Faith-Based Planning Must Be Neutralized

Earlier this year, I mentored a class of high school students on the intricacies of urban planning.  (I’ve previously written about the UrbanPlan curriculum.)  Several mentors were involved, each working with a small group of students.  The mentoring organizer was a public planner, recently retired after a long career which he concluded as a planning director.

As we assembled for the first of two mentoring sessions, I chatted with the organizer.  This was during the weeks immediately preceding the Petaluma Urban Chat when StrongTowns founder Chuck Marohn spoke with us by video link.  I mentioned this to this organizer, who expressed some interest.  That evening, I send him links to several posts about StrongTowns and the upcoming video chat.

As we assembled for the next mentoring session, the organizer sidled over and thanked me for the links.  Although I didn’t sense much enthusiasm, my proselytizing juices were flowing.  I suggested he come to Petaluma for the video chat.  You would have thought that I had suggested satanic worship.  He quickly backed away, assuring me, and himself, that he would never do anything like that.

It wasn’t the first time that I’ve seen senior planners with years of experience react in discomfort, fear, and denial about urbanism.

I did several projects in a community that was generally known for its progressive approach to land-use planning.  The planning director was thought by many to be at the cutting edge of new thinking about land use.  In fact, he was an adamantine opponent of urbanism.

He never put that position in words during his day-to-day duties, but the evidence was overwhelming.  Reports came back about him deprecating urbanism at planning conferences.  He would go to great lengths to impede urbanist projects in his community, including one situation that I rank among the most unprofessional I’ve seen in my career.  It was a tragedy for his town, with repercussions that still linger.

I want to make clear that I’m not painting all planners with this brush.  I’ve previously written about planners who see the logic of urbanism and yet are forced to conceal that knowledge.  And there are a great many public planners who competently and diligently apply the codes of their municipalities without bias.

But there is an aging cadre of planners for whom urbanism is anathema.

I’ve pondered the situation and the best analogy I can draw is religion.  Religious faith can be a marvelous thing, but ultimately it is just that, faith.  The definitive evidence for religious beliefs is lacking.

Similarly, the drivable suburban planning model was largely based on faith.  Despite a paucity of evidence and based solely on a seemingly plausible but untested hypothesis, the walkable urban model that had served well for millennia was discarded and replaced by the drivable suburban model.

Even as the evidence began to mount that the experiment was failing, as municipal balances sheet began to dip into the red, and as the threat of climate change loomed ever larger, we found ways to jiggle the results and convince ourselves that if we just stayed with the hypothesis a little longer, all would be well.

And the high priests of this blind faith were a generation of planners, some of whom still hold important planning positions.

I’m trying not to be overly critical of them.  Faith can be wonderfully comforting thing.  And that comfort can grow with time and age.  It can be a difficult thing to reach an advanced professional age and then be forced to confront the possibility that object of one’s faith is a failed hypothesis.

And so these planners, like many people in similar situations, ignore the evidence and continue to blindly, even aggressively, stay strong in their faith.

(I may sometimes poke fun at my engineering brethren, but we have the good fortune of working in a discipline that steeped in data, not faith.  There may be some professional backbiting, but no one goes to war over whether a bridge would function better in orthotropic steel or post-tensioned concrete.)

But the problem with having planning directors who continue to have faith in a failing vision is that they are directing us away from the future that we need.

So what should we do with these relics of a failed religion?  I’m reminded of a moment in Indian history as reported by historian Jan Morrison.  The Thuggee were a Hindu sect who believed that the correct spiritual path was to befriend traveling strangers and then to ritualistically murder and bury them during the night.

Bringing the Thuggee under control was a challenge for the 19th century imperial British authorities.  But even after the enforcement task was complete, a problem remained.  The Thuggee acknowledged that the British seemed to have superior gods because they were able to suppress the Thuggee, but the Thuggee believed that the path of ritual murder was still the correct one for them.

Even the young Thuggee, who had yet committed no crimes and therefore couldn’t be jailed, willingly admitted that they would follow the Thuggee path given the opportunity.

The British solution was to place the Thuggee in villages where they could live in peace and dignity, but without the option of leaving.  The Thuggee accepted the wisdom of the solution and gradually vanished from history.

It seems that a similar solution is required is required for the planners who cling to the failed drivable suburban hypothesis.  We needn’t strip them of their dignity or their professional positions, but we need to isolate them from opportunities to perpetuate their failed belief system.

Our future requires it.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

What is “Planning”?

The American Planning Association (APA) recently released the results of a poll on how Americans view planning.  The summary can be read here with the full report here.  What the pollsters found was that Americans strongly support planning, with a typical favorable rating of near 67 percent depending on the question and the demographic.

Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council weighed in with his typically cogent commentary, trying to understand “But, in a world where almost two-thirds of Republicans and two-fifths of all voters told pollsters ‘the government should stay out of Medicare,’ what do survey results mean, exactly?”   He points out various key findings, but also highlights some inconsistencies, such as a high desire for sidewalks but less desire for destinations toward which the sidewalks would lead.  In the end, he ends up almost as puzzled as when he began.

My theory is that the average American doesn’t have a clear picture of how planning works in our country.  And that confusion leads to perplexing poll results. 

The biggest problem, about which I’ve written before, is a mistaken belief that planners have far more power than they do.  Examples are the average citizens who argue “the city should have put a restaurant into that building” and the Agenda 21ers who express a belief that the OneBayArea plan will force everyone to live in multi-family buildings.  The type of planning authority may have existed in the Soviet Union, but certainly doesn’t in the U.S.  Nor should it.  After all, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed and centralized planning had a role in its failure.

In hopes of shedding a feeble light on the state of our planning, I’ll offer my thoughts on the different types of “planning roles” that would seem to apply to all countries working under a democratic/capitalist model.

By my count, there are five different planning roles.  (Others may count differently.  I’d like to hear your thoughts.)  In my tally below, I give examples in the land-use arena.  However, I expect that the five planning roles apply equally well to arenas as disparate as energy, banking regulations, and consumer goods.

Long-range planning: In land use, this is typically performed by government and comprises the establishment of long-term visions for the community.  Typical products are general plans, specific plans, and other conceptual plans.  Zoning codes, which planners anticipate will guide the community in the desired direction, is also a form of long-range planning.  Another example is the implementation standards for CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act).

Development planning: This is the configuration of a proposed project that will comply with the standards established by the long-range planners and which will also allow the developer to be rewarded for the development risk.  In land use, this task is typically undertaken by a private developer.

Compliance planning:  This is the form of planning of which many people think first.  It’s the government task that confirms that a proposed development is consistent with the appropriate codes and regulations.  In many cases, the area of planning also includes appearances before planning commissions and/or city councils.

Advocacy planning:  This category includes non-profit groups such as the Project for Public Spaces and academia.  Advocates may speak eloquently on behalf of a land use vision and sometimes have funds to help advance their goals, but don’t have the direct authority to approve projects.

Citizen planning: This is where the common citizen steps to the microphone to address the city council on a proposed land use, or writes a letter to the local newspaper to express an opinion, or volunteers to serve on a citizens committee for a new specific plan.

Over the course of a career, many people will function in several of the roles.  In my own career as a consultant and private citizen for three decades and counting, I’ve filled all five roles at different times.  (This blog is a small voice of advocacy planning.)

But rarely do the five integrate as well as we might hope.  A team of long-range planners might develop a specific plan calling for a particular kind of development and a developer might prepare a detailed plan to implement the concept, only to find that the compliance planners, or the city council, see things differently than the since-departed long-range planners.  Or perhaps advocacy planners argue for a new approach to land development which resonates with the public, but the long-range planners in the community have a different agenda.  It’s a frequent frustration, but it’s part of the process.

Perhaps when two-thirds of the APA respondents indicated a desire for more planning, they were really asking for better coordination between the five types of planning.  From years in and around planning, I’d agree with them.  But always with the caveat that too much planning coordination starts looking a lot like the centralized planning of the Soviet Union.  Our system may be clunky and often frustrating, but at least it doesn’t fail that catastrophically.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)