Readings in Planning Theory

Susan S. Fainstein, James DeFilippis, Susan S. Fainstein, James DeFilippis

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119045076
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Featuring updates and revisions to reflect rapid changes in an increasingly globalized world, Readings in Planning Theory remains the definitive resource for the latest theoretical and practical debates within the field of planning theory.

• Represents the newest edition of the leading text in planning theory that brings together the essential classic and cutting-edge readings
• Features 20 completely new readings (out of 28 total) for the fourth edition
• Introduces and defines key debates in planning theory with editorial materials and readings selected both for their accessibility and importance
• Systematically captures the breadth and diversity of planning theory and puts issues into wider social and political contexts without assuming prior knowledge of the field

Part I
The Development of Planning Theory

---

1. Introduction

1. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier
   Robert Fishman
2. Co-evolutions of Planning and Design: Risks and Benefits of Design Perspectives in Planning Systems
   Kristof Van Assche, Raoul Beunen, Martijn Duineveld, and Harro de Jong
3. Authoritarian High Modernism
   James C. Scott
4. The Death and Life of Great American Cities
   Jane Jacobs
5. Planning the Capitalist City
   Richard E. Foglesong
6. The Three Historic Currents of City Planning
   Peter Marcuse

---

Introduction

The readings in this first section examine influential visions of modern planning. They offer both established and critical views of planning history. We begin with Robert Fishman’s examination of two foundational figures in planning’s intellectual history: Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier. (Fishman’s larger book on Urban Utopias, from which this chapter is excerpted, also looks at a third visionary of twentieth-century urbanism: Frank Lloyd Wright.) Fishman goes beyond the standard account of Howard and Le Corbusier to examine the social history behind their distinctive utopias. Although all were reacting to the grimy reality of industrial cities, each took a fundamentally different path toward planning their ideal urban society. Corbusier’s Radiant City was mass-scaled, dense, vertical, hierarchical – the social extension of modern architecture. Wright went to the other extreme: his Broadacre City was a mixture of Jeffersonian agrarian individualism and prairie suburbanism, linked by superhighways. Howard’s Garden Cities were scaled somewhere in between: self-contained, relatively dense villages of 35,000 residents held together by a cooperative spirit, private industrial employers, and a communal greenbelt. The three utopias symbolize fundamental choices in the scale of human settlements: Corbusier’s mass Gesellschaft, Howard’s village-like Gemeinschaft, or Wright’s American individualism.

Although spatial planning originated within the design professions, after World War II it increasingly became based in social science. Chapter 2 by Van Assche et al. examines the co-evolutions of planning and design in order to demonstrate the contribution of good design to good planning. The authors begin by distinguishing design from planning perspectives. They demarcate the planning system by those actors and institutions that regulate and coordinate the uses of space. In contrast, while urban design overlaps with planning, it is especially concerned with manipulating spatial imagery at the micro-scale, and it introduces an emphasis on aesthetics. In particular, a design perspective captures the character of specific places and allows for their differentiation. The authors recognize the tension between planning and design caused by differing priorities but argue that every resolution requires trade-offs, that the balance will be affected by the culture in which planning and design are embedded, and that each perspective can inform the other.

The political scientist James Scott traces the roots of modernist planning’s effort to impose order on the messiness of humans and their environment – particularly focusing on what he calls “authoritarian high modernism.” In an excerpt from his book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Chapter 3, this volume), Scott traces the link between modernism and the modern nation-state’s efforts to simplify and standardize, while rejecting local context and initiative, to make the nation legible, measurable, and counted. This is how the modern state “sees.” Scott identifies three elements common to disastrous abuses of modern state development: administrative ordering of nature and society through simplification and standardization (“high modernism”); the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state to implement these rational designs; and a civil society too weak to resist effectively. “Social engineering” becomes the consequence of high modernism and nation-state power, and the authoritarian tendencies of the single modernist voice of rationality displace all other forms of judgment.

Scott sees three effective strategies to counter authoritarian high modernism: belief in a private sphere of activity outside the interference of the state (the idea of the private realm); liberal political economy (as in the free-market ideas of Frederick Hayek); and, most importantly, civil society and democratic political institutions. What are the implications for planning? Plans should not be so ambitious and meticulous that they are closed systems. Smaller and reversible steps, flexibly open to both surprises and human inventiveness, will break with the hubris of modernist planning. In Scott’s call for local initiative (“metis”), as an alternative to state-level technocratic planning, one hears echoes of arguments also made by Jane Jacobs, John Forester, and others.

Jane Jacobs considers the design approaches embodied in the American urban renewal programs of the 1950s as destructive of the urban fabric. She argues that the modernist theories from which they derived suffer from a dangerous misconception of how real cities actually operate. She summarily labels the classic planning prototypes described by Fishman as producing the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful.” She sees in Daniel Burnham, who was a progenitor of the City Beautiful model, along with Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, an uneasiness with actual cities. She condemns each of them for seeking to replace the rich complexity of a real metropolis with the abstract logic of an idealized planned city. We include here the introductory chapter to her landmark 1961 critique of postwar American urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Chapter 4, this volume). This book arguably oversimplifies the evils of planning, while both neglecting the destructive role of the private sector in urban renewal and romanticizing the capabilities of small, competitive, neighborhood businesses. Yet the book remains one of the most compelling and well-written arguments for encouraging diversity and innovation in big, dense, messy cities. (That said, Jacobs’ “diversity” is primarily about creating a wide range of building types and land uses, rather than a more contemporary definition of “diversity” as including a multicultural array of racial and ethnic urban residents.) Jacobs’ ideas also signal the long transition of planning theory from an early faith in science, rationality, and comprehensiveness to a more self-critical, incremental approach. It thereby anticipates a later interest in complexity and emergence. Jacobs demonstrates that the simple process of daily, intimate observation can lead to an understanding of the complexity of cities.

In a brief excerpt from his book, Planning the Capitalist City, Richard Foglesong provides a general critique of planning, based on a Marxist view of the role of the state in maintaining the built environment as a support system for private enterprise and mediator between capital and civil society (Chapter 5, this volume). The key dynamic to understanding the ambivalent role of planning in capitalist society is the “property contradiction”: the contradiction between the social character of land and its private ownership and control. The private sector resists government intrusion into its affairs, yet at the same time it needs government to regulate the use of land. For example, home owners look to zoning to prevent adjacent undesirable uses from lowering their property values, and businesses require the public provision of infrastructure. As a result, resistance to planning is not a simple rejection of planning as unnecessary. For Foglesong, this property contradiction is related to another contradiction: that between capitalism and democracy. Development interests have a particular agenda that is often at variance with views held by members of the public, and it is the role of planning to reconcile the two. In other words, planners act to legitimate policies in the face of public opposition.

Also critical of the role played by traditional planning, Peter Marcuse, in his discussion of three historic currents of city planning (Chapter 6, this volume), differentiates among “deferential technicism,” social reform, and social justice as types of planning. He then breaks down each of these categories into subcomponents. He indicates that in real life the three approaches are not usually present in pure form but argues that they nonetheless indicate clearly different ways in which planners operate. Technicist planners aim at efficiently realizing the goals that their clients set, employing tools that they acquired through professional training and experience. Planners who come to their jobs from civil engineering, economics, or architecture typically fall into this category. For these planners, tools like cost–benefit analysis, computer modeling, and application of architectural principles allow them to maximize goals set by their clients. In line with Foglesong’s argument concerning the property contradiction, Marcuse regards technicist planners as functioning to make the existing economic, social, and political order work smoothly.

Marcuse names social reform planning as an approach whereby planners accept the existing social order but focus on the needs of disadvantaged groups and support greater democratization of the planning process. Probably most practitioners with degrees from social-science-based master’s programs in planning at least start out with such ideals. Marcuse’s third category, social justice planning, is more radical. He regards this approach as challenging the powerful elements in society. He includes within it a variety of aspirations ranging from the application of principles of justice to the development of utopias. He concludes his essay by commenting that “the interplay between what is wanted, and by whom, and what is possible, between what is just and what is realistic, creates a constant tension in city development.” His sympathies clearly lie with the third approach, but he does not claim that such an orientation is necessarily feasible. Indeed one might ask whether planners are sufficiently influential to affect the shaping of cities except when representing the interests of a powerful sponsor, whether that be a political elite or a popular movement.

References

1. Fishman, Robert. 1982. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Foglesong, Richard E. 1986. Planning the Capitalist City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
3. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. London: Jonathan Cape.
4. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

2323__perlego__chapter_di...