No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Who Are These Planners, Anyway?
Many of my posts in the last two months criticize planning and argue that, no matter who does it, planning is bound to fail. Yet some people are still planners. Who are these planners and why do they do it?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 31,650 urban & regional planners practicing in the United States. This probably does not include most forest planners working for the Forest Service, watershed planners working for the Corps of Engineers, or other agency planners. Yet national forest and other federal agency planning processes are remarkably similar to urban planning, so it is likely that these agencies hired at least a few urban planners to help them design their processes.
In 2005, planners earned an average of $57,620, meaning we spend close to $2 billion on planning salaries alone. This is not a large sum by government standards, but neither is it a trivial amount.
Nearly all of these planners apparently belong to the American Planning Association, which says it has 30,000 members. APA adds that about two thirds of its members work for state & local government agencies, while most of the rest work for consulting firms that, for the most part, are either hired by government agencies or by developers attempting to navigate government planning systems.
What do these planners believe? A history of UC Berkeley’s planning school suggests the following:
City planning was the last stronghold of utopianism.” Planners were “heir to the
postulates of the Enlightenment with its faith in perfectibility, . . . and of the
Anglo-
They “sought social betterment through improved settings for social life through design of improved physical environments.” “Many came to believe that something akin to social engineering would soon be possible. If only we could accumulate sufficient scientifically derived knowledge of urban systems and if only we could apply that knowledge to social maladies, we could surely ameliorate troubling social problems.”
To be fair, some of these quotes refer to what planners believed at various times since the Berkeley planning school began, and not necessarily what Berkeley planners believe today. But these beliefs influenced today’s planners and provide insights into why they do what they do.
These quotes are not necessarily compliments. The American Heritage dictionary defines utopianism as “idealistic and impractical social theory.”
Faith in perfectability refers to a utopian belief in the perfectability of man,
that is, that education and environment can change people than selfish individuals
into altruistic members of society rather. As the UC Berkeley history goes on to
suggest, the tool planners used to seek that perfectability was “improved physical
conditions” through better “urban design, and land-
Planners gained their focus on urban design through their educational and historical
association with architects. Most urban planners graduated from one of the sixty-
“Winston Churchill’s dictum, ‘We shape our cities, and our cities then shape us,’ was an axiomatic precept in city planning circles,” says a the UC Berkeley history. (Actually, what Churchill said was “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.”)
There are two forms of hubris here. First is the arrogance of architects who believe that, because they can design a house for one family, they can design an entire urban area for a million families. This is hubris indeed when some, as Stewart Brand suggests in his book on How Buildings Learn, think that most architects are not even very good at designing a house.
Second is a faith in what Herbert Gans calls the physical fallacy: that by influencing
urban design, architects and planners can create a new, utopian society in which
people are happier, have a stronger sense of community, and spend less time isolated
in their automobiles. I imagine that when planners paraphrase Churchill, they tend
to identify themselves with the “we” who ought to shape cities, and everyone else
with the “us” who are shaped by the cities. In any case, planners’ emphasis on such
things as density, pedestrian-
Notice that there are two forms of hubris here. First is the arrogance of architects
who believe that, because they can design a house for one family, they can design
an entire urban area for a million families. That is something like gardeners believing
that, because they can grow a rose bush, they can design an entire ecosystem for
a million-
Utopianism and hubris would not be problems if planners and their architect gurus merely said to people, “Here are some ideas that will improve your life. Why don’t you try them out?” According to Peter Hall’s history of modern urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow, most “of the early visions of the planning movement stemmed from the anarchist movement.”
To Hall, “the anarchist fathers had a magnificent vision of the possibilities of
urban civilization, which deserves to be remembered and celebrated.” One of the major
exceptions was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. Le Corbusier was an “authoritarian” who
Hall calls “the Rasputin of this tale,” because he represented “the counter-
Sadly, most planners ended up following the authoritarian model. As Hall observes, “in half a century or more of bureaucratic practice, planning had degenerated into a negative regulatory machine, designed to stifle all initiative, all creativity.”
Yet I would argue that such authoritarianism is an inevitable result of the planning process. After all, if you have a vision of how people ought to live, and if you really believe that vision will significantly improve the world, then you don’t dare risk letting that vision be corrupted by the vagueries of the free market. So you turn to government to impose that vision on the world.
In sum, planners have historically believed that they could use urban design as a form of social engineering to perfect the world and the people in it. They acted on this belief by using the power of government to impose their designs through zoning and other regulations. The planning profession today continues to be shaped by these ideas.
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Reprinted from The Antiplanner