Witold Rybczynski in his last Slate column critiques public-sector planning, specifically the Obama administration's Office of Urban Affairs:
"According to Carrión, smart planning involves a combination of walkable communities, mass transit, and bicycle paths, and who could argue with that, except that in the last 40 years, our faith in centralized city planning has changed radically. In short, we've lost it."
Planning as a discipline is used to shouldering frequent attacks from libertarians and property rights activists, but
Rybczynski's voice resonates more loudly in these circles because of his noted career as an urbanist thinker. His book City Life was one the first I read and reviewed here. When he makes the claim that "a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace," it does make you rethink the value of planning in general.
But this particular piece is fraught with confusion throughout, not, I assume, on the part of the writer but on how its provocative stance could easily be interpreted. He means something much more specific by the word "planning" than most people engaged in the art of planning cities mean by it.
My first instinct, whenever I hear the mention of centralized planning, is to ask: centralized to what? Are we talking about global domination or a neighborhood association cooperating on a shared playground? There's a wide breadth of levels of governance. Presenting the options as either centralized or decentralized with regards to all planning and development activities is not very helpful. The same goes for neatly dividing responsibility into either the public or private realm.
The best planning policies follow the medieval principle of subsidiarity. The scale of the project matches the level of authority, or better yet the project is divided into levels of detail and passed along the chain of command. So, the federal government opens up some funds for a specific purpose, requiring a minimum eligibility criteria be met to receive them. They pass the program on to the states, who each hold a competitive grant competition among localities to disburse the funds. This is how lots of government programs currently work.
Adolfo Carrión seems to understand this process well, which makes him a strange target for Rybczynski's attack. In an interview, Carrión explains the purpose of the office,
"Our success will be that we encourage local communities to steer their way into the future in smarter ways, that local municipalities understand that they are part of a new complex of regional economies or metropolitan areas, and that they have shared destinies."
I don't see any muscular nationalism here at all, at least nothing reminiscent of the disastrous urban renewal days. All I see is a national interest in strong cities and the goal to help facilitate smart planning among communities.
"The purpose is to go and identify and amplify those creative solutions that communities have come up with."
Sounds more like a cheerleader than the quarterback. Characterizing this posture as too strong of a federal role is simply swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.
Rob Goodspeed redirects Rybczynski's question in more fruitful direction,
"The more interesting and accurate conclusion to draw from the failures of modernist city planning is to consider which forms of government planning are still active and desirable. In this sense, Rybczynski’s article is a bit behind the times. The tremendous interest in high speed rail, urban transit, green building codes, the government’s role in wind power and broadband, and housing finance regulation has reminded us of the central role of government in shaping our cities."
1 comment:
I too was frustrated by Rybczynski's article. Yet I think you're being a little to charitable when you say he's confused about possible interpretations of his writing and not about his own thinking per se. His "important lesson" that urban development should not be implemented by the public sector alone isn't helpful at all. For example, lots of urban renewal era commercial buildings were privately financed and developed with land publicly acquired and cleared. I'm sure Rybczynski would rail against that type of process today, but it certainly represented a collaboration between public agencies and private developers. Nor does he explain how the process of HOPE VI development is any different than traditional public housing - only that the outcome is more in line with in vogue planning principles. He never points out how his list of successful approaches to city building conflict with what the Administration is proposing. But why would he, when he only spends three sentences attempting to describe the new federal policy to begin with! It's really disappointing to see such lazy writing come from the author of The Last Harvest.
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