City Planning as a Social Movement, What it Means to be an Urbanist

Throughout the history of city planning, and except for a brief period in the 1960s, it has never directly entered the public mindset as something that can bring about social justice and lead to better living. 

Cities are the building blocks of nations. They are economic powerhouses which have developed or manufactured each and every technological advance in the history of the human race. Cities are the cornerstone of modern society. But cities are even more than that:

“Cities are for people. A place for their hopes and dreams, their work and play, their homes and homes for their children. Cities are alive and have personalities, each different from all others and each in constant change.”

-Richard Bartlett, AIA.

As I note in the banner of this blog, how we design and use our environments directly relate to the quality of interactions we have with and within them. These interactions can include everything from the mundane, such as buying groceries, to the extreme, such as criminal activity.

Cities are built by people and for people. As residents of cities, or as those who have reaped the benefits of cities, we have a responsibility not only to ensure their continued prosperity, but to ensure that the social, economic, and cultural benefits they bring reach the largest number of people and do the greatest amount of good. It is our responsibility to ensure that cities meet the needs of all social and economic groups, that cities can provide safe places for children as well as homes for the elderly. It is our responsibility to ensure that the penthouse apartments for the wealthy do not detract from the provision of housing for those on the margins of society.

Moreso, it is our responsibility to ensure that the economic and societal collapse of the 1960s and 1970s, mainly due to urban decay, does not repeat itself. We must make sure that our cities are resilient, both economically and environmentally. We must build for the desires of the present, while planning for the future; realizing that while bars and nightclubs may be desirable now, schools and grocery stores will be needed in the years to come. 

To this end, ensuring comprehensive multimodal transportation is the responsibility of every citizen, and we all have something to gain from it. Americans spend almost one third of their income on transportation, only to receive increasing commutes, increased stress levels, increased pollution, and longer work days. This is not sustainable in any way. Our love of the automobile has fractured our social networks, brought our environment to the verge of destruction, and caused our lives to revolve around the price of gasoline, not to mention the 30,000 deaths per year as a result of automobile wrecks.

We also have a responsibility to keep our cities free of crime. This does not have to mean an increase in the police force, however. The design of our cities in and of themselves can deter crime, something which was realized as long ago as the 1960s. This, along with a fundamental rethinking of policing strategies, as brought to the table by David Kennedy, is something that it is our responsibility to advocate for. It is the job of a city to bring people together and foster social, as well as intellectual, collaboration regardless of race, class, or gender. Crime does the opposite of this. It separates communities, often across racial lines, and fosters negative stereotypes.

Finally, and on a more personal level, the design of our environment impacts our health. Perhaps the ultimate solution to our healthcare costs lies not in the halls of congress, but in our methods of development. Our fascination with automobiles and drive-throughs has led to an explosion in the popularity of fast food and a dramatic increase in distance between travel points. A recent article in USA Streetsblog notes that only in three cities in the entire country, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, is it possible for a majority of residents to walk to a grocery store in five minutes or less. If we spent more time walking or riding our bicycles to the store and spent less time eating fast food in our cars, perhaps we could reduce our record rates of obesity and heart disease. If we consolidated our development and devoted more money to inner city economic development, perhaps we could alleviate the food desert issue that plagues so many low income communities.

However, none of these aspects can be looked at in their own field of influence. It is impossible to encourage more people to walk or bike in a community that is rife with crime. Likewise, it is impossible to encourage economic development and business investment without building a vibrant and resilient community. Finally, it is downright negligent to constantly mourn victims of mass shootings without paying attention to the fact that the majority of mass shootings occur in suburban areas. 

This is what the idea of urbanism is. Not just understanding the world around us and how we interact with it, but also realizing that the built environment is one that we all influence, whether we realize it or not. To borrow (and modify) a phrase from Matthew Taylor, the Chief Execuitve of the Royal Society for the Arts, I believe that the use of our urban space can “tell us about who we are as human beings, spark political debates about who we need to be, and lead to philosophical debates about who we aspire to be”. The goal of urbanists is to spark and lead these discussions, turning inclusive thought and deliberation into policy.

This sentiment was expressed over 50 years ago by Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book Death and Life of Great American Cities, which brought planning into the realm of the general public for the first time:

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

On Detroit

The bankruptcy of Detroit has sent a shock wave through the economic community and has caused much discussion about the continued provision of pensions and other "entitlements" by municipal governments. Such discussions follow the popular debate about public sector unions, but fail to take into account elementary knowledge of planning and economic efficiency. Detroit's development went against several guidelines noted primarily in Jane Jacobs' The Economy of Cities which describe how cities grow, develop, and adapt to change. Ironically, this book used Detroit as an example of how cities should develop sustainably.

1: Lack of Economic Diversity

Detroit was developed as an industrial city, and for many decades that industry and its exports were widely varied, from ship building to agricultural and industrial machinery to tools to automobiles. Jane Jacobs takes note of this and describes that a city must have diversity in its economy in order for it to adapt to change. During the second half of the 20^th century, Detroit's industry began to converge on one product, automobiles. This was well and good for the brief period before automation of assembly lines and competition from foreign manufacturers. This quickly changed, as assembly lines started to automate, less manpower was required to operate factories, and legions of workers were let go. In addition, as manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota came into the American market, offering what was widely perceived to be a superior product, the demand for domestic automobiles started to decline. The fact that Detroit's main export was automobiles meant that factory workers who were laid off had few employment alternatives.

2: Sprawl

Detroit's horizontal growth (attributable in no small part to it's main export) exponentially increased the amount of money that needed to be spent to provide public services to its residents. More police and firefighters were needed to cover more land, more schools had to be built and more teachers and staff hired to operate them, more hospitals and clinics needed to be built, and more roads needed to be maintained. This not only required the city spending money to build and maintain public structures and hire people necessary to operate them, but also required private residents to pay higher taxes to maintain those services, spend more on transportation, living, and healthcare. The city is now unable to maintain this infrastructure, and vacant houses have been torn down in droves.

3: Corruption

Despite the fact that the monetary losses from the city pale in comparison to its debt, this is a major consideration. Detroit is famous for its corrupt city officials. It's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, has been investigated multiple times by the federal government and accused of laundering money through a variety of front companies. In addition, many current and former council members have been charged with corruption. Clearly, the city's politicians are not motivated to solve problems such as economic resiliency, poverty, and crime.

In order for a city to be sustainable, it must be economically resilient. Detroit did not plan for this (perhaps due to the fact that the interests of its politicians were elsewhere) and, predictably, failed. Cities must insure adequate economic diversity for continued survival and the well being of their residents.

Design Fixation and The City

One development that's undergone much recent study in the field of engineering is the concept of design fixation, the reluctance of a designer to innovate due to their unquestioned adherence to existing ideas or due to the influence of previous designs upon them.

According to a study published by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), design fixation is often subliminal, and occurring regardless of what instructions are provided to the designer. This often results in a flawed design being, in a large part, copied, despite the designer being told specifically that it is flawed.  

This concept is beginning to manifest itself in several interesting ways in regards to city planning. One of the most apparent is the idea that in order to be competitive and economically resilient, a city should strive on attracting a "creative class" of young professionals, something which recent research shows might not actually work, as opposed to trying to develop one by increasing the quality of education, public services, or low income housing.

Another way is by cities directly copying aspects of comprehensive plans from other cities without optimization or the understanding of why they were originally developed. A good example of this is the implementation of form-based zoning codes aimed at promoting pedestrian friendliness and mixed uses. This is often seen when cities do not provide a reason or direction for their codes, and implement them over large areas of land instead of applying them to specific neighborhoods.

A good example of this is "new urbanist" suburbs which are composed of rowhouses on a grid plan, but do not exist in a larger context. They must still be accessed by car, and still have minimal connectivity to adjacent roads.  

One of the major flaws of the urban renewal program in the 1950s and 1960s was that it tried to apply standardized solutions to a variety of problems across a variety of cities, itself an expression of design fixation. This approach paid no attention to the peculiarities of the urban environment.

Jane Jacobs discussed several flaws with this approach, most notably, the fact that the design of these developments run counter to the way the street level is actually used by a city's inhabitants. She also noted that the interactions that take place among the residents of a city play a large part in keeping it safe, interesting, and economically competitive. Most importantly, she noted that each city has its own peculiarities which influence these interactions. The peculiarities of one city are different than those of another, and thus a planning solution to a particular problem may work in one city, but not in another.

In order to make a substantial effort at addressing the variety of urban problems that face us, such as poverty, crime, and abandonment, the reasons for them, demographic patters, investment and development rates, policing strategies, and travel patterns, must be thoroughly examined and well understood. In this way, each city is unique. A problem that is fundamentally different in two locations cannot be solved with the same solution.

This is what keeps urban design interesting, and I dare say, what makes it fun.

Urban Economic Development

The two works which inspired this post are The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs and “Alleviating the Financial Capital Barriers Impeding Business Development in Inner Cities”, A study by Timothy Bates.

In Jacobs' 1970 book, she not only lays out her theory that cities developed before agriculture, but also explains her theories for urban economic growth, the import-replacement effect, the export-multiplier effect, (which operate in tandem) and the addition of new work. In short, they state that as a city grows, its development of manufactured goods will allow it to produce domestically goods which it previously imported, and then add these goods to its exports to other cities. The principle of the addition of new work states that as these imports are converted to exports, ideas for new exports and new processes for making these new exports are derived, thus creating more economic opportunities.

However, the economic engine of cities (and of the United States as a whole) has changed radically since the 1960s. Commercial service has replaced industry as the driving economic force, and with the exception of highly specialized manufacturing (streetcars, airplanes, and medical equipment, for example), this is likely to remain the case. It also depends on the abilities of a city's educational system, for adding new work to old requires a constant supply of creativity, something that schools are increasingly unable to provide given standardized curricula and benchmarks based on standardized tests.

On the other hand, Bates' study focuses on the perils of inner city and minority run businesses, including access to start up capital through various means. Bates' study, however, does not discern small businesses from larger corporations that happen to be minority run or located in inner cities.

In his study, he focuses primarily on testing and debunking claims made by Michael Porter, such as urban areas representing untapped markets and logistical advantages present in inner cities.

Bates did not find that these claims held true, he also noted that a venture capital fund set up by Porter to test these theories was profitable due to its investments in ventures not located in inner cities, which balanced out investments in inner city firms.

However, Bates did find that there were substantial roadblocks to inner city firms who desired capital and credit, and his study examined efforts already in place to mitigate these as well as proposing new solutions.

One promising solution Bates examined was that of a firm called Medallion Funding, that would provide loans when given capital to back the loans up on (taxi medallions in New York City, or dry cleaning equipment for laundromats, for example). He states that this method holds promise, because it can both diversify and cater to smaller establishments, as it can recoup failed loans by selling off this capital.

To extend this into a firm that can provide start up capital for any type of small commercial businesses or boutique manufacturing company, a large organization would be required. This is so it can diversify its holdings and better absorb the failure of some companies it lends capital to, a reality in a market driven society. However, this organization would also need to be able to tailor itself to the needs of a specific city or even a specific neighborhood or district within a city.

Also, this organization would need a reliable source of capital to back the loans given out to urban businesses. One possibility is the building that the business is located in, which could be repossessed and sold off or re-leased for substantially more than the amount of the original loan.