Urban Planning And The Development Process

David Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135154042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This text is about the very essence of urban planning in a market economy. It is concerned with people - landowners, developers, investors, politicians and ordinary members of the public - who produce change in towns and cities as they relate to each other and react to development Pressure. Whether Such Change Occurs Slowly And Is Almost Unnoticed, Or happens rapidly and is highly disruptive, a production process is creating a finished product: the built environment. This form of production, known as the land and property development process, is regulated but not controlled by the state. Urban planning is therefore best considered as one form of state intervention in the development process.; Since urban planning would have no legitimate basis without state power, it is an inherently political activity, able to alter the distribution of scarce environmental resources. Through doing so, it seeks to resolve conflicts of interest over the use and development of land. However, urban plans that appear to favour particular interests such as house-builders above others such as community groups provoke intense controversy. Development planning can thus become highly politicized, with alliances and divisions between politicians not always explained by traditional party politics.; These issues are explored with particular reference to statutory plan-making at the local level. The author draws on his extensive research into urban planning and development, making use of recent case studies and examples to illustrate key points. There are four parts. The first explores the operation of land and property markets and development processes, and examines how the state intervenes in the form of urban planning. The second part looks at the people and organizations who play a critical role in shaping the built environment and considers their relationship with the planning system. Specific attention is paid to important actors in the development process, such as landowners, developers, financial institutions, professional advisers and to the variety of agencies in the public sector that aim to promote development. This concludes with discussion of public- private partnerships and growth coalitions. The third part of the book concentrates on local development planning.

PART 1

THE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

This book is about the very essence of urban planning in a market economy. It is concerned with people – among them landowners, developers, investors, politicians and ordinary members of the public – who shape the built environment as they relate to each other and react to development pressure. Whether urban planning exists or not, people such as these ensure that most towns and cities gradually evolve through a continuous process of change and development. Urban planning neither overrides nor fully controls this process, but aims instead to influence it. Indeed, as an explicit programme for the management of land-use and environmental change (Healey et al. 1988), urban planning is best defined as a form of state intervention in a development process dominated by the private sector.

Any justification for urban planning thus demands evidence that such intervention produces a better urban environment than that which could be generated by the market alone. Nevertheless, urban planning does not replace the market but works through it, affecting the value of land as it is bought and sold and creating potentially lucrative development opportunities for others to implement. In a market economy, no theory of urban planning which assumes that the planning authority controls the urban environment is therefore valid. Rather, the extent to which any such authority can successfully influence the development process is dependent on the resources it can attract, the powers with which it is entrusted, and particularly on the depth of its relationships with landowners, developers, investors and other significant actors. Such relationships do not flow merely in one direction, for these very people whom urban planning tries to influence may themselves wish to see urban plans modified to their own advantage.

Urban planning in practice therefore has little to do with scientifically discovering the best technical solution to be implemented by the planning authority in the public interest. Rather, it is about the processes of bargaining, negotiation and compromise over the distribution of scarce environmental resources, in which the planning authority, in attempting to mediate between conflicting claims on land, may promote particular interests above others. This approach does not devalue the vision of a well designed and attractive urban environment, nor deny the significance of fundamental urban linkages, such as those between the housing and employment markets. Rather, it seeks to put them in proper perspective by relating them to how planners operate in practice. Moreover, since urban planning has the potential to alter the resource distribution that market forces produce, causing some people to gain and others to lose, it is an inherently political activity in which controversy is never far from the surface. For this reason, authorities often reach urban planning decisions that may appear technically defective.

Earlier conceptions of urban planning

Urban planning was not always seen in this light. For example, it has been variously regarded as an exercise in civic design, a style of corporate management, and as a form of systems analysis. A brief historical excursion is helpful to explain the legacy of these approaches. The early pioneers of town planning believed passionately that the comprehensive design of new settlements and the reconstruction of existing ones could best achieve amenity, convenience, safety and public health in urban form, and reinforce the onward march of social progress. In this vision, the planner was considered the master-designer of the built environment, arranging landuses to produce balance and order throughout the city. This required aesthetic appreciation and technical skills, natural qualities for a planning profession that had originated in architecture, engineering and surveying.

For the first five decades of the 20th century, urban planning was thus commonly equated with civic design in a tradition that remained for many years thereafter, a powerful influence on both planning education and the self-image of planners in practice. However, this consensus was shattered in the 1960s by new approaches to urban planning in three related areas of controversy, termed respectively by Yiftachel (1989) the analytical, urban form and procedural debates. Each of these debates can be traced back to the early days of urban planning at the turn of the 20th century. All three debates have since taken place in parallel and continue to do so today.

In the analytical debate, the fundamental question is “What is urban planning?” After the 1960s, urban planning was considered less a matter of civic design and more a function of state policy. Marxists saw urban planning as aiding and abetting the capitalist system, facilitating capital accumulation by paying for infrastructure, providing welfare and other services and ensuring social harmony (Blowers 1986). In contrast, pluralists, who believed in a neutral state capable of serving a variety of interests, resisted the Marxist challenge to the public interest as a basis for planning action. Those who took a managerial view of the state stressed the ability of a rational, independent and increasingly powerful bureaucracy, nominally subservient to politicians, to define the public interest. This coincided with the growing popularity of corporate management in public service both centrally and locally, evident in the introduction of corporate plans that aimed to allocate resources according to the overall objectives of the service rather than by traditional departmental boundaries.

Corporate management was thus intended to prevent unco-ordinated action by the bureaucracy caused by the inherent tendency of its different sections to pursue mutually conflicting objectives. Local authorities who searched for expertise capable of preparing corporate plans often turned to those on their own staff originally trained as town planners. For a time, urban planning became caught up with the management and delivery of public services as a whole, including education, housing and social services in a working environment far removed from any notion of civic design. The planner was seen as “the master-allocator of the scarcest resources: land, and capital and current expenditure on the built environment and the services which are offered to the community” (Eversley 1973: 342). In the 1980s, as Yiftachel (1989) notes, the analytical debate continued to be divided along ideological lines, with the main strands then evident best described as managerialism, neopluralism and reformist Marxism.

Yiftachel (1989) identifies the fundamental question in the urban form debate as “What is a good urban plan?” Until late in the 1960s, it was widely believed that older industrial cities should be redesigned and redeveloped at much lower densities, with the overflow of population dispersed to newly built settlements at some distance. This type of urban plan was physically led, reflecting the ascendancy of design thinking, often to the neglect of social and economic considerations. However, comprehensive redevelopment within cities came to be regarded as destructive of social and economic life and as poor value financially. Since the 1960s, the urban form debate has emphasized urban containment rather than urban dispersal, and has preferred conservation and rehabilitation to clearance and redevelopment. More recent attention has been given to the sustainability of alternative urban forms and to the relative merits of high- and low-density development.

The fundamental question in the procedural debate is “What is a good planning process?” Yiftachel (1989: 34) further contends that: “the first five decades of the century were dominated in what is termed here the ‘design method’, whereby substantial knowledge about a given object was translated into a plan via the intuition or inspiration of the planner.” In the early days of urban planning, Patrick Geddes, one of the pioneers of the civic design tradition coined the phrase “survey before plan” to encapsulate this method, but to later generations of planners it became better known as “survey–analysis–plan”. The narrowness of this consensual approach was again challenged in the 1960s by new approaches that defined the planning process as the application of reason to collective decision-making.

Rational comprehensive planning, as it became known, sought to employ scientific methods to social organization and control. This approach had originated in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, and drew heavily on cybernetics, systems analysis and operational research. The planner’s task became to identify all possible alternatives or courses of action, to evaluate the consequences of each against pre-stated ends, and as a result to select the most appropriate. Whether the planner in question sought to rebuild a city or put a man on the Moon mattered little, for planning was seen as a generic activity applicable in principle to any task. The planning graduate, educated to take an overall view in co-ordinating the work of others and to appreciate the longer-term perspective, was considered qualified not only for the town planning profession but for a management career in any part of the public or private sectors. During the early 1970s, such procedural planning theory came to dominate planning thought as a whole, with urban planning almost caricatured as a set of techniques for rational decisionmaking. The most influential application of the rational comprehensive approach in British planning practice proved to be systems analysis, and its employment particularly in the initial wave of structure plans in the 1970s.

The systems approach regarded the city not as a place of chaos but of order, functioning as a richly integrated urban system with complex interconnections between its component parts (McLoughlin 1969, Chadwick 1970). Since certain land-uses were considered to generate particular traffic requirements, movement around the system could be predicted, once it was known how land at each node of activity was used. Advanced mathematical models could therefore be employed to simulate the urban system. This approach was thus linked to the quantitative revolution in the social sciences more generally. The planner was seen as a helmsman, controlling and directing the process of change throughout the urban system, at the same time continuously monitoring the impact of such action through the model. Plan-making therefore became not a single event but a continuous process.

Although rational comprehensive planning was highly influential on urban planning practice research and education in the 1970s, Yiftachel (1989) comments that it was never supported by a similar consensus to that achieved by the design method during the early decades of the century. Competing concepts of the planning process included disjointed incrementalism (Lindblom 1959), mixed scanning (Etzioni 1967) and advocacy planning (Davidoff 1965). In later years, McLoughlin (1985) himself bravely acknowledged criticism that the systems approach reinforced the existing social order by accepting it as given, depended too much on the availability of information that was often difficult or expensive to collect, and ignored political and bureaucratic realities. By the 1980s, rational comprehensive planning had given way in the procedural debate to two competing strands which Yiftachel (1989) identifies as positive discrimination and rational pragmatism.

Neither civic design, corporate management or systems analysis, powerful as they have each been at times within these debates, adequately explain the nature of urban planning in a market economy. Although civic design sought to improve the built environment directly, it often neglected social and economic factors responsible for poor physical conditions. At its most naive, the pretension that better living conditions would inevitably create social harmony and a sense of belonging represented no more than a highly simplistic form of environmental determinism (Allison 1986). Indeed, civic design primarily reflected the values and attitudes of the middle class, and tended to be regressively redistributive in practice, since it concentrated on creating or preserving environments unaffordable by the urban poor. In contrast, within corporate management, urban planners have been required to act as educationalists, housing specialists and welfare officers, for which many have neither the training nor the expertise. Systems analysis certainly brought a new logic and rigour to planning thought, as a result of which most planners today automatically set out the aims and objectives of any policy recommendations. However, it is highly questionable whether urban systems bear any real resemblance to the systems evident, for example, in biological phenomena. Indeed, to many people, urban areas appear chaotic and unpredictable places, with any sense of order far removed.

Much as civic design and systems analysis seem distinctly different, they both regard urban planning as a politically neutral activity in which rational choices technically identified by experts readily gain popular consent. Such a philosophy fails to acknowledge that every piece of land affected by a plan has not only a use but a value and an owner. It is therefore helpful to consider alternative approaches that examine how various types of interest relate to the planning system (Healey et al. 1988). For example, plans that suggest new uses for land affect monetary value and cause owners pleasure or displeasure. Landowners are certainly not the only people who stand to gain or lose through urban planning. Community groups, for example, may value their local environment in a quite different sense for the amenity it bestows. If urban plans threaten that local amenity, whether justified or not on wider grounds, controversy can normally be expected. Indeed, urban planning produces winners and losers of all kinds, who in a mature democracy know how to bring pressure on politicians to overturn the supposedly neutral recommendations of planning experts.

The implementation of urban plans in a market economy

A market economy is conceived differently in neoclassical, welfare and Marxist economics. Markets, in neoclassical economics, are structured principally by the behaviour of buyers and sellers. Since no single buyer or seller can affect market price, perfect competition exists. The price mechanism ensures that supply and demand are balanced unproblematically. In welfare economics, the propensity of markets to fail is emphasized. Competition is seen not as perfect but often as highly imperfect. Market efficiency then depends on the success of political and institutional measures taken to correct market failure. Marxist economists dismiss the notion of markets in the conventional sense. Although particular Marxist interpretations differ from one another, they share the view that resources are distributed by the outcome of the continuous struggle between the forces of capital and labour.

This book seeks to examine urban planning and the development process from an approach grounded within a welfare economics perspective. It contends that, since the development process is dominated by the private sector, the implementation of urban plans is highly dependent on the extent to which the planner can successfully influence landowners, developers, investors and other significant actors. Earlier conceptions of urban planning that fail to understand the critical relationship between planmaking and implementation are seriously flawed. For example, both civic design and systems analysis start from the mistaken belief that the planner is in control of the urban environment and that the implementation of plans is an unproblematic administrative process that follows on naturally from the setting of policy. This “top-down” view of the world assumes that plans, formulated at the top of a hierarchy, are passed down to compliant agents who are responsible to the plan-makers for implementation (Bruton & Nicholson 1987). If such unrealistic thinking were applied in the real world, where planners are in constant negotiation with landowners, developers, infrastructure companies and other agencies, each of whose powers and resources may be greater than those of the planning authority, it would merely produce paper plans with little prospect of implementation.

A more helpful explanation of real life provided by Barrett & Fudge (1981) rejects such sequential and hierarchical assumptions, instead seeing policy formulation as an interactive process of negotiation and bargaining between policy-makers and implementing agencies. The power, resources and influence of relevant agencies and their ability to bargain thus determine not only what is and what can be implemented but also what is feasible in the first place, in policy terms. In this perspective, urban plans result from a dynamic relationship between policy and action in which those responsible for implementation negotiate to maximize their own interests during policy formulation and in which urban plans are open to constant modification as bargaining takes place.

By the beginning of the 1980s, urban planning practice had thus left behind earlier notions of civic design, corporate management and systems analysis. However, by failing to develop a new basis in theory and instead concentrating on the job in hand (reflected by the catchphrases of the time such as “getting things done” and “making things happen”), urban planning proved easy prey to the New Right thinking of the Thatcher Government. For until 1979, postwar urban planning had sought to promote economic efficiency, protect the environment and fulfil community needs, but under Thatcherism “the first of these has become paramount, the second important only in spe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Tables
• Part 1 The Development Framework
• Part 2 Actor Perspectives
• Part 3 Local Development Planning
• Part 4 Looking to the Future
• Bibliography
• Index