Hall's chapter also discusses both Letchworth and Radburn. I wouldn't worry about the minute details of each of these places, but a short answer is: Radburn had no substantive agricultural greenbelt (the most prominent green feature is the central green spine between the rows of houses). Nor did it have a critical mass of industrial employment, but rather is well-integrated into the larger commuting landscape of suburban northern New Jersey. Radburn is perhaps best known for its use of large blocks (superblocks, though not on the Corbusier design), cul-de-sacs, separation of pedestrians and roadway, and other fine-grained designs). It didn't embody the grander communal features from Howard's original ideas. [SC]
*the city is not just an economic place, but also a social place (and we will make bad plans and designs if we retain this narrow view of the city's function): "MOST OF OUR housing and city planning has been handicapped because those who have undertaken the work have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city." (59) "The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city life." (59) Further down, he writes: "social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic, must be subservient to its social needs.” (60)
* more broadly, the city is a rich, complex expression of human activities beyond the economic: "The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an esthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater." (59)
*primary vs. secondary relationships in a city: Mumford seems to reflect the then-popular distinction (described earlier by the German sociologists Tönnies and Simmel, and later by the Chicago School, e.g., Wirth, etc.) between the primary/direct relationships of smaller communities (Gemeinschaft) and the secondary/indirect relationships of big cities (Gesellschaft): "The city is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations: the first like family and neighborhood, are common to all communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city life." [59] "One may describe the city, in its social aspect, as a special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant collective drama. As indirect forms of association, with the aid of signs and symbols and specialized organizations, supplement direct face-to-face intercourse, the personalities of the citizens themselves become many-faceted..." (59-60)
*limits to city size: one should not let cities grow unbounded (either in population or in land area): "There is an optimum numerical size, beyond which each further increment of inhabitants creates difficulties out of all proportion to the benefits. There is also an optimum area of expansion, beyond which further urban growth tends to paralyze rather than to further important social relationships." (60-1) and later: "Limitations on size, density, and area are absolutely necessary to effective social intercourse; and they are therefore the most important instruments of rational economic and civic planning." (61)
* Relatedly, one sees here echoes of Howard and Geddes in Mumford's regionalist view of achieving a regional balance between city and countryside by having a polycentric (polynucleated) region (rather than a dominant central city surrounded by subservient suburbs and rural villages): "In such a network no single center will, like the metropolis of old, become the focal point of all regional advantages: on the contrary, the whole region becomes open for settlement." (62) [and he goes on to praise Wright and Stein's design for Radburn as in this spirit]
* He concludes with an argument for conscious planning to achieve this new type of polynucleated region: "Instead of trusting to the mere massing of population to produce the necessary social concentration and social drama, we must now seek these results through deliberate local nucleation and a finer regional articulation." (62) [SC]
Interesting question. there are two elements here: (1) the land use mix of a community (and whether it is just residential or also includes commercial and industry?); and (2) the type of planning (e.g., master planning). I’ll focus mostly on #1.
Re (1): Yes, I do see that similarity between garden cities and technoburbs: both contain employment centers and not just residential districts -- and thus both differ from "bedroom" community suburbs. That said, the ownership structure, lack of an agricultural greenbelt, etc. of a technoburb are markedly different from Howard's idea of a garden city. Also: though technoburbs may have housing, shopping and employment, they tend to be rather open systems: many people in one "technoburb" will drive to many other places within the region (e.g., other technoburbs, edge cities, the central city) for jobs, recreation, shopping, etc. That for many planners is the conundrum of mixed-use planning: the (New Urbanist) hope is that people would all live, shop, and work in their own walkable mixed-use community, but they still regularly get in their cars and drive all around the region (both for work and non-work trips).
Re (2): I agree: technoburbs are not necessarily "planned" in the same master-plan style as garden cities (though some areas/components of these technoburbs may be heavily planned, these planning is likely done by many different public and private groups, not just one.)
I find it useful to remember the difference between the start of the 20th century (the era of Howard, Geddes and Mumford) and today: a century ago, the concern was overcrowded, over-powerful central cities, and the need for decongestion (e.g., Mumford’s regional balance) to counteract these centripetal forces. Now (in many regions, esp. SE Michigan), the concern is about struggling central cities with strong centrifugal forces of suburbanization (pushing out past the inner-ring into outer-ring exurbia).. (It’s also useful to remember that the “garden city” was a model of a better city, whereas the “technoburb” is the name created by an urban historian to describe a phenomenon.)
This passage from Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias is a useful summary of his “technoburb” idea:
"Kenneth Jackson in his definitive history of American suburbanization, Crabgrass Frontier, interprets post-World War II peripheral development as "the suburbanization of the United States," the culmination of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century suburban tradition. I see this development as something very different, the end of suburbia in its traditional sense and the creation of a new kind of decentralized city.
Without anyone planning or foreseeing it, the simultaneous movement of housing, industry, and commercial development to the outskirts has created perimeter cities that are functionally independent of the urban core. In complete contrast to the residential or industrial suburbs of the past, these new cities contain along their superhighways all the specialized functions of a great metropolis - industry, shopping malls, hospitals, universities, cultural centers, and parks. With its highways and advanced communications technology, the new perimeter city can generate urban diversity without urban concentration.
To distinguish the new perimeter city from the traditional suburban bedroom community, I propose to identify it by the neologism "technoburb." For the real basis of the new city is the invisible web of advanced technology and telecommunications that has been substituted for the face-to-face contact and physical movement of older cities. Inevitably, the technoburb has become the favored location for those technologically advanced industries which have made the new city possible. If, as Fernand Braudel has said, the city is a transformer, intensifying the pace of change, then the American transformer has moved from the urban core to the perimeter.
If the technoburb has lost its dependence on the older urban cores, it now exists in a multicentered region defined by superhighways, the growth corridors of which could extend more than a hundred miles. These regions, which (if the reader will pardon another neologism) I call techno-cities, mean the end of the whirlpool effect that had drawn people to great cities and their suburbs. Instead, urban functions disperse across a decentralized landscape that is neither urban nor rural nor suburban in the traditional sense. With the rise of the technoburb, the history of suburbia comes to an end."
Physical determinism - the assumption that physical forms (e.g., the shape and form of the built environment) determine social outcomes. The term is often used as a criticism or warning: i.e., don't assume that there is a one-to-one direct relationship between the physical form of a city and its social dynamics. By extension, don't assume that one can directly change or fix social problems through reconfiguring the built environment. That said, most of us are in the field of planning (or architecture, etc.) because we do think there is some connection between the physical and the social (albeit complex, and often indirect). If there were NO link between the physical and the social, then the role of planning and architecture would arguably be very limited. So, a wiser path might be: avoid the most crude and naive versions of physical determinism, but then figure out where the physical does shape the social, and focus your efforts there.
Herbert Gans, in an influential critique of Jane Jacobs ("Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism," in Gans, People and Plans. New York: Basic Books, 1968; pp. 25-33), uses the term as a way of saying: perhaps Jacobs has misplaced much of the blame for urban renewal and the lack of urban vitality:
"Her argument is built on three fundamental assumptions: that people desire diversity; that diversity is ultimately what makes cities live and that the lack of it makes them die; and that buildings, streets, and the planning principles on which they are based shape human behavior. The first two of these assumptions are not entirely supported by the facts of the areas she describes. The last assumption, which she shares with the planners whom she attacks, might be called the physical fallacy, and it leads her to ignore the social, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to vitality or dullness. It also blinds her to less visible kinds of neighborhood vitality and to the true causes of the city's problems."
pluralism -
OED: “3. Polit. A theory or system of devolution and autonomy for organizations and individuals in preference to monolithic state power. Also: (advocacy of) a political system within which many parties or organizations have access to power. 4. The presence or tolerance of a diversity of ethnic or cultural groups within a society or state; (the advocacy of) toleration or acceptance of the coexistence of differing views, values, cultures, etc."
The theme of pluralism runs through many of the readings (Davidoff, Jacobs, Iris Marion Young, Leonie Sandercock, etc.). Davidoff argues for pluralism (with many voices, and many divergent and competing interests) as an alternative to a monolithic version of planning (with a forced, singular "public interest"). One can see variations on the idea of pluralism in discussions about diversity, multiculturalism, communicative action, etc.
[SC]
Jürgen Habermas (born in Germany, 1929) is one of the most influential of philosophers/public intellectuals of the postwar era. (If this were a philosophy course, we would read his original writings, and see him as part of the famous “Frankfurt School” of social research, along with Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc.). For planning his relevance is primarily in the influence of his ideas about democracy and communicative action on the rise of communicative action/collaborative planning. We read a piece by John Forester (who teaches planning at Cornell), who has used the ideas of Habermas to explore the role of communication, deliberation and public participation to create a more egalitarian, democratic planning. Planners are attracted to his ideas of the “ideal speech situation” and “inter-subjectivity” (discussion between subjects to come to a sense of understanding and truth) as ways that discussion/debate between different individuals and interest groups can collectively shape planning outcomes. (And critics of Habermas have attacked the “ideal speech situation” as naively assuming an even distribution of power and access.). This is why Bent Flyvbjerg and Tim Richardson (in "Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory") were critical of Habermas, and instead turned to Foucault. for more, see, for example, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
German architect who became (in)famous as the chief architect under Hitler and the Nazis. Designed several prominent Nazi buildings. Had ambitious plans for the reconstruction of Berlin to represent the grand aspirations of the Nazi “1000 year empire” -- most of these plans were never realized, as the German nation turned its attention and resources from nation-building to warfare and armaments production in the late 1930s. He mostly came up in UP540 through Peter Hall’s chapter on “The City of Monuments”. We didn’t cover much about Speer, but it’s worthwhile to know his role as the chief Nazi architect.
It was a landmark effort to build a nation-wide network of interstate highways. It involved massive amounts of money (and concrete/asphalt), and was seen as a crucial element of the rise of postwar automobility (which in turn was linked to suburbanization and the growing use of freight truck traffic). Significantly, the federal government paid for most of the costs, and was a model of federal-state partnerships in infrastructure building. Can been seen as part of a larger postwar effort to integrate the various American regions together in a single network. It was also known as the “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act,” and the military benefits (real or rhetorical) of having an integrated network of interstate highways (during the Cold War) was part of its marketing (and the US President at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a WWII general/hero). Indeed, the system was later renamed the "Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways." More info: “Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System” (alt link).
Interesting question -- I hadn’t thought about the connections between the two. [That said, in the classroom we treat the various styles of planning (comprehensive, incremental, advocacy, equity, strategic, communicative action) as pure types, while in the field, planners naturally combine and blur the boundaries. (I.e., these are useful analytical categories for understanding, but may be less distinct categories for practice.) ]
Is communicative action a necessary part of strategic planning? I don’t think so: it could be a useful part, but I also see many situations where the streamlined, top-down efforts of strategic planning collide with the deliberative, process-oriented, participatory nature of communicative action. Be sure to differentiate between communication as two-way deliberation/citizen participation/empowerment (what we usually think of when we talk about communicative action, a la Healey, Innes, Forester, etc.) and communication as instead one-way communicating/marketing the benefits of a strategic plan.
Can elaborate on your question so I can give a better answer?
Mel Webber (who taught transportation planning at Berkeley for many years) observed what he saw was a fundamental change in the role of place in society: where communities were once bounded by place (fixed in place), we now live in a highly mobile society where our relationships/networks/social ties are no longer always (or even mostly) physically nearby. Hence the idea: “community without propinquity” (physical proximity).
In this contemporary era of social media, internet, etc., this idea may seem commonplace -- but Mel was writing in the early 1960s. The piece we read by Webber, “The Post City Age,” addresses this growing divide between what we once thought of as cities and the new “post city” age. For the modern citizen, “how little of his attention and energy he devotes to the concerns of place-defined communities.” He “lives in a life-space that is not defined by territory and deals with problems that are not local in nature. For him, the city is but a convenient setting for the conduct of his professional work: it is not the basis for the social communities that he cares most about.” [477]
(Note: there are interesting similarities between Mel Webber’s view of these new social networks and Fishman’s description of the “technoburb” -- see #10 above.)
the property contradiction comes from the article by Richard Foglesong (a short excerpt from his book, Planning the Capitalist City). It is the contradiction between the social character of land and its private ownership and control: capitalism both needs planning, but also threatens planning. This contradiction does not invariably lead to collapse, but at least to tension and political conflict. (and one could argue that one role of planners is to manage this contradiction).
Why does capital (i.e., businesses, firms) have an interest in socializing the control of land? (1) to cope with the externality problems of land as a commodity; (2) housing, etc. for the reproduction of labor power. (3) to build infrastructure used by capital as a means of production. (4) coordinate efficient spatial circulation of infrastructure (i.e., transportation). Yet capital also restricts the social control of land.
Overall, the concept of the contradiction is useful because it gets us beyond the overly simplistic sense that the private sector always resists government intrusion, regulation, planning. Instead, businesses both resist and want government involvement in the private sector. (One sees this in the housing market, in infrastructure, in redevelopment projects, zoning, etc.) This is why I assigned Foglesong’s writing in the session on arguments for & against planning -- because he helps us understand why individuals and organizations can seemingly be pro- and contra-planning at the same time.
Fishman (in his book Urban Utopias in the 20th Century) examines the intellectual history of three visions of the city: Howard’s garden city, FL Wright’s Broadacre City, and Le Corbusier's Radiant City. “social thought in 3 dimensions” refers to the expression of broader social ideas and debates (over social organization, scale, democracy, order vs. freedom, etc.) in architecture, design and city building. Wright stressed an American decentralist view (Jeffersonian democracy?) and individual ownership; Corbusier went to the other extreme, with a highly organized, centralized, hierarchical society and the role of technocratic experts to turn chaos into order. One might see Howard somewhere in between: a hybrid of communal and private ownership; a mix of cooperation and competition; a medium-size scale (the garden city of ca. 35,000 people). [SC]
Substantive theory focuses on the substance/subject of urban planning: e.g., on city form, design, layout, on what makes a good city, etc. (influenced by architecture, landscape architecture, geography, etc.). Procedural planning theory focuses on planning as a process (of decision-making, of community participation, of converting knowledge into action, of the challenges of plan implementation; etc.) You might consider the difference in how you read the phrase “urban planning” -- is your emphasis on the “urban” or the “planning”? [SC]
A small but influential group of writers, professionals, architects, activists, etc. who met (mostly in NYC) from ca. 1923 - 1933. Influenced by Geddes, E. Howard, etc. Stressed the dangers of over-concentration in central cities and advocated instead for a regional balance between city and countryside (e.g., through garden cities). See question #2 above. See also Peter Hall’s chapter “The City in the Region” in Cities of Tomorrow. [SC]
interesting question. The “common good” is not a term we have really used in this class, and it seems to have various meanings in different contexts, often referring to an interest or benefit broadly shared by the public. (Perhaps some might find overlap between the “common good” and the “public interest”.) In planning, we talk about “public goods” in explicit reference to economics. Public goods (in contrast to private goods) have two characteristics -- non-rivalry and non-excludability -- that lead to the private sector under-producing such goods (such as national defense, public safety, education, etc.). Therefore the public sector steps in and partly or completely provides these goods (They might directly produce them, or instead subsidize either the production or consumption of these goods. Think of government-built public housing vs. government tax-subsidies of private affordable housing units vs. rent assistance payments to the poor.) (The valuation of these goods is therefore partly or completely determined not by market demand, but by the political process: whom we elect, how we vote on bond issues, etc.) [SC]
I think you are referring to the (interesting but challenging) article by Heather Campbell and Robert Marshall ("Utilitarianism’s Bad Breath? A Re-evaluation of the Public Interest Justification for Planning.”) They make the distinction between consequentialist (focusing on consequences, outcomes) and deontological (rule-bound, procedural) versions of the public interest. The authors then examine how the recent emphasis on communicative action (CA) fits into this debate about the public interest. The authors are supportive of CA but also see its limitations: they do welcome communicative action’s “emphasis on difference, diversity and democracy, has made a positive contribution to the debate about the future of the planning enterprise.” But they worry that CA alone won’t necessarily lead to good substantive outcomes: “An open agenda for public deliberation seems unlikely to provide the means by which important collective values can be upheld and maintained. To paraphrase Pitkin (1981), no account of planning, politics and the public can be of value if it is empty of all substantive content, of what is at stake.” [SC]
in simple terms, it is the two-way interaction between society and space (i.e., place, geography, cities). A dialectic is the tension/juxtaposition/interaction between two forces, ideas, etc. This is simply a conceptual description of what we constantly observe and discuss (and often implicitly assume) in planning and design: that social forces shape the way that buildings and cities are constructed, and that the built environment in turn influences society. (Of course, we can get into lively -- and perhaps unresolvable -- debates about which force is stronger: society → space or space → society …). Let’s conclude with the Winston Churchill quote: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” [SC]
a good question with a potentially long answer (I’ll aim for a short one). Both the property contradiction (PC) and market failure (MF) are useful concepts in the larger debate over the justifications for government intervention into the private marketplace. Each provides an economic framework to argue for the necessity for government intervention into the economy -- and by extension, for planning intervention. One difference may be in the nature of the relationship between the public and private. In the MF model, the public sector might be seen as a “corrective” of the shortcomings of the market (as if one is adjusting a flawed machine). In the PC view, there is this built-in tension (contradiction, conflict) between the public and private sectors that can create a combative, if not unstable, push-pull between the two.
MF is a concept borrowed from micro-economics. Beginning with the premise that a market functions optimally if certain assumptions are met (competitiveness, perfect information, no externalities, etc.), what happens when some of these pre-conditions are NOT present? The market does not produce a socially optimal amount and type of goods or services at the socially optimal price. We call this a market “failure” (or you could call it a market suboptimality, or flaw, since the market doesn’t necessarily completely “fail”). How to fix this market failure? There are numerous government strategies: government production of the good or service; government subsidies (to encourage private production), price controls, tax policies and other regulations, etc. (Planners, of course, often use zoning and other land use regulations.) Does the presence of a “market failure” necessarily mean that government intervention would be better? Not necessarily, since government intervention might have its own set of negative consequences (often called a “government failure” or “non-market failure”).
The PC describes the tension (i.e., contradiction, conflict) between the role of property (e.g., land, housing, etc.) as a private commodity vs. its role as a social good/need. In a way, such property has both public and private characteristics (at least in our current political economy), and therefore the tension between the public and private -- and the resulting arguments for and against public sector planning -- is built into the system itself.
** for a discussion of the property contradiction, see Question #14 above.
(Note: I am not an economic historian, but you might trace the differences back to the two ideas’ origins: MF in micro-economics, and PC in the economic thinking of Proudhon, Marx and the tensions between “exchange value” and “use value.”) [SC]
Big question, but I’ll provide a few key points and observations. (It’s interesting, by the way, that we rarely strive for a consensus view of urban planning, but from regional planning we more readily offer a summary definition.)
- Regional planning advocates typically define the region (and assert the importance of the region) in contrast to the city/municipality. The city is too small a scale, too fragmented, to deal with the urban areas as a complete system. The region best describes and contains the functional urban system and its parts: housing markets, labor markets, transportation networks, water and other resources, etc. And the regional scale might allow city-suburb inequities to be more directly addressed (e.g., between Detroit and its suburbs) -- though this city-suburb inequality understandably also leads many communities to resist greater regional efforts. Localism is a powerful force.
- I hesitate to provide a tidy categorization of the eras of American regional planning, but there is an early 20th century era of regional planning (both the “metropolitan planning” of the Regional Plan Association and its director Thomas Adams and the “regional planning” of the RPAA with Mumford, Wright, Stein, Bauer, MacKaye, etc.) with its emphasis on regional balance (of city and countryside), influenced by Geddes and Howard, etc.; then morphing/changing into the regional development efforts of the 1930s New Deal (TVA, Resettlement Administration, National Resources Planning Board, etc.) with an emphasis on regional economic development to counteract the poverty and underdevelopment of the Great Depression; then all that shifting into wartime mobilization of regional and national resources (1941-45); then a postwar period of pent-up consumer demand driving the mass construction of suburban housing, auto consumption and highway building (where the pre-1945 emphasis on regional, territorial planning gave way to a new faith that industrial and commercial growth would, through the rising middle class, auto-mobility, new roads, rural electrification, etc., lead to a convergence and integration of the nation -- and thus no longer a great need for pre-war type regional development planning); then a 1970s era push for regional planning through municipal consolidation, etc., all shaped by both the concerns about the “urban crisis”, white flight to the suburbs, and the growing environmental movement. And in the current era (what some might call “new regionalism”, which is a rather imprecise term meaning many things, but loosely describes the shift from ca. the 1970s to today)? a mix of many things: regional planning through collaboration (rather than consolidation); a focus on transit to link the region; on sustainability; on the impact of the “technoburbs” (new regional employment centers outside the central city); on a polycentric region (rather than the old regional model as single central city-suburbs-rural hinterland); megaregions; etc.
[more broadly speaking, the US has had a complex, long history of both implicit and explicit regional development efforts through Congressional action, Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, the westward expansion and “Manifest Destiny”, using military spending as an implicit regional development policy, National Forest service and other government land policies; etc. But that is a bigger history than the more narrowly defined history of 20th and 21st century regional planning…] - What has triggered this recent shift in regional thinking? changes in the spatial structure of regions themselves; changes in the economic structure of regions (especially the shift from manufacturing to more services and high-tech); changing fiscal policies and threats in local and county finance; ISTEA and the rise of MPOs; global competition; etc.
- In a way, the evolution of regional planning thinking is similar to the evolution of urban planning thinking, but with the added emphasis on changing city-suburb relations; the inherent inter-governmental complexities; the dramatic geographic expansion of the region; and the persistent dilemma (at least in the US) that though regional-scale planning might seem increasingly urgent, the country has a weaker tradition (and legal institutions) of regional planning than many other countries.
- to review, see Peter Hall’s chapter on regionalism, and Fishman’s "The Death and Life of American Regional Planning." chapter in Reflections on Regionalism
- NOTE: this is likely far more detail than I would expect you to know for the exam (since we only spent one session on regional planning), but it is useful to know a few basic ideas/concepts, such as that distinction between Adam’s metropolitan planning (RPA) and Mumford’s “regional” planning (RPAA); a few basic ideas about how a region might be defined and what regional planning might offer that municipal planning does not; why the garden city idea might be appealing to regionalists such as Mumford; etc. [SC]
New (often relocated) capitals intrigue planners because (among other reasons) these projects give architects and planners a rare chance to not only built an entire new city, but given its status as national capital, there is typically a big budget and the opportunity (and compulsion) to make a powerful symbolic statement through design. A few other points:
- there are many (overlapping) reasons why a government might move its national capital: to symbolize a new start/a new regime (e.g., the move from St. Petersburg to Moscow); to counteract the over-concentration of population, power and economic activity in the historic capital city (from Rio to Brasilia); to trigger development in a new region of the country; etc.
- In the case of Brasilia and Chandigarh, these new capitals came during the height of the Modernist movement, so their respective governments used Modernist architecture to present their government seats as new, efficient, rational, modern. (This also led to subsequent critiques of these capitals as being either isolated, out-of-touch with the local population and/or not in keeping with the local environment. These are valid criticisms, but at times Brasilia and Chandigarh also became scapegoats in an anti-Modernist polemic.)
(Peter Hall discussed new capitals in his book.) [SC]
(Yes, we didn’t really cover this movement in class -- Robert Fishman teaches a great course in the winter semester that would cover all of this: UP 594 - Amer Pln 1900-2000)
The standard planning history contrasts the City Beautiful Movement (ca. 1890s - 1910s) and its emphasis on civic buildings, parks, etc. with the City Efficient (aka “City Functional”) Movement (hard to date, but maybe roots in the late 1800s through the 1920s?, though its legacy lives on). To quote Buenker (from below -- in ctools but not assigned this semester): “The City Efficient Movement was the product of a marriage between two of the most significant phenomena of the Progressive Era: the municipal reform movement and what has been dubbed the ‘efficiency craze.’” That is: a combination of efforts to clean up city government and to run government based on principles of rational efficiency (ideas heavily discussed at the time in an era of rapid industrialization and the development of new, “scientific” ways to organize production). Cities established offices to promote efficient municipal government. A young Robert Moses worked at such an office (The New York Bureau of Municipal Research) in ca. 1913-14.
A quote from Mel Scott’s standard history of planning:
“The emphasis on the City Efficient or the City Functional characterizing the city planning movement by 1912 was in some ways a logical out-growth of the social impulses that had crept into the City Beautiful movement as it became concerned with playgrounds. transportation. and terminals.” Scott, M. (1969). American City Planning Since 1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 123
resources: Buenker, John D. 2007. "City Efficient Movement" (Encyclopedia of American Urban History) [in the ctools resources folder]
City Beautiful and City Efficient movements. Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, vol. 1. [SC]
Could you please distill the major ideas of communicative action planning? And its connection and distinction with advocacy planning?
THE BIG QUESTION here is: How can we promote a more democratic and inclusive form of planning (the latter leading to the former?)
- Collaborative planning = communicative planning (sometimes also argumentative planning, planning through debate, inclusionary discourse, etc.)
- a dominant debate in PT since the 1990s
- A reaction to what was seen as either exclusive, elitist, top-down planning or else the ineffectiveness of planning
- a recognition that what planners mostly do involves communication (deliberation, facilitation, mediation, etc.) rather than the technical development of formal plans.
- And linked to the critique of modernism and the rise of “postmodernism”
- A focus on diversity, inclusiveness, language (since the range of interests gets reflected in a range of voices) --
- one also sees here an echo of Davidoff, though he seemed to be more literal in his view of advocacy – people know their interests, but do not have voice/power. And he seemed to think more of pluralism, rather than the collective construction of an ideal speech situation.
- Forester calls this practice: “inclusive deliberative practices”
- Note: deliberation has two related meanings:
- 1. To weigh in the mind; to consider carefully with a view to decision; to think over.
- 2. Of a body of persons: To take counsel together, considering and examining the reasons for and against a proposal or course of action.
- Here is a useful table to compare communicative action (vs. an older model of rational, technocratic planning):
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I included this pair of terms to help differentiate between two claims about the advantages of cities: are cities economically successful because they are efficient (due to scale economies, making the same goods and services at lower per-unit costs)? or because they have higher levels of innovation (i.e., developing new goods and services, or new ways to produce such goods and services)? Both are present in cities, but much of the recent literature (see, for example, Glaeser, or some of the ideas cited in Lehmann) emphasizes that the recent vibrancy of cities is likely due to their clustering of innovative activities. One might argue that if a city only relied on efficiencies to gain advantage over suburbs and rural areas, that the diseconomies of scale (e.g., congestion, higher costs of living and working in big cities) would overwhelm much of the economies of scale in cities. Therefore it is the added advantage of being innovative that gives cities its greater advantage over other places. (Jane Jacobs would make arguments that sound similar). [Note: you might see some similarities between the efficiency-innovation and growth-development dualisms.] [SC]
A good discussion of this is in Dalton, L. (1986). Why the Rational Paradigm Persists: The Resistance of Professional Education and Practice to Alternative Forms of Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 5(3), 147-153. [in ctools, though not assigned in class]”
“Typically planners use a model of choice from utility theory as symbolic of the rational paradigm in planning. Banfield (1959) characterizes planning as a rational process of selecting the best means to achieve some pre-determined ends - a way of choosing the "correct" answer based on an assessment of the consequences of alternative solutions. Consistent with its origin in economics, the notion of efficiency is inherent in this decision making process. Rational choice then depends upon people's ability to know and measure their preferences (utilities), consistency, and continuity among these preferences; complete knowledge of the choices available and their consequences; and the ability to determine the uncertainty and risk involved in a decision (Harsanyi 1982; Sen and Williams 1982).”
Often we interchange rational planning and comprehensive planning as two overlapping ideas. And that then leads to the criticisms/alternatives to the rational/comprehensive approach: incremental, advocacy, strategic, equity, communicative, etc. (You could include Rittel and Webber’s “wicked problems” in this questioning of the rational planning model.)
The trick here is that many planning theorists have beaten up on rational planning (just as many have beaten up on modernism, technology, science, etc.), but either (a) seem to construct a strawman image of rationality (so it’s easier to knock it down); or (b) don’t provide a compelling alternative to the rational model. [SC]