No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Summer Book Reviews #5: The Peter Hall Trilogy

Jul 6

2007

Once upon a time there was an urban planner who traveled around the world and looked at urban plans and discovered they were disasters. For this, he received a knighthood from the Queen.

Sir Peter Hall is a planning professor at University College in London, and he also taught and did research for a time at UC Berkeley. Though he believes in planning, his books provide an excellent case for antiplanners. In fact, whenever I get frustrated with some planner talking or writing about the wonders of planning, all I need to do is read a portion of one of these books to get a breath of fresh air from an objective observer of the profession.

Click on the image of each book to get information about purchasing a copy.

Published in 1980, the first book in the trilogy presents case studies of several major planning disasters: the Concorde, the San Francisco BART system, the Sydney Opera House, London motorways, and London’s third airport. Like Bent Flyvbjerg’s more recent book, Megaprojects and Risk, Hall’s goal is to show that there are systematic problems with large-scale planning that cannot be overcome with “better planning.” Truly fixing the problems would require a complete overhaul of our democratic systems.

While Great Planning Disasters focused on large projects, Cities of Tomorrow is a history of urban planning — at least, a history of planning in the English-speaking world since about 1890. First published in 1988 with several significant updates since then, the book shows that most modern planning “represents a reaction to the evils of the nineteenth-century city” (which is amusing because it seems like smart-growth planners are trying to emulate those cities).

Hall finds that many early urban planners were actually anarchists. The main exception was the architect Le Corbusier, who Hall describes as “an authoritarian centralist.” The sad irony, of course, is that most of today’s planning — both the ideals of high densities and the government regulation to achieve those ideals — can trace its roots to Corbu, not to his anarchist colleagues and predecessors.

“The anarchist fathers had a magnificent vision of the possibilities of urban civilization, which deserves to be remembered and celebrated,” says Hall. “Le Corbusier, the Rasputin of this tale, in contrast represents the counter-tradition of authoritarian planning, the evil consequences of which are ever with us.”

Hall is disdainful of the anti-sprawl movement, considering it an elitist effort to deny working-class people the privileges enjoyed by the middle class. He considers growth management to be “environmentally conscious NIMBYism” and says it can’t be reconciled with “any concept of social equity.” He doubts that changing urban form, as the New Urbanists want to do, will reduce the amount that people drive.

In short, he is skeptical of all of the modern, authoritarian, planning fads.

Hall’s magnum opus, and the third volume of this trilogy, is nearly 1,000 pages long — more, if you count the bibliography and index. The 1998 book looks at the history of cities in general by focusing in on the detailed histories of sixteen different cities, ranging from Athens to London to Los Angeles.

I confess I haven’t read this entire book, but use it as more of a textbook. For example, when I read a book that claims planners did a wonderful job building high-density housing in Stockholm, I can turn to Cities in Civilization and learn that, around 1971, protesters took to the streets in revolt against the planners and forced the government to allow construction of more single-family homes. Before 1970s, says Hall, three out of four homes were apartments; after 1980s, three out of four were single-family homes.

As a result, the high-density housing was increasingly left to low-income people and guest workers (a pattern also found in France and other western European countries). Today, much of Stockholm has suburbanized and “is almost indistinguishable from its counterparts in California and Texas.”

Taken together, these three books show the follies behind the very idea of planning. Planning advocates can make their ad hominem attacks on the Antiplanner, but it is hard for them to respond when one of their own is saying the same things.

15

Trackback  •  Posted in City planning, Regional planning  

Reprinted from The Antiplanner