The Regional City

An Anglo-American Discussion of Metropolitan Planning

Derek Senior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351475327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this volume leaders in the fields of urban design and planning from both sides of the Atlantic examine the structure and functioning of the urban region, discuss the strategies and machinery required to make regional planning effective, compare experiences in urban renewal, and analyze the part played by transportation and land values in the shaping of regional development.

For thousands of years we have lived in cities, towns, villages, or country houses, and most of us still think of our surroundings in these traditional terms. Today, however, most people in Western countries inhabit a new form of social environment--the urban region. For all who live within thirty or forty miles of a metropolitan center, modern means of transport, communication, and power transmission have opened up a vastly extended range of choice in employment, recreation, and every other form of social activity. But our obsolete pattern of settlement and our pre-motor-age administrative organization prevent us from making the most of the opportunities to enrich the quality of everyday life which advances in technology have put within our reach.

In our efforts to plan for a fuller enjoyment of the benefits of regional living we can learn much from those who are tackling this worldwide problem in the context of different laws, public outlooks, and degrees of motorization. Therefore this Anglo-American discussion of metropolitan planning, offering much material that is new, unfamiliar, or not easily available, has special timeliness and significance.

1

INTRODUCTION

‘The assumption behind this seminar is that the urban region represents a new form of civilisation, with its own distinctive possibilities and problems ... It is further assumed that the urban region represents a highly significant entity for the purposes of governmental plans as these bear on the use and development of land . . . The main focus of the seminar will be on the comparison and evaluation of public policies and plans for deliberately shaping the structure and functioning of the urban region. It is from this point of view that we wish to compare trends, problems and policies in the United States and Britain; to see how far common solutions and methods are being adopted or recommended; and to learn from the experience of both countries in tackling critical planning issues.’

In these extracts from their preliminary circular, the convenors of our seminar made plain what they took to be the common ground from which any Anglo-American dialogue on the planning of the urban region must begin. They also made plain that the purpose such a dialogue must have in view was to explore, not to compose, the differences between British and American ideas as to how the regional planner should go about his task. Differences there must be, since the circumstances that condition the planner’s work in Britain and America differ so widely; and ours was not a diplomatic gathering, intent on simulating a consensus by glossing over disagreements with agreed forms of words. Rather did we seek to elucidate our dissents, so that we might draw enlightenment from them. We hoped that each country’s contingent, by revealing what the urban region looked like from its own side of the Atlantic, might help the other to get the measure of this emergent entity, to see it in the round, and thus to gain a better grasp of its bearing on the way ahead. We met, in short, not to convert one another, nor to pass unanimous resolutions, but to add a new dimension to our understanding of the problems created by the urban region in our respective situations.

To what extent this hope was fulfilled is a question that each participant must answer for himself. In reporting the seminar’s discussions the editor has conscientiously endeavoured to maintain a ‘mid-Atlantic’ stance, so that British and American readers alike may benefit from the information given and the arguments deployed. Any attempt on his part to evaluate them could not pretend to do more than express one insular Englishman’s personal reactions to what he found a most illuminating experience.

In matters of English usage, however, the ‘mid-Atlantic’ stance is often uncomfortable; and in matters of spelling, untenable. Terms peculiar to Britain or the United States have been ‘translated’ only where the other country’s version is more self-explanatory. Where either country’s version might not be fully understood in the other, the first use of the American term is followed by its British equivalent in brackets. For the sake of consistency the spelling has been anglicised throughout.

2

THE CONTEXT

At our first session, opened by Professor Peter Self and Mr Frederick Gutheim, the acceptability of the seminar’s basic assumptions was demonstrated in the most convincing way possible: it went without saying. In subsequent sessions, as we examined more closely the differing contexts in which American and British planners had to operate, it became apparent that this tacit consent masked some divergences of view as to what exactly was implied in these assumptions, and more particularly as to how far public policies and plans could or should go in ‘deliberately shaping the structure and functioning of the urban region’. But it also became apparent that in spite of the inevitable contrast between their methods of tackling the problems presented by this new phenomenon, British and American planners were striving for very similar goals.

More revealing, perhaps, than the differences between us were the differing views expressed as to where exactly the essential difference lay. Professor Self began by suggesting that in America, where more elaborate regional studies had been made and where a system for the training of regional planners had been developed, a great deal of thinking about regional planning had been going on, whereas in Britain there had been much less thinking but some governmental action in this field. The purpose of the seminar, as he saw it, was to relate American thinking to British practical experience. He had been particularly struck by the New York Metropolitan Regional Study, which made the assumption (strange to anyone in Britain) that governmental efforts to influence the structure of the urban region would more or less cancel one another out. It also differed from other regional studies in that it attempted to forecast not only population changes but also changes in the structure of employment and in the pattern of its distribution. He questioned the realism of this exercise and emphasised the importance of keeping plans and forecasts distinct.

Two of the main issues, as outlined by Professor Self, were: a) What should a regional planning and development strategy try to achieve? b) What sort of machinery and tools were needed for the job? As to the first, he thought it was a matter of integrating three sets of factors: economic, social and aesthetic. The economic factors were development costs, which varied according to site, area and pattern; operational costs, which varied with location; and transport costs, which varied according to pattern. The social factors were concerned with what people wanted or needed in the way of housing, services and jobs, while the aesthetic factor brought in design. When people talked about urban planning they were generally preoccupied with only one aspect of one of these factors; this was what made physical planning the most difficult, the most interesting and the most confusing form of planning there was. We had to become increasingly aware of all three sets of factors and to realise that each had its place in a regional plan or development strategy; somehow we had to manage to understand them all and relate them to one another.

On the subject of machinery and methods the important matters for consideration were: the sort of administrative mechanism required for the regional co-ordination of land-use planning with industrial location and transport, and for the relation of regional proposals to national policies; the training and recruitment of regional planners and their field of research; the use and appropriate powers of special development agencies; the control of land use and land values and the provisions to be made for objections to interference with the rights of ownership.

Mr Gutheim said Britain and America had been intellectually interdependent in the planning field to an extent that was remarkable in view of their different economic institutions and objectives and the different constitutional framework within which their planners had to work— not to mention what had been called ‘our greatest common barrier, the English language’. These differences necessarily coloured and distinguished their approaches to the broad questions of policy involved. The American city planner admired his British counterpart’s professional status, his discretionary powers, his position in the counsels of government and the confidence with which he moved; for in America everything the planner did was subject to judicial review in the courts, with the result that every self-evident point of professional judgment had to be elaborately rationalised and objectively documented.

American planning decisions tended to be market decisions ‘based on how we think people will behave rather than on projections of public policy in an effort to make the economy conform to what we want it to do’. But this did not mean that American economic planners were concerned merely with trying to forecast developments in the economy: they were fundamentally interested in causality. They tried to identify economic relationships so that they could develop their thinking about economic factors into decision-making models and efforts at interpretation involving non-economic factors. As we concentrated on the question of what kind of cities we wanted, we should state our goals in terms of the real forces of today and not try to derive them from the cities with which we had been familiar.

Turning to the means by which Americans hoped to realise the kind of city they wanted, Mr Gutheim said it was not just a question of prediction but of making ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’. This must have a time-scale long enough to bring into the account some benefits in return for the efforts made in the early part of the planning period, for only when the problem was put in these terms could politicians be induced to take responsibility for long-term decisions. There must also be a top-level co-ordinating device built into the planning mechanism to make activities in various fields reinforce one another.

For a solution to the problem of breaking away from present trends and behaviour, American planners had to rely on the example of creative and imaginative people, often in private foundations, who were demonstrating the possibilities of new departures from established ways of doing things—for example, in urban-renewal projects. Such innovations were suggestive of fresh initiatives in other lines of activity. But they often ran into difficulties, he added: ‘too often we try to innovate but do not succeed in overcoming the forces of inertia, tradition and established practice’.

Mr Gutheim concluded by saying that we must look at these issues not just in terms of planning for problem areas or on a city-by-city basis, but in terms of regional planning within a framework of national economic planning. Each nation must see that its goals for economic growth were consistent with its own type of economy and at the same time used all the national resources and allowed the greatest opportunities for development in every region.

Significantly it was to this question of the relationship between regional physical planning and national economic planning that the seminar confined its attention throughout the ensuing discussion. Could America be described as having a mechanism for national economic planning? Mr Gutheim conceded that neither Britain nor America was trying in this field to do anything comparable with what was happening on the continent of Europe. In particular, they were not relating the objectives of national planning to those of regional planning and development. America had agencies concerned with maintaining full employment and promoting economic growth, but they were not co-ordinated with the Economic Development Agency, which had been set up to consider individual pockets of poverty and had now scheduled two thousand economically depressed areas. The approach was not significantly different in Britain, though the yeast was at work there. Local unemployment was still treated as a relief and welfare problem; there was no framework for dealing with it in any larger development terms.

Mr Henry Wells disagreed that Britain and the United States were basically on a par, as compared with European countries, in this respect. Britain was over-populated, had very limited raw materials and was obliged to live from its exports; it had therefore been driven by necessity, like the European countries, to see that its resources were sensibly used. Machinery for this purpose, which had been running since the beginning of the war, operated a form of national economic planning, and this was the framework within which land-use planning had to fit. Other speakers observed that the British system of control over industrial location, though negative in form, was reinforced by heavy public investment and positive financial incentives to industry to go where the government wished. But Mr Henry Cohen pointed out that there was a fundamental difference between having individual policies that made an economic impact and the comprehensive national economic planning that operated in France—at least on paper.

Mr D. L. Munby thought the basic element of economic planning was acceptance of the Keynesian view that the economy was not a self-balancing mechanism and that inflation or unemployment could be avoided only through government action, including direct controls as well as monetary and fiscal measures. This view had been accepted in Britain ever since the war, but it had expressed itself in two streams of action, working with different objectives and different tools, and to some extent in different directions. One aimed at taking work to the workers to deal with the structural changes required in the British economy. The other—backed by town planners, architects, sociologists and others concerned about the failure of the market to produce ideal social conditions—had led to the development of new towns and land use controls. The result had been an interdepartmental battle rather than a policy. Recently, however, these two approaches had been brought closer together by the change in the objective of national planning from the maintenance of an economic balance to the promotion of economic growth.

This change called for the adoption of targets and for indicative planning on the French model. People had come to realise that if you had a policy of planned growth you must also have regional plans and machinery. The Labour Party, for example, was proposing to set up a Ministry for Economic Affairs (in addition to the Treasury), which would have positive regional planning goals for the distribution of industry and population throughout the country; it would set up regional organs to link the regional offices of the Ministry of Housing, Board of Trade and Ministry of Transport and to produce regional development plans. These would take account of how the growth targets for the economy were to be broken down by industries and by regions. It was now generally accepted that the policy of dealing with the unemployment problem in the ‘development areas’ or ‘development districts’ where it arose was all wrong: what was needed was the development of large areas concentrated on growth centres, which tied in with regional planning for overspill.

Mr William Slayton regretted that America still lacked any kind of organisation for comprehensive national economic planning, such as Britain had begun to build. But Professor G. P. Wibberley thought the question of machinery was secondary: what mattered more, he suggested, was that in both Britain and America the growing disparity in economic development between one region and another was worrying the economic analysts—the people concerned with efficiency—as well as the people concerned about its social aspects. Thus the two lines of policy were coming together.

What, then, should the government do about these regional disparities in economic growth? Mr Gutheim cited the case of Poland, where it had been found that national economic planning on the Russian model was successful in promoting development in certain industrial sectors but did nothing for the regions in which these industries did not happen to be located. Obviously this was a politically impossible as well as an economically wasteful situation. A change had therefore been made to a far more regionally oriented policy, making each of over thirty regions the subject of a highly integrated economic and physical plan. These regional plans were now set in the context of a national economic plan, and to see the regional and national plans working together and strengthening each other was a uniquely exciting experience.

This gave rise to several questions. Did the integration of regional and national economic planning necessarily involve not only the promotion of growth in some regions but also its restraint in others, and was not any such restraint alien to every American instinct—economic, social or political? On what basis were conflicts between economic and land-use objectives to be reconciled in a national plan? Could the planner’s competence extend beyond the physical arrangement of land use and development within the urban region, or must he be content merely to take note of economic processes at the national level?

Dr Nathaniel Lichfield suggested that a new element had been introduced with the emergence as a field of public policy of economic development—the deliberate stimulation of a region’s economic growth— as distinct both from economic planning (in the sense of maintaining a country’s economic balance) and from regional planning in the sense of arranging a region’s land use. On the question of how to stimulate regional growth, the British were comparatively unknowledgeable, he went on; they had nothing like the T.V.A. project, in which the Americans had shown what had to be done to develop the resources of a region and to provide the wherewithal for it to live. He agreed that most planners must be basically concerned with the physical arrangement of things on the ground, but in that operation all the social and economic forces impinging on land use had to be taken into account and the relationships between them understood. Planning in America, being more oriented towards the social sciences, was less narrowly conceived than in Britain.

It was evident, in short, that neither the British nor the American contingent felt complacent about its own country’s preparedness to tackle the critical planning issues raised by the emergence of the urban region. If Britain was making more progress towards getting itself organised for this task, America had more to show in the way of ad hoc performance; but both were far from having an operative regional planning system and still farther from getting regional land-use plans integrated with comprehensive national economic planning. It also appeared, on the other hand, that the acceptance of planned economic growth as an objective of national policy was at last resolving conflicts in this field and enabling the governmental agencies and professional interests concerned to pull together. It was on this modestly hopeful note that our first session closed,

3

THE STRUCTURE

What is an urban region? We were clearly in danger of arguing at cross-purposes if we embarked on a closer examination of the strategy and mechanism of planning for the urban region without first making sure that we were all talking about the same thing—or at least that we all knew what each of us was talking about.

No precise definition had been attempted at our first session. Professor Self and Mr Gutheim had indicated two quite different ways in which the concept of the region was to be distinguished from that of the city, but both had left undefined the basis of the distinction between region and nation—a distinction that was taken for granted throughout the subsequent discussion. ‘Towns have grown into conurbations,’ said Professor Self, ‘and these have spilt over into wider aggregations which we may call urban regions.’ Mobility lay at the root of this increase in the scale of the urban unit; but ‘people hop around between urban regions’; so far as mobility was concerned, then, the whole nation was an urban region. If a sub-national urban region was to be distinguished as ‘a critical entity for planning and development strategy’ it must therefore be defined in terms other than mobility.

Professor Self was sure such an entity existed, but identified it only as ‘a focus for bringing together a whole range of questions about how you should plan and what kind of general development strategy you should adopt’. For Mr Gutheim the starting-point was ‘what kinds of cities do we want and what kinds of goals for urban development?’ He went on to describe the urban region as ‘not simply an overspill of the city, or a territorial unit, but a population living as an organically interrelated group of people whose jobs, economic activities, social institutions, leisure time and mobility are working together in a highly integrated fashion’. It was this unity of behaviour, he insisted, rather than the territory in which it was taking place, that was the significant thing—the thing that most distinguished the ‘city’ of today, in this period of affluence, leisure and dynamic growth, from the city of the nineteenth century, which was not only smaller but (as Professor Asa Briggs had shown) an inherently simpler type of organisation.

This narrowed the concept a little, but still left the question of the scale of the urban region open-ended. Granted that the explosive city of today could no longer be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prefaces
• List of Participants
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Context
• 3 The Structure
• 4 The Strategy
• 5 The Machinery
• 6 Regional Studies
• 7 Implementation: Urban Renewal
• 8 Implementation: New Towns
• 9 Development Values and Controls
• 10 Transport and Land Use
• 11 Recapitulation
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Index