Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions

Towards More Equitable Development

Karen Chapple

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317655084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

As global warming advances, regions around the world are engaging in revolutionary sustainability planning - but with social equity as an afterthought. California is at the cutting edge of this movement, not only because its regulations actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also because its pioneering environmental regulation, market innovation, and Left Coast politics show how to blend the "three Es" of sustainability--environment, economy, and equity. Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions is the first book to explain what this grand experiment tells us about the most just path moving forward for cities and regions across the globe.

The book offers chapters about neighbourhoods, the economy, and poverty, using stories from practice to help solve puzzles posed by academic research. Based on the most recent demographic and economic trends, it overturns conventional ideas about how to build more livable places and vibrant economies that offer opportunity to all. This thought-provoking book provides a framework to deal with the new inequities created by the movement for more livable - and expensive - cities, so that our best plans for sustainability are promoting more equitable development as well.

This book will appeal to students of urban studies, urban planning and sustainability as well as policymakers, planning practitioners, and sustainability advocates around the world.

1 Introduction

The Challenge of Equitable Regional Planning for Neighborhoods, Housing, and Jobs

Wanted: Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy Cities

Here at the start of the twenty-first century, we can glimpse the contours of several new global challenges that underscore the importance of far more targeted concern for the human dimension. Achieving the vision of lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy cities has become a general and urgent desire. All four key objectives—lively cities, safety, sustainability, and health —can be strengthened immeasurably by increasing the concern for pedestrians, cyclists, and city life in general. A unified citywide political intervention to ensure that the residents of the city are invited to walk and bike as much as possible in connection with their daily activities is a strong reinforcement of the objectives.

Jan Gehl (2010: 6)

When we examine the writing, professional culture, and popular beliefs about urban planning, it seems that there exists a counterpart to this reaction against rationality and broad social design. For what we are attempting to plan is, indeed, community itself.

Michael B. Teitz (1985)

Around the world, cities are becoming more livable. By reconfiguring cities to make it easier to conduct a variety of activities, we help city residents, workers, and visitors live richer, and presumably happier, lives. As values shift toward livability, the new city paradigm that Jan Gehl refers to above is arising worldwide, not just in the famous examples such as Copenhagen and New York, but also in the more improbable, such as Melbourne and Moscow.

The push to re-engineer our cities and regions also comes from the gradual societal acceptance of the need for more sustainable living patterns—communities that meet the needs of today without compromising the futures of our children and grandchildren. As global warming advances, regions around the world are engaging in sustainability planning. Arguably, California is the cutting edge of regional sustainability planning, not only because state legislation requires land use and transportation planning to target reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but also because its combination of pioneering environmental regulation, business technological innovation, and Left Coast politics generate a unique conversation about how to blend the “three Es” of sustainability—environment, economy, and equity.

But planning and building sustainable and equitable regions is proving to be a serious challenge. The livable city is an expensive city; our urban playgrounds attract people and businesses, causing land and housing prices to rise. This creates the potential for social exclusion, if protections are not in place.

Yet, over the decades, we have accumulated many layers of urban policies that do not work well for the families and businesses of the twenty-first century. Many transportation agencies still resist linking transportation investment to jobs and housing. Anti-poverty policy seems to be trapped in the 1960s. It does not help that opponents, from business groups, to Tea Partiers, to progressive housing advocates, are lining up for the fight against the rational planning of community, as in Teitz’s quote above about the Counter-Enlightenment. And many regions around the world are repeating U.S. mistakes on top of their own.

In this book, I argue that to plan for sustainability that truly incorporates equity, we need to revisit traditional liberal approaches in light of societal changes. Our prescriptions have been, for the most part, backward-looking. Despite the extraordinary demographic and economic changes of the last 50 years, we continue to rely on urban planning and policy dogmas from the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, these legacies have become reified into a planning playbook that does not always reflect today’s lived experience—and may not result in the most equitable outcomes. The vestiges of urban renewal and public housing, economic restructuring and redevelopment, concentrated poverty and riots stamp our best-intentioned, most progressive strategies with a misguided impulse to engineer diversity, the economy, and opportunity.

For example, the idea of mixing income levels in housing is core to our notions of fair housing. But given rising income inequality and segregation of the affluent, in practice it has proven ineffective at improving access to opportunity. Though we have adapted our economic development strategies to focus on knowledge and creativity, we ignore the mixed quality of jobs produced. Opportunity is not just about access and proximity to jobs and schools, but stable social networks, institutions, and families in a world of rising racial/ethnic diversity and informal work. The rising land values in livable cities and regions may disrupt this support system.

To plan for equitable and sustainable regions, we need to start from an understanding of how regional economies, economic opportunity, and family lives work today in each region around the world, and then link that to growth management planning. Yet, the standard prescriptions are hard to uproot, all the more so because they stem from a way of thinking about problems that grew out of the French Enlightenment; in liberal policymaking, we appeal to facts and logic to rectify societal problems, applying the power of reason and the scientific method. We believe that society is knowable, and solutions for a new and better world can be designed. However, this flies in the face of another kind of order, the need of individuals for a sense of belonging and mutual support. Thus, communities that planners try to plan react against this rationality (Berlin 1980).

Planning for the Future—Amid the Ghosts of the Past

This book upsets—and reconstructs—three premises that have guided urban planning and policymaking for much of the last century: namely, how to engineer neighborhood density and diversity, how to develop economies for specific places, and how to locate the poor near social and economic opportunities. In a sense, we need to re-conceptualize a series of relationships: between people and plans, economy and place, and the poor and their life chances.

Embracing Diversity

The first premise to address is the idea of engineering diversity, embraced so fervently by planners. Ever since Jane Jacobs showed us the virtues of social and economic diversity in the neighborhood and the region, especially in comparison to the modernist spaces of urban renewal, planners have promoted physical diversity in the interest of social diversity and economic productivity (Fainstein 2010). They have sought to create it through a variety of policies, from mixed-income neighborhoods, to jobs–housing balance, to mixed-use development, to new density.

At face value, these strategies meet sustainability and equity goals. Urban planners and policymakers often try to create more equitable and just cities through redistribution and encounter (Fincher and Iveson 2008).¹ Redistributive policies reduce disparities between groups by remedying locational disadvantage (e.g., neighborhoods with poor-quality schools) and inaccessibility (e.g., distance to job opportunities). The principle of encounter means planning spaces for more interaction between different groups. Both principles entail increasing diversity in places—though, as Agyeman (2013) points out, the concept of diversity may be narrowly defined in race and gender terms, rather than the full array of cultural differences.

But, in practice, fostering diversity at a local or micro scale may actually result in more segregation, or simply outcomes that are unintended. What if, by making it easier for businesses to locate in the core, professional businesses push light manufacturing to the suburbs, resulting in a much larger carbon footprint? What if, in locating near transit lines, low-income households end up much closer to highways, with poor air quality raising asthma levels for children? What if families can live and work in the same neighborhood, but the kids’ school is now a 30-minute drive away? What if having neighbors of different incomes triggers resentment and self-esteem problems, particularly among lower-income residents? Planners’ efforts to create diversity at specific sites or places can fail miserably, as illustrated by the vacant retail-zoned ground floors of residential development, or the inability to generate high job densities to support transit lines, or the struggles of low-income families to find jobs in the suburbs.

With an increasingly diverse population and rapidly changing preferences for living and working, the approaches learned in previous decades about how to create more heterogeneous environments need to be recreated. Mixing uses within a building, or incomes within a development, or densities in a block is a useful tool in specific contexts, but does not work as a system-wide rule. Instead, we need to consider how to support diversity goals at multiple scales simultaneously. It may be effective to foster diversity at a larger scale, for instance, like that of the community, while allowing more homogeneity at a hyper-local scale, such as a site or block. This, then, could meet equity and sustainability goals of redistribution, encounter, and greenhouse gas reduction, without the restrictiveness that can lead to unintended results. For redistribution, it makes most sense to foster diversity at the scale at which resources are distributed, such as school districts.

Spurring the Economy

The second premise is the artificial separation of the economy and place. Technology and globalization have transformed the economy into a more informal place, while eviscerating the middle class—yet, we continue to plan for a world of corporate offices and well-paying conventional jobs, chasing the manufacturing plant that never responds, or the high-tech firms with their creative workers. Acknowledging a world dominated by workers patching income together from multiple jobs, home-based businesses, the sharing economy, and entrepreneurship—as well as minimum-wage workers—leads to a re-conceptualization of strategies.

The most successful regional economies—Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Research Triangle—develop organically around innovation clusters, and even less high-tech regions, such as Houston and Minneapolis, are driven by dynamic sectors, from manufacturing, to the arts (Castells and Hall 1994; Hall 2000). Businesses decide where to locate more through a combination of historical accident and inertia than a conscious decision to optimize production, and when they do select a location intentionally, it is most likely to be driven by labor force needs, either the need for high-skilled labor or low-cost housing (Gottlieb 1995). This suggests a focus on endogenous development—development from within—rather than business attraction.

Yet, rather than supporting businesses to grow in place, urban policymakers and planners either see the economy as exogenous to place or equate economic development with real estate development. The needs of the existing economy are rarely acknowledged. So we plan places such as waterfront parks without regard for the adjacent cement plant that needs to be on the water—and might be subsequently displaced by rising land costs. Or, a city trumpets a new entertainment megaplex as economic development, seemingly without realizing that the profits are only benefiting outsiders and the jobs are simply replacing others in the region. These silos—the distinct practices of land use and economic development—have led us to plan more livable places and regions that simply transfer economic activity from one place to another, and not necessarily to its most efficient location. Since our politically driven economic development policies and incentives support these transfers, their very structure acts counter to sustainability goals, which require planning over a longer-term framework.

How might we reconfigure urban planning and policy to support a more flexible, entrepreneurial economy? Entrepreneurs need low start-up costs and minimal overhead, whether that means operating out of a suburban garage or a mobile van. To expand, businesses need flexible space, where cubicles can be rearranged, functions can be shared, parking can be converted into workspace, and operations can switch easily between development, production, and sales. If workers are traveling among multiple sites instead of at one job center, accessibility becomes key. These changes add up to a new focus on identifying entrepreneurs, building local markets, and assisting businesses to reuse existing spaces effectively, rather than building new urban spaces.

Offering Opportunity

The third premise is how we conceptualize the geography of opportunity, or the distribution of life chances across space. In reaction to the problems of concentrated-poverty neighborhoods, twentieth-century anti-poverty policy tried to identify neighborhoods with concentrations of opportunity, in the form of good schools, low crime, and jobs. Yet, the office building next door may not hire from the neighborhood, the nature of low-skilled work has changed, and quality of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Challenge of Equitable Regional Planning for Neighborhoods, Housing, and Jobs
• 2. The Landscape of Regional Sustainability Planning, Past and Present
• Part I Guiding Neighborhood Change in the Region
• Part II Growing the Regional Economy through Sustainability
• Part III Addressing Poverty, Opportunity, and Accessibility in the Region
• Appendix: Place-Based, Dispersal, and Mobility Approaches to Regional Equity
• Index