The life of cities is my avocation, and I hope that someday my vocation will have something to do with helping cities to grow and prosper responsibly and sustainably. But as I study the problems facing cities and the history of planning I find myself more and more disgusted by that word itself: planning. It is a direct contradiction. Cities, communities of people, cannot be planned. They are dynamic organisms with emergent behaviors. No planner, no matter how brilliant, can foresee which behaviors will emerge from a particular community or how future events will change that community and its goals and values. The phrase urban planning rings in my ears too much like that old Soviet idea: central planning.
The field of urban planning gave rise to one of the most traumatic periods in the history of America’s cities: urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s. A group of powerful and influential planners with a hard-on for Le Corbusier condemned many vibrant neighborhoods as blighted. Blight was used as a euphemism for diverse, dense, black and in the way of the automobile. The solution was to separate people. They couldn’t be left alone to cohabitate so their neighborhoods were carved up by interstate highways and narrow, pedestrian friendly streets were replaced by wide avenues. Mixed-use buildings were destroyed and replaced with single use housing projects. And our cities have never been Great since.
Where once a neighborhood had 5 or more small grocers, there are now “food deserts” miles from the nearest supermarket. Where there were laundries and diners and nightclubs there are now row after row of government houses. Where there were sidewalks there are now extra traffic lanes and parking meters. In most neighborhoods the churches were the only non-residential uses to survive.
Those neighborhoods that were destroyed? They had been successful before because they had planned themselves, naturally, organically, around the needs of the community. It is not too late to return control to the neighborhoods. But a modern city has many challenges those early communities did not face. It is necessary for the city to run the traffic system, and for the state to maintain the highways. Legal protections are necessary to prevent developers from threatening public health and safety.
So what should the role of the city and of planners be today if we are to let neighborhoods dictate their own futures? I think the city’s role should be to provide the infrastructure, the backbone along which neighborhoods can grow and prosper. This means providing for public transit within and out of the neighborhood. This means providing legal protection against development the neighborhood identifies as undesirable and incentives to encourage community approved development. This does not include controlling the zoning regulations. That is a task which should return to the neighborhood. I propose an experiment where a city defines neighborhood boundaries based closely on city council districts or traditionally understood neighborhood boundaries. Within each neighborhood turn over the zoning regulation to a council elected from within that neighborhood. Allow neighborhoods to set their own priorities. Why should city council members from the suburbs dictate what happens in inner city neighborhoods? Most citizens are a far better judge of where the centers of activity and of business in their neighborhoods are and should be than central planners. Citizens know which streets are full of families and where children play. They know which streets can handle additional traffic, and where empty lots present dangers that should be filled in with new development.
It’s an old idea but a powerful one: power to the people. It’s time for a radical shift in the way we govern our cities, because the old models just aren’t working and as the pace of development has picked up, too many places have fallen through the cracks. Would suburbs have allowed McMansions to clog their feeder roads if those already living there had had a say in the area’s development? Would single family homes in inner city neighborhoods be torn down and replaced with quadruplex tract mansions that stretch to the full dimensions of the lot if the neighbors had a direct voice?
Power to the people, man.
