Planning for Small Town Change

Neil Powe, Trevor Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317686002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Change is inevitable in all communities: they both grow and decline. Planning is a means by which we have sought to manage this change. It has not always succeeded in providing the types of settlements and environments which many residents and others want, either because it is operating with the wrong policies or because it is failing to ensure that the right policies are effectively implemented. These failings have opened planning to criticism by a dominant neoliberal orthodoxy which shapes an increasingly difficult environment in which planning has to operate.

Planning for Small Town Change builds on an underexploited selection of international research and the authors' English case studies to consider the efficacy of planning for change. Drawing on insightful small town experiences, three themes emerge: understanding and conceptualising change; appreciating the potential within place; and the mechanisms for planning and delivery. The research draws on many examples of how key actors have made a significant difference to specific places and provides important insights into how the planning process can be better matched to the long-term and complex challenges faced. Whilst small town experiences are often neglected, they are found to be particularly insightful in understanding the potential roles of local communities and the importance of place quality when planning for change.

1

Planning for Small Town Change

Introduction

Urban sprawl, dormitory settlements, environmental degradation, rundown town centres, poor design, community fragmentation, clusters of poverty and depopulation are potential outcomes of a failure to adequately plan for change. This book is about planning to avoid and/or alleviate such negative outcomes. Whilst this may seem a conventional focus, we have chosen to examine these matters through the lens provided by the experiences of small towns. We have chosen this focus partly because small towns can provide a sharply focused insight into the impacts of economic and social change and into the challenges of managing change to meet the aspirations of local residents who use and value the places they inhabit; and partly because there is a rich, and probably underexploited, resource of case-study material giving important insights into place change.

Whilst some of the important contextual factors will be physical (availability of development sites, the quality of the built and natural environment), others will be economic, social and cultural (structure and health of the local economy and its supporting networks of services, or the perceived quality of community life and endowments of social capital). The resultant ‘“practising of place” by individual actors’ or ‘praxis of place-making’ can take many forms (Hankins and Walter, 2012: 1510). For example, in areas of poverty or deprivation, it might involve place-(re)making. The challenges involve coping with and managing decline, as a basis for initiatives to set a locality on a more positive trajectory of renewal and redevelopment. Such communities have, in most cases, failed to maintain their economic competitiveness vis-à-vis other localities where relative economic decline is frequently paralleled by degradation in physical and social elements. In a growth scenario, the emphasis is, instead, on the making of new places, where there is a need to accommodate new development whilst maintaining the place qualities that made it attractive to residents and visitors. For places with strong heritage and local distinctiveness, the challenge might be place-sustaining (Radstrom, 2011).

Whilst change in a community may progress slowly as the result of an accretion of small developments, or rapidly as the result of an economic shock such as the closure of a dominant local employer and the erosion of the economic rationale for the community’s very existence, change is ubiquitous and inevitable. Some would argue that such changes are most effectively dealt with through the market mechanisms that almost always produce them in the first place. However, the feeling that markets show too little regard for matters of equity, for factors that are less readily monetised, for matters in the public rather than the exclusively private realm, and for the long rather than the short term, led to the emergence of planning as a balancing mechanism between private and public, individual and collective, interests. However, the place for planning is by no means clearly defined or universally accepted. As Wildavsky (1973: 129) suggests, ‘promise must be dignified by performance’ and planning has not always successfully translated the policy on the page to the quality of development on the ground, and this has undermined its reputation.

However, producing the desired planning outcomes has become an increasingly difficult task, for two main reasons. First, cultural and institutional changes have diminished the authority of ‘planning’ within State machinery. Indeed, ideas about the processes for developing planning policy have been replaced by an increasingly fragmented institutional landscape within which more nuanced and subtle models exist. Processes of discourse and influence now assume greater importance and are an essential complement to understanding the physical environment. The place of statutory planning, for example, does not always have close institutional ties to the mechanisms for implementation and therefore the task of developing and delivering policy requires a greater breadth of understanding and an increasing need to influence the priorities of other agencies. Small town planning involves much more than the statutory roles of managing land-use change. Second, in a world with greater mobility and the rapid diffusion of information and communication technologies, the pattern of spatial relationships that characterised basic policy models with clear hierarchies of role and function for settlements and patterns of behaviour for individuals needs to be replaced by an understanding rooted in relational rather than Cartesian geographies, where planning needs to consider the determinants of the relationships between places and spaces rather than focusing on a bounded analysis of the attributes of a place.

A third reason might also be advanced. The development of planning has been characterised ‘as a state function [that] can be attributed to the rise of the modern interventionist state and Keynesian economics’ (UNHGR 2009: 10). However, Keynesian economics no longer represents the dominant underpinning for government policy and the idea of the interventionist State is challenged by the growing dominance of neoliberal modes of thought. So, whilst from the perspective of many committed planners, development management within the framework of strategic thinking might seem the logical route to follow to achieve an optimum outcome, regulation and direction of patterns and modes of development are harder to justify and levels of control have steadily been eroded. Now, development management is more about collaboration and persuasion than direction, with outcomes favourable to economic development dominating policy discourses, in spite of an apparent attachment to the principles of sustainable development.

However, given this divergence of views as to whether place-making efforts are an unwarranted interference or necessary intervention in the development process, is there any agreement on what the outcome of development should be? In the most general of terms, Thomas Sharp’s (1940: v) view that planning should produce ‘a new and better way of life’ could be one that is widely shared across the development sector, although with some different nuances of meaning. After all, the development of some form of control over building for reasons of public health, emerging in the 1840s, was essentially the expression of a collective interest in a period when laissez-faire economics was in the ascendency. Initially, such objectives were captured by the exhortation for planning to act in the (undefined) ‘public interest’ but latterly, the language and focus of such interests in ‘place’ have become both more specialised and at the same time more elusive in their meaning. However, the objective of ‘making better places’ remains a central objective and one which could continue to be widely shared within and outside the planning field.

Perhaps an important question, however, is ‘a better place for whom?’ This question encompasses reflections about both process and outcomes, although the two are not independent. Before the emergence of a commitment to participative approaches to planning, defining a ‘better place’ was a largely technocratic exercise, with the parameters of quality being formed through specialist, ‘expert’ reflection rather than community-wide inputs. The different range of outcomes delivered by development should be ones that meet the needs of different groups in a community – the rich and the poor, the mobile and the less mobile, for example – whereas often what are cited as examples of ‘successful’ communities are ones that have undergone a process of gentrification, the impact of which is to favour some groups and exclude others. This is perhaps another example of the difference between a market-led and a planning-led agenda for development, and merely redefining planning as the art of ‘place-making’ does not remove this difference in concerns.

Small Towns as a Spatial Category

Before proceeding further it is perhaps necessary to try to pin down what ‘small towns’ represent as a single spatial category or scale of research. In terms of size defined by population, they constitute urban areas which may be broadly or narrowly defined. In the US, a small town is defined as having a population of under 10,000 (Daniels, 1989). Whilst rural towns in the UK are also defined as settlements with fewer than 10,000 residents, policy initiatives for small towns in the early part of this century focused on towns with a population of between 3,000 and 20,000. In Germany, the small town designation (Kleinstadt) similarly refers to towns with a population of between 5,000 and 20,000. Markey et al. (2008) describe how small towns in British Columbia can also range from 5,000 to 20,000 residents. Most of the case studies provided within this book will fall within these broad parameters, with most Northern European small towns in this size range tending to be found in accessible rural locations, falling within what Daniels (1989) refers to in a US context as the ‘urban–rural fringe’. In the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example, there are also small towns that are much more remote and are likely to have their own dynamics beyond an ‘urban field’ (two-hour drive from a large urban area) (Dahms, 1995).

Choice of the small towns category for study is not seen as ‘spatial fetishism’, as described by Herod (2011), where deterministic relationships are seen to occur in relation to size. Whilst, in some cases, the small scale of towns may make it easier to establish community initiatives, it would be naive to assume that such development would automatically occur (Edwards et al., 2003). Indeed, there are likely to be cases where the opposite is true. Whilst Daniels (1989: 415) suggests the ‘myth that small towns are self-reliant, self-contained places dies hard, especially within the communities themselves’, small towns are not thought to provide receptacles for contained activity. Rather, they are very much part of the global economy. Small towns offer places to live, work, access a range of services and enjoy leisure and may be important centres for rural activity, but many people will engage in only one or two of these activities within the towns (Powe and Bek, 2012). This does not challenge the idea that small towns are useful as a spatial category/scale, but rather suggests the fluid and non-deterministic nature of the term.

As suggested by Herod (2011: 256), ‘any system of scalar classification is historically and geographically situated, rather than universal’. Indeed, change within small towns has occurred on different timescales, with marked regional, national or international variations. Taking a place-orientated focus, the context-specific nature of the emerging trajectories that have affected small towns has meant that place is distinctive, leading to a wide diversity of outcomes in terms of character and the functions they provide and their overall prosperity, growth/decline and resilience to change (Powe and Hart, 2008). There is no such thing as a typical town. Indeed, each town is unique, reflecting amongst other things its local history; geography; the assets upon which it can draw; policy and political contexts; and local capacity/entrepreneurial initiative. Although small towns clearly exist as a size category, Powe and Hart (2008) have demonstrated that, in terms of functionality alone, the designation of towns using a single typology would indicate a naivety as to their underlying complexity. As such, they are difficult to define as an ontological concept.

Given this diversity, similar to the debate concerning the merits of researching ‘rurality’, if they cannot be defined as distinct localities with a distinct range of characteristics, their worthiness for separate consideration could be questioned. For example, Hoggart (1990: 245; 255) in an article entitled ‘Let’s do away with rural’ argued that ‘intra-rural area differences can be enormous and rural-urban area differences can be sharp’ and went on to suggest that places need to be ‘located in the context of their causal processes and not with regard to their physical attributes’. Whilst there is value in attempting to define a specific context within which individual towns sit, constructing any functional categorisation for small towns is likely to result in an oversimplified analysis. In truth, the very term ‘small town’ is a widely used social construct redolent with many shades of meaning. As with the rural category, small towns have meaning as representations of space, whose definition and importance (economic, social, cultural and political) vary through time and space (Halfacree, 1993). The literature on scales suggests such social constructs have previously been used as a means of knowing (epistemology) in terms of a representative trope, a policy tool, as well as providing a level of governance (Moore, 2008; Lowe, 2011). So, whilst ‘small town’ is a ready shorthand used throughout this book, it should be remembered that it is a term which is underpinned by a complex range of functional and perceptual meanings.

Key Themes Covered in the Book

In essence, this is a book about the efficacy of planning for change, gaining an appreciation of what can be achieved and the most effective routes for delivery. By looking at small towns, we are focusing both on place and on specific places. Here the focus is on the very local scale, rather than the region or territorial area which might be the focus of local economic development, for example. It is our contention that a focus on small towns shines a brighter light on a number of important issues, such as the forces driving changing roles for settlements, the enduring qualities of place which are important to residents, businesses and visitors, and the challenges faced by local actors in seeking to play a part in managing change. Given the long-term nature of change processes, a focus on small towns can ease the important task of longitudinal study.

Whilst much of the book has a focus on the local economy, exploring issues at the small town level means a more holistic approach is necessary in understanding and planning for change. The remainder of this book addresses three themes. The first two themes (‘understanding and conceptualising change’ and ‘potential within place’) merge together to form Part I of the book. Given the focus within this book on the efficacy of planning for change, Part II focuses on the ‘mechanisms for planning change’. Part III explores the first three themes further through case-study research, but also contributes to the key overriding focus of the research in understanding how to make a difference to places – making ‘better’ places.

Part I: Understanding the Challenge

In spite of the ontological challenge of defining ‘small towns’, understanding the forces driving change in different circumstances is an important precursor to exploring the efficacy of planning for change. Drawing from recent work on resilience, a descriptive evolutionary model is developed in Chapter 2 which suggests a tendency for cyclical processes of change. A number of international case studies are provided which could be seen to follow such adaptive cycles, with their form and context given due consideration. A central idea within this book is that, unlike in ecological systems, there is an ‘intentionality of human actions’ within which there is the potential for ‘human intervention to break cycles through their ingenuity, technology and foresight’ (Davoudi 2012: 305). In many ways, the existence of such ‘intentionality’ forms a key justification for planning activity. The mechanisms for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Author bio
• Series information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1 Planning for Small Town Change
• Part I Understanding the Challenge
• Part II Mechanisms for Planning Change
• Part III Making a Difference at the Small Town Level
• Index