The Comprehensive Plan

Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century

David Rouse, Rocky Piro

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514230
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Architektur
• Sous-sujet: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

The practice of comprehensive planning is changing dramatically in the 21st century to address the pressing need for more sustainable, resilient, and equitable communities. Drawing on the latest research and best practice examples, The Comprehensive Plan: Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century provides an in-depth resource for planning practitioners, elected officials, citizens, and others seeking to develop effective, impactful, comprehensive plans, grounded in authentic community engagement, as a pathway to sustainability. Based on standards developed by the American Planning Association to provide a national benchmark for sustainable comprehensive planning, this book provides detailed guidance on the substance, process, and implementation of comprehensive plans that address the critical challenges facing communities in the 21st century.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003024170-1

The 21st century is a time of unparalleled progress and unprecedented challenges for humankind. People around the globe enjoy a standard of living unimaginable to those who came before us, made possible by rapid technological change that promises to help solve many of civilization’s most intractable problems. But technological advancements have come at a heavy price: a changing climate driven by fossil fuel emissions; degradation of natural resources caused by population growth and development; and the growing divide between rich and poor. The effects of climate change are evident in the increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and other natural disasters, which disproportionately impact poor and vulnerable populations.

According to a global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services, the rate of change in nature during the last 50 years is unprecedented: up to 1 million of the estimated 8 million plant and animal species on Earth are at risk of extinction, many of them within decades (IPBES 2019). Technological innovations such as automation and artificial intelligence threaten to disrupt the workforce and displace workers, compounding the effects of globalization and other macroeconomic trends on local communities. While globalization has raised living standards for over a half a billion people and reduced inequality between the developing and developed world, inequality within the United States and nations around the globe is increasing (Bourguignon 2015). Socioeconomic inequality is reflected in stark differences in life expectancies between nearby zip codes, as chronic illnesses associated with lifestyle-related conditions like obesity and stress have replaced infectious diseases as the leading cause of death in most industrialized and many developing countries.

The comprehensive plan is the leading policy document guiding the long-range development of counties, cities, towns, and other local jurisdictions across the United States.¹ Just as communities need to adapt to the forces of environmental, economic, social, and technological change, comprehensive planning practice needs to evolve to help communities navigate those changes in an increasingly uncertain world.

In the 20th century, comprehensive plans focused on land use and the physical development of communities. The typical plan consisted of elements such as land use, transportation, and housing, each with its own goals, objectives, and policies. While this model persists today, a new approach has emerged over the past several decades. Contemporary plans engage community members and articulate their shared values through a collaborative process; organize plan content around cross-cutting themes; connect values and vision for the future to a defined action agenda; address issues that transcend jurisdictional boundaries; and use alternatives to paper documents to communicate the plan to different audiences (Rouse, Chandler, and Arason 1999). In doing so, they go beyond the roots of comprehensive planning in physical development to address social dimensions of community, such as equity, public health, and human investment.

As planning practice continues to evolve, how can the comprehensive plan – an invention of the first half of the 20th century, with a mixed track record of implementation – position communities to deal with the magnitude of challenges confronting them in a world of accelerating change? How can its outcomes improve community health, livability, and sustainability while addressing global problems like climate change? To help answer these questions, this book provides a resource and guide to comprehensive planning practice for professional planners, elected officials, citizens, and others seeking to create sustainable, resilient, and equitable 21st-century communities. Drawing on research and best practice examples of plans from across the United States, it covers the comprehensive planning process, the content and attributes of the plan, and plan implementation with the overarching goal of creating sustainable, resilient, and equitable communities. While geared toward comprehensive planning as it is practiced by local jurisdictions in the United States, the principles and practices it elucidates can be adapted for use at different scales (for example, neighborhood, region, and megaregion) and by communities worldwide.

While the authors were writing this book in 2020, the United States absorbed two major shocks that brought the magnitude of the challenges that communities face to the forefront. The first was the loss of life and economic impacts caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The second was the deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers, which sparked anger and protests across the nation. Both were symptomatic of deep-seated structural disparities in the nation’s society and economy. COVID-19 disproportionately affected minority communities and people with underlying conditions, such as obesity and diabetes, that relate to the social determinants of health. Its economic effects were experienced most severely by workers in the service economy, many of whom live from paycheck to paycheck, rather than by those who could work remotely using digital technology. Violence against Blacks is a manifestation of institutionalized racism to which planning practice has contributed. Although reversing systemic inequality requires a sustained, broad-based societal commitment, the authors believe that the comprehensive plan can and must be part of the solution.

Sustainability, Resilience, and Equity

Sustainability, resilience, and equity – the overarching themes of this book – are distinct but interrelated concepts. The Brundtland Report defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). Building on that definition, the Institute for Sustainable Communities defines a sustainable community as one that “manages its human, natural, and financial capital to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are available for future generations” (Institute for Sustainable Communities n.d.).

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative defines resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to adapt, survive, and grow in the face of stresses and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it” (Arup n.d.). Stresses are chronic challenges to natural and human systems such as the long-term effects of climate change and entrenched poverty. Shocks are acute natural and human-caused disasters such as extreme weather events and severe economic disruptions.

The American Planning Association (APA) defines equity as “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. Unlocking the promise of the nation by unleashing the promise in us all” (American Planning Association 2019). According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, equitable development is “an approach for meeting the needs of underserved communities through policies and programs that reduce disparities while fostering places that are healthy and vibrant. It is increasingly considered an effective place-based action for creating strong and livable communities” (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency n.d.).

The American Institute of Certified Planners Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct implicitly charges professional planners with the ethical responsibility to help the communities they serve become more sustainable, resilient, and equitable (American Institute of Certified Planners 2016). The aspirational principles (ideals to which they are committed) contained in the Code call for certified planners to:

• Have special concern for the long-range consequences of present actions.
• Pay special attention to the interrelatedness of decisions.
• Give people the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the development of plans and programs that may affect them.
• Seek social justice by working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of the disadvantaged and to promote racial and economic integration.

Systems Approach

A fundamental premise of this book is that a systems approach is necessary for the comprehensive plan to yield truly sustainable, resilient, and equitable outcomes. A system can be defined as an interconnected set of elements that are coherently organized in a way that achieves something; in other words, it has a function or purpose (Meadows 2008). A system is part of (nested within) a larger system and, in turn, comprises smaller subsystems (a concept referred to as system hierarchy). From this perspective, a community such as a city or town is a complex system that is both part of a larger system (the region) and an aggregate of smaller subsystems. Community subsystems include geographic subareas (for example, neighborhoods) and functional components such as land use, transportation, and housing, which themselves are systems comprising subsystems. For example, transportation is a multimodal system whose subsystems accommodate vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, public transit, and other ways that people and goods move through a community. In contrast to the traditional comprehensive planning model, which addressed functional systems like transportation and land use as siloed elements, a systems approach accounts for interactions between them in the plan and its implementation.

Systems demonstrate characteristic behaviors that reveal themselves over time. From a systems perspective, the real-world impacts of the comprehensive plan result from altering the behavior of multiple systems to create desired change.² The following are examples of how a systems approach can help a community become more sustainable, resilient, and equitable:

• Land use and transportation system behavior can be changed to increase energy efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption (sustainability).
• An enhanced urban forest as a subsystem of a community-wide green infrastructure system can ameliorate the urban heat island effect while absorbing and reducing stormwater runoff (resilience).
• All such interventions can be designed to increase access and opportunity for poor and underserved populations (equity).

A Brief History of the Comprehensive Plan

The origins of comprehensive planning date back to the City Beautiful movement, embodied by the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1902 McMillan Commission’s plan for the monumental core of Washington, DC (Kelly 2010). In 1912, the American Society of Landscape Architects published A Brief Survey of Recent City Planning Reports in the United States, which identi...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I THE PLANNING PROCESS
• PART II THE SUBSTANCE OF THE PLAN
• PART III FORWARD TO IMPLEMENTATION
• Appendix A. Comprehensive Plan Standards for Sustaining Places
• Appendix B. Comprehensive Plans Cited?
• Index