The straight answer is because we want to influence the future to our benefit. Once we decide what we want, we plan to achieve it. As Thoreau said, "Men hit only what they aim at."
The more reflective answer is that we plan because we have to. We have no choice; our modern brains are wired to plan.
We are "modern" human beings precisely because we stride hopefully towards the future, propelled by capitalism and democracy. We want profits and we want rights. Both are possible only by engaging one another as capitalists and democrats with an eye towards ensuring our future security and opportunity.
The relationship between capitalism and democracy is not easy. As democracy matured in America, workers won on-the-job safety protections and the right to organize. But corporate boards are largely closed to employees, mayors of cities where plants are located, consumers, and others who might broaden the principles by which firms operate. We have democracy and capitalism, but not democratic capitalism or capitalist democracy.
In other words, if capitalism is the beast, then democracy allows us to harness it, though perhaps not tame it. It's an ongoing struggle, a "process", which is another word for preparing (planning to plan), strategizing (planning), and evaluating (re-planning). The planning process is not just a set of skills we have learned, it is at the heart of our system of values. We are socialized into the mental categories of planning at an early age when, as young capitalists, we sell candy on behalf of our elementary school or, as juvenile democrats, negotiate the bounds of conduct with our parents. We enter adulthood confident that no challenge is too big or wild to be resolved by means of well-laid plans, including the problems of our communities.
We know the problems: urban blight, suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, pollution, racism, crime, injustice, anomie, soullessness, and sometimes just plain ugliness.
We know what want: healthy, attractive, safe neighborhoods with convenient and accessible services that support sustainable living.
We are for motherhood and against transgression.
We may not know how to achieve what we want to achieve, but we are certain it is achievable with proper foresight and planning.
The wonderful Medieval and Renaissance cities can inspire us to plan, but not guide us. Florence, Mantua, Salzburg, Brugge, historic Prague and Paris, Karlsruhe, and so on, were built by people with an entirely different worldview. Nature was not valued as something to be bought and sold - "natural resources" to be traded in the marketplace - and consequently most communities sustained themselves with what they had. The economy was based primarily on transactions with friends or friends of friends, and so cities had to incorporate all the necessities of life within a relatively confined, defensible space. Cities were built around religious institutions or seats of political and military power, which also furnished the values that governed citizens' thoughts, words, and deeds.
Today, of course, we depart from very different underpinnings to plan and build our cities. We assume that all behavior can be reduced to rules, and that we can apply these rules to our living spaces to modify behavior. We view land as the basis for just about every future relationship we can envision - social, legal, economic - because land, or rather, "property", is the necessary precondition for almost all of our long-term investments and activities: homes, schools, churches, stores, factories, offices, roads, power stations, pipelines, and parks. And, with every passing year, our confidence grows that we have the potential to regulate our relations with nature in unprecedented and beneficial ways.
Many of the problems that we are trying to solve were the results of previous planning failures: urban renewal, for example, which tore apart urban neighborhoods, and overinvestment in roads, which enabled suburban sprawl. The missteps do not prompt us to quit or to question the validity of planning. Instead, we refine our models.
Models extract patterns and rules from complex realities. To revitalize cities and regions, Richard Florida, a university professor, developed a Creativity Index, which measures a community's quotient of technology, tolerance, and talent. To become or remain a "player" in the new economy, a community must move up on the Creativity Index by, for example, embracing homosexuals and other traditional outsiders or attracting young, high-tech-savvy professionals. Never mind that asphalt highways generate far more jobs than information highways or that the elderly spend more money in restaurants than young adults or that poor minorities have more creative influence on the pop music industry than educated yuppies or that most investment decisions are made by bankers, fund managers, corporate board members, and government policy makers - most, if not all, of whom fall outside the creative class.
Michael Porter, a Harvard professor, created a model for recruiting businesses to dense but depressed cities. According to Porter, an urban neighborhood with 1,000 households each earning $20,000 has the same total income, and therefore the same buying power, as a less-dense suburban subdivision of 200 households with average annual incomes of $100,000. Show these numbers to corporations and they will establish stores and services in your inner cities, Porter told mayors.
If the models were accurate, American inner cities - indeed, entire metro areas - would resemble Greenwich Village. The models don't work, of course, because what's left out of the models - crime, residential transience, government efficiencies, tax inefficiencies, global volatility, social networks that bring people together, cultural differences that pull people apart, and so on - are at least as important as what is in the models. These models, and many others, were never beta-tested in the real world before being trumpeted as solutions.
But the models live on; in fact, it's difficult to find a practicing land use planner at the state, regional, or local level that doesn't include them in his or her toolbox. They continue to be utilized because they are straightforward, easy to understand, elegant, and don't require a degree in computer science to apply.
Cities and regions are complex systems. They are made up of countless interdependent relationships, and, therefore, subject to countless transformations. Even a small change in one area or the anticipation of a change, like a road or subway closing, can cause people throughout a region to re-calibrate their movements. Moreover, we all interact with one another on multiple levels, sometimes controlling the interactions and sometimes modifying the rules of interaction.
Other complex systems, such as climate and the stock market, are modeled by supercomputers. But we entrust the planning of our cities to a few dozen people sitting around a table and trying to define a community's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. There's always a certain arbitrariness to performing a S.W.O.T. analysis. Is lack of investment the problem or lack of local leadership? Will tourists really want to visit our beloved local history museum? Small groups of stakeholders tend to paint a distorted picture of a community in order to advance their own hopes. These arbitrary and qualitative distinctions are then blended with quantitative data chosen selectively to fit questionable models. The resulting blend of personal observations and simplistic models becomes an inventory of current and future conditions, which, in turn, forms the basis of a community's comprehensive plan.
Comprehensive planning all comes down to how the participants relate local knowledge with mathematical procedure, what is with what should be, inductive with deductive reasoning.
Is the community a laboratory or a stage? Shakespeare was sure of the answer, but most planners and residents vacillate between the two. Finding the optimal balance needed to extend disclosure to analysis and analysis to action without misleading remains fiendishly difficult. The way we plan for the future of our communities doesn't seem like a creative way to attract a creative class of people or investment dollars, but, then, supercomputers still can't predict the weather or stock market.
It's interesting to note that all of the acknowledged regional successes in the United States, such as Portland's urban growth boundaries and Louisville's metropolitan government came about not as the result of a comprehensive plan, but as a function of legislation and leadership. Nor have many of the great American city plans been implemented. Burnham's plan for Chicago and L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C. remain academic visions for successive generations of college students. Most plans that have been implemented with success operate at more modest scales: a neighborhood, a waterfront, a park, a watershed, a corridor.
If we were perfectly honest, we would acknowledge that our attempts at master planning and design of cities have been failures. But we rarely question the importance (indeed, the necessity) of comprehensive planning, much less our ability to plan.
First, we know planning is a process; models can always be refined and plans improved. The harder we try, the better we will get.
Second, this isn't the old Soviet Union; planning is only one part of policymaking in America. Our plans can fail, but good policy can still be made.
Third, thinking of cities as complex systems with infinite interdependencies - a task more suited to physicists than average citizens, planners, or policy makers - can lead to sense of powerlessness. If our collective behavior is so complicated it can't be reduced to a manageable number of rules, if our problems are so enmeshed in our community's history and culture that even the people who live there can't determine cause and effect, then, perhaps, we are powerless to plausibly chart a course forward.
Our modern faith, however, assures us that nothing is inevitable or impossible, the future is ours to shape, and so we plan because we must plan.
Tony Favro has spent most of his adult life in urban planning and investment. He was a senior executive for a private real estate development corporation for 25 years, followed by 12 years in local government as Assistant to the Mayor of Rochester, New York and Director of Planning and Zoning for the Town of Irondequoit, New York.
Mr. Favro has a PhD in geography from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He is the USA Editor for the City Mayors Foundation, an international think tank dedicated to urban affairs, and has published over 50 articles on urban issues.
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