The Urban Planning Imagination

A Critical International Introduction

Nicholas A. Phelps

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509526284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Städtische Soziologie

Urban planning is not just about applying a suite of systematic principles or plotting out pragmatic designs to satisfy the briefs of private developers or public bodies. Planning is also an activity of imagination, with a stock of wisdom and an array of useful methods for making decisions and getting things done.

This critical introduction uncovers and celebrates this imagination and its creative potential. Nicholas A. Phelps explores the key themes and driving questions in the circulation of planning ideas and methods over time and across spaces, identifying the contrasts and commonalities between urban planning systems and cultures. He argues that the tools for inclusive urban planning are today, more than ever, not solely restricted to the hands of planning bodies, but are distributed across citizens, a variety of organizations (what Phelps calls 'clubs') and states. As a result, the book sets the ground for the new arrangements between these groups and actors which will be central to the future of urban planning.

By unsettling standard accounts, this book compels us towards more critical and creative thinking to ensure that the imagination, wisdom and methods of urban planning are mobilized towards achieving the aspiration of shaping better places.

1
Introduction: what is planning?

Introduction

Modern urban planning has been defined in many ways that shed light on this multifaceted activity. Kunzmann (2005: 236) suggests that urban planning is ‘the guidance of the spatial development of a settlement’. The Commission of European Communities (CEC, 1997: 24) defines spatial planning as ‘the methods used … to influence the future distribution of activities in space … to co-ordinate the spatial impact of other sectoral policies … and to regulate the conversion of land and property uses’. To quote Magnusson (2011: 131), ‘to plan the city is to rationalize our activities in relation to one another within a confined space, but it is also to think of how that space is to be reshaped as a sustainably habitable, productive, comfortable and congenial place’. Just as there is a sociological imagination that exceeds questions of ‘personal ingenuity and private wealth’ (Mills, 1959: 10), so there has been and should continue to be an urban planning imagination at work in the way we settle the earth. Adapting dictionary definitions, that urban planning imagination might be defined as the faculty for forming ideas, images or concepts relevant to the task of city building where these need not be entirely new but instead are the products of an historical stream and geographical diversity of ideas, images and concepts. The ‘huge amount of energy expended on “planning” as demonstrated by the multiple types of plans at all levels’ (ESPON, 2018: 76) suggests that urban planning is an increasingly pervasive and indispensable activity – one that is a geohistorical stream of thoughtful and practical acts that carry valuable wisdom of what works, what doesn’t, what could be desirable and what is not.

‘Planning is both anticipatory and reactive’ (Levy, 2016: 6) and both aspects are found across several different styles elaborated in a recent review of European planning systems (ESPON, 2018). Regulative planning is legally binding while framework-setting planning typically involves non-binding policies. Strategic planning typically provides non-binding indicative reference points regarding future development, and visionary planning sets out agendas for desired futures in the form of normative principles. Planning’s regulatory aspect leads strongly in the direction of rules or codes regarding the use of land that shape ‘how places perform – socially, environmentally, and economically’ (Talen, 2011: 11). Codes and standards have long existed for building construction, the layout of entire settlements and streets and key spaces within them to ensure the safety and health of urban populations, but they are also carriers of societal values (Ben-Joseph, 2012). Rules shape places imperfectly and elicit great creativity directed at evading or distorting those same rules. Yet the drift in many parts of the world has been inexorably towards more regulation, despite the largely counterfactual question of whether non-planning, less regulation or zoning would be worse (Banham et al., 1969; Siegan, 1970). Of course, in the absence of the sort of imagination associated more with strategic and visionary styles of urban planning, the urban experience may become no more than a surrender to codes and their unintended and unanticipated consequences.

None of the definitions of urban planning and its associated imagination noted above are prescriptive about who is doing urban planning, since, as Wildavsky (1973: 129) noted, ‘planning must not be confused with the existence of a formal plan, people called planners, or an institution’. In this sense, the attempt to distinguish urban planning from non-planning – perhaps ‘the market’ – is futile: the two are inseparable.¹ Urban planning is pervasive, as John Friedmann (1987: 25) noted when defining it as part of the public domain and as ‘a social and political process in which many actors, representing many different interests, participate in a refined division of labour’. It is to be found ‘at the very centre of the complex mass of technology, politics, culture and economy that creates our urban society and its physical presence’ (Rydin, 2011: 1–2). Thus, ‘many of the so-called market forces that the planning system takes as given are in fact caused by public policies to which individuals and businesses respond’ (OECD, 2017b: 17). The outcomes of planning past and present are made plain in the appearance of cities and patterns of settlement.

The pervasiveness of urban planning leads me to take a broad view of the range of activities, actors and associated ideas and methods that constitute it. Far from being empty, the injunction to plan concerns the unavoidable need for purposive thought and action as a way of responding to our being in the world; we all act, make plans for ourselves, and are acted upon by the plans of others. If, as philosopher Edward Casey (1997: ix) observes, ‘to be at all … is to be in some kind of place’, then the urban places that we have imagined, designed, planned and made for ourselves are the very expression of our being in the world. They express the uneasy tension between our own sense of self and our peaceful and productive coexistence with others. In this view, ‘plan making was an established art long before even a modest portion of human settlements could be regarded as urban’ (Silver, 2018: 11). Moreover, ‘place is as pervasive and important as language: we are place-makers and users, as we are language-makers and users’ (Sack, 2003: 4). In our inability as humans to accept reality (nature as it is/was), we engage in (urban) planning as a purposeful, future-oriented act of imagination. Regardless of whether it comes on a grand scale or in increments, at its best, urban planning is concerned with shaping good/better places, though it can just as easily – with lack of awareness and thought – lead to the production of poorer, bad or downright evil places (Sack, 2003).

We live in an urban age – an age where the majority of the world’s population live in officially defined urban areas. The United Nations (UN) has estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050 (United Nations, 2014). I use the term ‘urban planning’ rather than ‘spatial planning’ not to deny either the quantitative significance of vast expanses of rural and semi-rural lands that lie outside the world’s formally defined urban areas, or indeed to deny their relationships to cities, but to signal instead the renewed significance of developing the planning imagination in this urban age. The need for us to plan settlements in ways which are sensitive to the vast natural hinterlands from which they have been carved is more pressing than ever in an age in which urbanization is associated with enormous consumption of natural resources, the production of waste and greenhouse gas emissions (Camaren and Swilling, 2012). The need to do so in ways which recognize and leverage the historical and geographical interrelationships that inhere in thought and action distributed across an increasing array of actors has never been more pressing. This is the sense in which I speak of the urban planning imagination.

The urban planning imagination

The urban planning imagination is ever more distributed across a range of actors with differing geohistorical sensibilities. It is this that ensures that consideration of urban planning’s contributions and failures should adopt vantage points well outside those of Western Europe and North America. The way in which we think about urban planning, as professionals, educators, politicians, civic activists, business and association leaders and citizens, should perhaps be forgiving of urban planning’s inherent limitations but re-enchanted by its impressive and growing stock of knowledge, ideas and methods and the sense of possibility it carries with it. To plan – as to err – is human.

Urban planning has a geohistory and imagination that far precede planning as a modern profession, and range from indigenous Australians’ complex relationships to land to the cities of Mesopotamia, Imperial China, Athens and Rome and those of Latin and Meso-American civilizations, through to the cities built in the Renaissance in Europe and in, for example, the Philippines, Peru and Mexico under the Laws of the Indies – where in each case significant financial and human resources were devoted to city planning and building (Hein, 2018). Indeed, ‘many of these earlier interventions are still visible … They continue to shape practice in multiple ways, through governance structures or planning cultures, through inherent path-dependencies of institutions or laws and regulations, as formal references, or frameworks for design, transformation, and preservation’ (Hein, 2018: 2).

Who plans?

In this book I argue that if urban planning is part of ‘a refined division of labour’ (Friedmann, 1987) then it has become a more complex and distributed set of practices as the division of labour in society continues to evolve. The innumerable acts, the substantive concerns, wisdom and methods, and the most inspiring and powerful historical and geographical references for urban planning are apparent across a diversity of actors that I simplify here as citizens (individuals and individual households), clubs (corporations, civic associations, environmental groups etc.) and states (new, old, unitary, federal, liberal market, developmental etc.). The interest, influence and power to shape urban development outcomes are distributed very unevenly across these actors, with states and their planning pervasive but less powerful in certain respects than is often appreciated (McGlynn, 1993). The urban planning imagination speaks to and operates in and through ‘a patchwork of private, club, and public realms that both cohere and fragment the city’ (Webster, 2002: 409).

It may be particularly important to recognize the diversity of urban planners and urban planning practices found in and across citizens, clubs and states in the modern era, when it is all too easy to reduce urban planning – its imagination, its substantive concerns, wisdom and methods – to the institutionalized statutory urban planning of the global north in the past 150 years or so. To be sure, the institutions of statutory planning provide a store of wisdom: ‘precedent does offer access to a rich archive of prior human experience and creativity’ (Hoch, 2019: 99). However, much of the emotional intelligence that Hoch (2019) directs us to and which can provide new, practical, urban planning wisdom may rest with citizen and club actors to be mobilized in productive mixes between state, citizen and club, as I emphasize at points throughout the book.

Instead, then, the strengths and imagination of urban planning are to be sought in the increasingly dispersed nature of innumerable, more or less reflexive, acts by citizens, and in the name of clubs and states across sweeps of time and space that collectively describe the making of cities. If learning itself remains the most valuable resource people possess to prepare for the future (Hoch, 2019: 3), the future of the urban planning imagination will need to be open to the complex possible mixes or combinations of, or experiments among, citizens, clubs and states found in different parts of the world at different times. The positive contributions to city making of some of these mixes may seem unlikely, but we should suspend any prejudices we may harbour here regarding the essential properties or rationalities of citizen, club or state planning actors if we are to continue to offer broadly popular and tractable, if temporary, solutions to the unending stream of challenges that attend city making.

History and the urban planning imagination

An historical perspective on cities and urban planning is needed since, as Patrick Geddes (1904: 107) argued, ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’. The securing of shelter from the elements and the mobilization of ‘things to hand’ are central to the human condition of becoming. As with the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), the urban planning imagination must firmly locate itself within the stream of individual, club and state actions by which our cities are built. Acts of urban planning emerge as something ordinary in their immediacy and yet extraordinary in their longer-term effects. An historical sensibility – a reflexive sensitivity to the temporality of the city and urban planning itself – is vitally important to understanding the becoming of cities. Conservation of the natural and built environment is an important substantive concern of urban planning. History is important to excavating and understanding the failed or lost potentials of cities and associated urban planning imaginations. However, the backwards look can never be the majority part of urban planning, let alone its entirety. This is why I choose to define urban planning as an imaginative, future-oriented act even as it is cognizant of the past.

Urban planning is characterized by significant continuity as a result of particular, durable, administrative and legal traditions that inhere within societal cultures and, more recently, in the statutory basis of national and consequently local planning systems, as I discuss in chapter 6. Continuity is a product of the habits and conventions adopted and acquired by generations of planners – whether individuals, corporations or states – and which become fossilized in policies, plans and meanings and values attached to particular sites in what we understand as distinct urban planning cultures. At the same time, it is apparent that urban planning has been the subject of significant change. Urban planning activities and proc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: what is planning?
• 2 Imagination: what is planning’s spirit and purpose?
• 3 Substance: what are the objects of planning?
• 4 Wisdom: what does planning teach us?
• 5 Methods: what are the means of planning?
• 6 Comparisons: what are the global variations in planning?
• 7 Exchanges: what are the global connections in planning?
• 8 Prospects: what is the future of planning?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement