City Politics and Planning

Irving Horowitz, Francine Rabinovitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351528399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume discusses some of the factors determining the political impact of the city planner on community decision-making. Rabinovitz bases her book on case studies of planning decisions in six New Jersey communities that were chosen for reputations of both effective and ineffective planning. She also uses a reanalysis of an attitude survey of U.S. planning directors, as well as a synthesis of previous studies. The materials are presented comparatively, thus enabling the reader to identify major themes in the broad and, until now, largely uncharted area of the interrelationship of politics and planning.The author first discusses the variables that influence the effectiveness of planning. She then develops a typology of community political systems in the six cities, based on such factors as power distribution, values, style, participation, conflict and cohesion, and potential for program output. The typology of urban political systems is matched by a typology of roles for the planner; this leads to a careful examination of the usefulness of different roles in different urban political situations. Other variables on which the success of particular roles depends--such as the ability to command resources for desired actions, the norms of the planning community, and the needs of the planner--are included. Finally, the author raises three important questions central to the planner's effectiveness: Can success spoil the planner? What does the planner contribute to decision-making? To what extent does political utility determine the planner's benefits or reverses?City Politics and Planning not only explores some crucial aspects of the city power structure but also shows the importance of who governs and, in addition, assesses the impact of community values on the types of policies that the community is likely to adopt. As such, this volume is invaluable to the students of city planning, local government, political science, and urban sociology; as well as, of course, to th

I
THE EXPERT AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

This is a study of the politics of solving city problems and of the role of the urban planner in this process. The central question that will be examined concerns the factors that determine the political effectiveness of the urban planner as a participant in community decision-making.¹ The urban planner is studied as one type among the new breed of urban experts who are rising to prominence as cities become increasingly involved in attempts to solve their development problems. By comparing the experiences of a variety of such experts, it is hoped that we will eventually arrive at some general propositions about these specialists, impact on urban policy. An understanding of their influence is today extreraely important, for it may well be the key to accurate predictions about the future shape of our cities.

Understanding the role of the expert and the variables that determine bis effectiveness requires examination not only of several types of specialists but also of the varying factors they must face in different cities. it is not sufficient to know how a given expert in a given city operates at a given time under a given set of circumstances. This, then, is a book based on comparative analysis. It is a study of only one type of expert, the physical planner; it investigates his experiences in six cities that vary in size, problems, and socio-economic characteristics. Its purpose is to aggregate the findings about the role of one kind of expert in a variety of different settings in order to begin to lay bare the underlying conditions, processes, and activities determining the effect and the effectiveness of expert participation in urban development decisions.

The city planner has corae to play an increasingly important role in such development decisions because of growth and changes in urban areas in the United States. In 1960, 125.3 million people, or 70 percent of the population of the United States, lived in urban areas. In the next twenty years, 54 million more people will be living in American cities. It is not population growth itself that has changed the role of the urban planner. As a product of the population expansion, there has been a transformation in the functions of city government. The city government is no longer concerned only with providing a necessary bundle of services that private enterprise can-not carry out. It is now the instrument for planning, building, and insuring the future growth of the city to ward a more advanced and effective state. That is, urban government is the instrument for community development.² It is through the urban political system that decisions are made, not only about streets and sewers but also about racial isolation, the quantity of housing, and the quality of environment.

This change in function has placed a new actor in the limelight in community decision-making, the urban expert. The search by government agencies for new solutions to urban problems requires an understanding of numerous social and economic factors and the control of technical tools for dealing with these problems, The need for information and specialized skills in government has placed the urban technician in a central position in much the same way as the revolution in technology and the Cold War have moved scientists into the spotlight in national government, Like the scientist in national affairs, the urban expert is often the only one at the scene to know what is possible. Since only he can determine what inhibits the traffic flow or poisons the atmosphere, only he can develop strategies for expanding the transportation network or stemming air pollution. The urban expert alone controls the techniques needed to guide industrial location, to regulate the suburban land developer, to renew the central city core—techniques without which government management of urban development would be infeasible.

The practical importance of experts’ participation in urban decision-making is indicated by the magnitude of current activity in urban programs dominated by such experts. If the measure is the number of communities affected, the planning function ranks high. By 1964, every city with a population in excess of 100,000 had a planning agency. Ninety-two percent of cities with a population of over 10,000, or 1,261 cities, also had planning agencies, an increase of more than 60 percent since 1957.³ This proliferation is, in part, a result of Federal requirements. Much of the Federal legislation in the housing and transportation fields requires local jurisdictions to present a plan before they can receive capital aid. By 1968, more than half of the forty-three programs providing funds for urban development attempted to shape local efforts in the direction of functional or comprehensive planning.⁴ In the last five years of the Urban Planning Assistance Program (from 1954 to 1959), it had provided funds to more than 11,000 municipalities in 94 urban regions. Since 1954, the Federal government has distributed $235 million for planning, apart from the funds provided for urban renewal.⁵ These programs are the forerunners of the even broader efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spur urban and metropolitan planning. The 1966 Urban Development Act authorized additional capital grants to municipalities for public facilities built in accordance with comprehensive metropolitan plans. It also extended the assistance offered under Section 701 of the Housing Act of 1954 to encourage further the establishment of local planning organizations.⁶

Despite the fact that urban government has now developed facilities for using expertise as a resource, and despite growing numbers of policy mechanisms that give experts the opportunity to influence urban decision-making on a regular basis, little attempt has been made to answer important questions concerning the role of the expert. This situation is somewhat surprising, given the nature and justification of recent studies of other actors in urban politics. Political scientists usually measure the power of traditional urban elites by their participation in conflicts occurring over the management of urban development. They assess the over-all distribution of influence in cities by determining the participants, gainers, and losers in urban decisions to plan, build, and insure future growth.⁷ The very rationale for studying urban elites is found in their impact on urban development problems. Yet few political scientists have studied the influence of those actors who have risen to prominence as development decisions have risen in importance in government circles.⁸ We have little knowledge of what factors actually determine the effectiveness of experts, the source of their influence, or their skill at employing their resources. We cannot specify the terms on which experts have become involved in urban decision-making or the effect on their professional status of this involvement, no less its impact on city politics and urban physical form.

The existing studies of traditional elites suggest only that the expert plays a role in urban decision-making because the acknowledged leadership groups no longer have the desire or ability to be involved with the problems of urban growth. In the large cities, urban executives, harassed by divergent pressures, have chosen to avoid seeking solutions to controversial city problems.⁹ The complexity of managing a large city in which developmental activities can intensify conflict among groups that have coexisted with reasonable success, dictates a posture of vacillation. Many incumbent officeholders risk defeat when they become associated with a complicated issue, so only when crises erupt do these executives take positions.

Because elected officials are often unwilling to initiate decisions about the priorities among different courses of action and inaction in regard to urban development, participation by informal groups has become necessary. The day-to-day concerns of urban businessmen and their associational life generate their interest in local public affairs. Nevertheless, voluntary associations and cliques of corporate executives are usually unable to provide any significant direction for a city’s development plans. The entry of businessmen into the political arena is always uncertain because political controversies require responses different from those needed by businessmen in their regular activities. Also, businessmen are hesitant to tarnish the reputations they earned in private occupations by getting too involved in the uncertain and sometimes un-clean world of municipal politics. When they do enter public life they can raise issues, but they frequently lack the institutional base for resolving them.¹⁰ Although new mechanisms for private participation in urban programs may alter the situation, in the past, businessmen did not possess the continuing organization, for example, to see that the renewal projects they championed were actually built, that the parks they requested were patrolled, that the building inspections for which they lobbied were overseen.

The decline in the desire and ability of these formal and informai leadership groups to resolve city problems leaves gaps in the network of power. Thus, resources for the solution of urban problems are not mobilized in most cities. Simultaneously, forces operating to effect urbanization in the United States are creating complicated physical and social problems for aging and growing cities. Awareness of the growing disparity between need and response is indicated in many ways, At the local level, some segments of the community are becoming more vocal about their dissatisfaction with urban conditions. They are becoming more insistent that the scope of urban government be expanded so that they can share the amenities of urban life more equally. At the national level, there is an indication of increased action to fill the leadership vacuum through Federal incentive programs. Within the cities themselves, it is the professional who has been called upon to assume the duties of leadership, with the responsibility for the development function being delegated to the urban expert,

The acceptance and practical importance of the expert in urban politics does not, however, justify the conclusion that the expert, and in particular the urban planner, is actually influencing policy making. A comprehensive physical plan can be prepared by any community having the funds to hire planners. This is not to say that such a plan will control development. To have maximum impact, urban planners must be both “wise” and “effective.”

“Wisdom” can be said to be present if a planner’s program anticipates the problems, wants, and resources of the city involved and if it contains mechanisms sufficient to overcome the ecological forces driving the city along its current path. The planner must also be equipped to calculate correctly the outcome of the steps taken to alter this course. The participation of an expert and the existence of a planning agency do not insure such wisdom. Indeed, an enormous amount of effort is devoted each year in American cities to dealing with the unintended consequences of previous technical decisions.¹¹

Even if experts have the requisite wisdom to manage development, there is no guarantee that they will be able to influence its course. Urban governments have shown a tremendous capacity to ignore development pressures and the experts advice. In one survey, the Urban Land Institute noted that while 102 of 114 reporting cities had subdivision regulations and planning commissions or planning departments, only ten made specific reference to their plans.¹² The expert therefore must also be “effective.” Effective participation may be defined as the intervention of the expert at all levels where decisions vitally affect the course of a city’s development. The planner’s ability to modify the system of people and space in favor of the preferred alternative is also a mark of his effectiveness.¹³ The effectiveness of planning can be determined in three situations: (1) when the expert initiates a planning policy that meets with no opposition, and it is enacted; (2) when the planner prevents a policy he opposes from being enacted; and (3) when the planner initiates a policy that meets with opposition but that is nevertheless enacted.¹⁴

In recent years many advances have been made in the development of tools to augment the “wisdom” of urban experts. Operations research, measurement scaling, linear programming, and a burgeoning body of other techniques are increasing the precision of prediction and control. Monumental increments in the knowledge of how to achieve “wisdom” are not matched, however, by an understanding of how to make “wisdom” work for us. There is little information on the factors leading to differential effectiveness in the experts participation in decision-making in different cities. There is not even agreement on what they are. Most practicing professionals explain effectiveness in terms of factors peculiar to specific situations, In large part, their failure to draw generalizations can be attributed to the fact that most urban experts are members of professions that have not yet become fully professionalized.¹⁵ There are, then, few common criteria by which to measure accomplishments in the fields of planning or renewal administration or the war against poverty. The rapidity with which these fields have grown has also made it difficult to collect up-to-date, comparative information about their effectiveness. While there are a number of ideal theories concerning the rational participation of experts, no one is certain exactly what the expert is or should be accomplishing in the field.

Conditions for Influence

What is it then about cities and the activities of planners in them that should be compared in order to arrive at general propositions about experts, influence in decision-making? One way to begin is to try to derive from the experts’ own unsystematic statements an interpretation of the factors they assume to be the determinants of their effectiveness. Although such an interpretation must necessarily be speculative, a perusal of planning literature suggests that planning theorists have operated with an implicit model. They have frequently suggested that it is organization and a technical role orientation that are the keys to effective influence of planners on urban policy-making«¹⁶

ORGANIZATION

The history of the position that organization is a major key to the effectiveness of planning is not difficult to trace. The conditions in urban areas decried by James Bryce in 1898 in the American Commonwealth spurred volumes of literature elaborating on his twin doctrines that local politics corrupted the functioning of government and that the corruption could be stamped out by the development of new institutions. In the optimistic Progressive era these prescriptive doctrines were developed into a series of devices to free policy-making from politics. Thus, the reformer became the advocate of instruments ranging from nonpartisan elections and the council-manager form of government to proportional representation on city councils. Planning was initially conceived as a set of rules and structures designed to keep politics out of urban development. Because land-use control had an enormous impact on land values, the chances of graft were considerable. Reformers attempted to eliminate this temptation by minimizing discretion. Planning regulations were formulated to establish in advance the conditions under which changes in land use would be allowed. It was then only a short step to the use of formal structures and rules as the means of keeping politics out of planning. Planning theorists were susceptible both to the reformist cry that streets and sewers are neither Republican nor Democratic and to the reformist method of solution by reorganization. Planners advocated independent planning commissions to insulate planning from the sordid political system. As Rexford Tugwell noted, “the great advantage of the independent planning commission was that it was removed as completely from what is ordinarily called politics as is humanly possible. . . .’¹⁷

While planners favored the independent form because they considered themselves aloof from politics, they assumed private leadership existed that could make decisions affecting public policy in their communities.¹⁸ The independent commission was composed of prominent civic leaders. Planners believed these men would be able to make planning effective through the complex of values —wealth, prestige, respectability—that civic leaders symbolize.

Practical experience led to disenchantment with the view that the principal private interests in the city were all powerful, however. The independent arrangement failed to provide a process for securing the impleraentation of city plans. Instead, the commission arrangement often cast planners into such unavoidable opposition to the mayor and legislature that planning proposals could not benefit from the power and prestige of city officials. These officials soon found routes to bypass independent commissions. One consequence of such a situation resulted in a twenty-year straggle by New York’s planning commission, which had autonomy but no constituency capable of implementing a program, to get a new zoning ordinance instituted in the city.¹⁹

By the 1940s, the supposed ineffectiveness of the independent stracture seemed clear to most supporters of planning. Their remedy was administrative reorganization. As social engineers and municipal league members sought salvation first in nonpartisan elections and then in minority representation and the merit system, refo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 THE EXPERT AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
• 2 THREE KEYS TO PLANNING EFFECTIVENESS
• 3 THE REAL WORLD OF MUNICIPAL POLITICS
• 4 THE POLITICAL ROLES OF THE PLANNER
• 5 RESOURCES AND CONSTRAINTS
• 6 CAN SUCCESS SPOIL THE PLANNER?
• NOTES
• INDEX