in suburban downtowns and new urbanist subdivisions are gaining favor

• As part of economic development efforts, planners help feed the “heritage industry” to give “local distinctiveness” through local arts and architecture (thus making the city more attractive to young professionals), to the point of manufacturing it

– Few cities have charm like New Orleans or vibrancy like Austin, and there is no magic formula to replicate it

• One minor success seems to be that metropolitan regions are more likely to compete for investment as an internally coherent block than as cities vs. suburbs; this cuts down on some of the incentives being offered (although this just means the region as a whole and states do more of the lifting)

Planning for Healthy and Livable Cities

• Europe is far ahead on setting standards for such things

– Healthy Cities project since 1987, which seeks to end environmental injustice, social sustainability, community empowerment and thoughtful planning

– Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) set down some guidelines from which most states in Europe developed their own set of regulations

• Usually includes: pedestrianized downtown, restricting auto access, slowing traffic speeds, encouraging density, maintaining greenways/forests, bike paths and bike expressways, integrated rail/metro/tram/bus networks

– One of their innovations is cohousing, where there are apartments/townhomes clustered on a pedestrianized street and one common house, with a large room for weekly community meals and events, a day-care space for common child-care, game rooms, gyms, etc… (sort of like a condo spread out over a block with greater emphasis on community)

• Italy gave birth to very comprehensive CittaSlow movement, which not only has the usual green space, eco-building, pedestrian/transport friendly codes; but also a strong local identity component that removes advertising/noise/light pollution, encourages restaurants with local recipes, supports arts and crafts, and modern industry with distinctive character giving products (but only for cities with < 50,000 people)

• Only Portland (among large cities) in the US has set similar transport/bike, green space, anti-sprawl goals`

Planning for Healthy Cities (cont.)

• The major theory in the US (and at this point, it is mostly just a theory) to counteract sprawl is called Smart Growth

– It is specifically designed for suburban land use (as opposed to Europe’s more downtown focused policies), specifically raising quality of life in first-ring suburbs and setting a growth limit. Do so by:

• Preserving open space both interior to and on the fringe of urban areas

• Renovate & infill older suburbs to bring middle/upper income households back

• Cut down on cars with sticks (higher gasoline tax) and carrots (density around transit stops)

• Create mixed use pedestrian friendly zones

• Create community (easier said than done)

– Obviously environmentalists and older suburban mayors are for it; developers hate it because it ties their hands (Chamber of Commerce opposes it because they oppose anything that costs money)

• If implemented, though, it would likely drive up prices and hurt establish residents

Planning for Healthy Cities (cont.)

– In practice, Minneapolis/St. Paul has done this best, taking 7 counties and putting them into a Regional Development Framework, where land is divided between the metropolitan urban service area and Rural service area (meant to protect farms)

• In the MUSA, goals are

– Preserve urban core (which they have done, it is widely recognized as one of the US’s most livable central cities, despite the horrid winters)

– Only allowing new development as population demands and at a rate that services can expand successfully

– Announcing a development schedule, so anything new is planned/vetted.

• They also have metropolitan tax-base sharing, where after 1971, 40% of all new commercial/industrial property taxes increase go to a common pool, and are distributed to high population districts with a limited tax base

– Because most areas are well served, the whole city is more pleasant with less persistent poverty

– The key, of course, is the willingness to create a regional government and planning authority with teeth to overcome fragmentation

• Indianapolis, Lexington, and Louisville are examples where the country and city simply merged (though that pushes sprawl out of the county)

– Big lesson: In the past, in the US, we probably expected too much of planning; now, it seems we no longer believe big non-highway projects are possible (meaning too little faith)