Abstract
In April 2019, the Trump Administration announced new tax rules that benefited venture capitalists and entrepreneurs developing properties in “struggling communities,” or Opportunity Zones. 1 These new rules, which embraced a “trickle-down” approach to community building that incentivizes the wealthy to invest and that overlooks the precariousness upon which those investments prey, raise important questions about the relationship between physical planning and social planning. Do we plan to simply make money? Do we plan to improve social conditions? Or can we do both? The five books discussed in this review use history—biography, transnational history, social justice, and urban politics—to better understand this question and its implications for the future of urban planning. Planning’s past reveals that poverty and justice are not mere facets of planning; they are its historical mission and enduring justification: to alleviate the ills of the congested city and improve the conditions of the impoverished. 2
As we come to terms with the current sweep of private investment, physical planning, and market-oriented solutions, as championed by the Trump Administration’s pro-development agenda, we are reminded of planning’s original purpose: to help the most precarious and least powerful by embracing the social structures that comprise urban life. Certainly, we must expect more from government than a tax cut for the wealthy and a trickle-down benefit for the poor. We must imagine planning for the public interest—for all members of society. As planners and purveyors of city life, we must acknowledge the impoverished and precarious as among planning’s most important stakeholders and accept the invitation to reimagine social relationships spatially in an enterprise that has become decidedly physical.
Harold L. Platt’s transnational history Building the Urban Environment tracks seven cities (Rotterdam, Paris, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo) that embrace or reject the “Organic City” concept. The cities are chosen to reflect trends in the global north and the global south. The concept of “Organic City” organizes his analysis, but its meaning, Platt admits, is impressionistic— “each planner used the term in his or her own way” (p. 9). Platt uses it to refer to the ways that the various parts of this built environment work together. Specifically, he locates the concept in the rise of technocratic planning in the first half of the twentieth century, and in the challenges to planning orthodoxy in its second half. But, for Platt, the Organic City also tracks the influence of three groups of stakeholders—the planners who envisioned the city, policy makers who furnished them with the support of the state, and the grassroots organizations who exposed the limitations of the built environment. Platt places Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright in conversation with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Los Angeles police violence victim Rodney King, and invites us to see planning as contested, and to understand how struggles to shape the built environment serve—and neglect—the interests of urban stakeholders.
Building the Urban Environment whose seven chapters are organized into two sections, beginning in the 1890s and concluding at the end of the twentieth century. Each section opens with an historical overview before launching into case studies. The first section is devoted to planning’s intellectual traditions—with utopian planners, architects, engineers, and social scientists who transform the lived environment by reimagining the city. But as Platt reveals, from London’s Green Belt Plan to Paris’s housing estates or São Paulo’s hydro development, this reimagining exacerbated rather than resolved existing inequalities. In the second section, which focuses on the decline of the Organic City, Platt discusses the role of grassroots organizations in shaping the built environment. Although it might have been nice to learn more about ordinary people earlier—the participants in the settlement house movement of the 1910s and in the New Deal programs of the 1930s—we learn how disillusionment with systems and technology eroded the credibility of professional planning in the cities he describes. Platt, however, carefully adds that the legacy of grassroots planning is not necessarily greater equality; in fact, he questions the ability of planners to determine the needs of diverse communities both in the south and the north. The rise of right-wing politics, deregulation, and neoliberalism prefigure the Watts riots in Los Angeles, the deindustrialization of Chicago, and the rise of gated communities, such as São Paulo’s Alphaville. This fracturing of cities by century’s end also shattered planning’s guiding concepts, like the Organic City, and replaces them with what he calls “hybrid space.”
Platt asserts a bold reimagining of twentieth-century planning. However, the book’s organizing concepts do not hang together as well as they might. The global north and south do not always denote meaningful physical spaces. And, the “grass roots”—comprised of ordinary people, everyday life, and vernacular conceptions of space—are curiously delegated to the book’s second half. Moreover, Platt’s Organic City is more of an expression of planners and policy makers’ expertise—of the physical—which positions social planning as a response, rather than an impetus, to change.
In Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, Scott Larson describes how giants of mid-century, American planning—Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses—continue to shape the American city a half century after their greatest influence. In fact, the book’s title borrows directly from New York City Planning Director Amanda Burden, whose conflation of Moses and Jacobs in a 2006 speech serves two key functions: to startle readers trained to view the two as dichotomous, and to drive a narrative that invites that startled reader to then recognize what they have in common. Tracking the conflation of urban renewal and its greatest detractor, Larson assembles a political narrative of the built environment that points to the people planning has left behind.
Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind is organized around ten short chapters that ground current debate over Moses and Jacobs in the efforts of New York City Mayor—and 2020 United States Democratic candidate—Michael Bloomberg to build in Manhattan. The first two chapters examine how the legacies of Moses and Jacobs are defined against each other: urban renewal versus neighborhoods. According to Larson, this involves something of a rehabilitation of Robert Moses; here, we are reminded that Bancroft Prize-recipient Kenneth T. Jackson credited Moses with making New York City “the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of capitalism, and the capital of the world” (p. 22). The next four chapters ground Jacobs and Moses in New York City, in four “mega projects,” in regional planning, in new zoning rules, and in the city’s efforts to impute Jacobs’s and Moses’s divergent viewpoints into a synthesis that justifies continued developments. Much of Larson’s criticism of this synthesis comes in the final four chapters, which interrogate the Bloomberg Administration’s use of this synthesis to justify development. These chapters examine how Jacobs’s and Moses’s ideas have traveled outside New York City, exploring “design” as a justification for the continuation of the synthesis, and pointing to the subjects ignored by the synthesis: poverty, affordable housing, class and racial inequality. Here, Larson suggests, the dichotomy masks agreement, where top-down versus bottom-up planning lead us to overlook the ways that Moses’s use of Title 1 Urban Renewal legislation (from the Housing Act of 1949) complements the gentrifications ascribed to Jacobs’s vision of the city. Both cut the vulnerable out of planning by focusing on the physical. As Albany lawmakers sought to firm up tenant protection in summer 2019, they would also reveal that New York City continues to wrestle with the social implications of a physical, built environment that refuses to accommodate its most vulnerable. 3
But what, according to Larson—in this engaged, well-organized, brief volume—are the implications of his analysis for social planning? Teeming with immigrants and enterprises, New York City’s congestion and reform activism catalyzed American planning a century ago—most spectacularly in the nation’s first zoning statute in 1916. But what has come of this justification—to protect health, safety, and welfare—that has carried planning through so much of the twentieth century? Is Larson suggesting that planning is really just a New York City enterprise? Is the political power that facilitates planning’s inequalities different from the power that might also diminish those inequalities? Larson’s analysis bridges Moses’s physical plans and Jacobs’s social concerns, but does not resolve this fundamental division in twentieth-century American city planning.
The main figure in Gregory Heller’s absorbing biography of architect-planner Ed Bacon attempts to resolve the dichotomy between bottom-up Jacobs and top-down Moses by appealing to multiple stakeholders. As Philadelphia’s head planner, Bacon—a New Deal Democrat in a Republican city where patronage governed planning—embodied an approach to planning that stressed vision, promotion, and dogged pursuit of implementation. The result was a different model than that of Edward Logue in Boston or Robert Moses in New York. Here, the bulldozer—the key implement of urban renewal—is surgical, as attested to by the preservation of Society Hill’s “old [colonial era] homes [which] still had their historic Flemish-bond brick, double hung windows, and federal pediments” (p. 117). Urban renewal, in Bacon’s hands, was less a tool of redevelopment and more a tool of preservation.
Heller’s biography is organized into ten chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. The opening briefly summarizes Bacon’s background: his training at Cornell University, travels and work in Shanghai, a scholarship to the illustrious Cranbrook Academy of Art (with Eliel Saarinen at the helm), planning work in Flint, Michigan, and eventual return to Philadelphia where Bacon was rapidly promoted to lead planner. He was aided in the process by strong family connection and political opportunism. “Unlike in Flint,” Heller tells us, Bacon “was learning how to utilize his connections to gain access to important individuals and how to work within the political and business structure to advance this agenda for the future” (p. 53). Readers learn not just how Bacon was made, but how Philadelphia was rebuilt: it was organized into twenty-seven “redevelopment areas” as required by federal oversight; the city built highways, and even breached the “Chinese Wall”—replacing the antiquated locomotive technology with Penn Central consumerism—flirting with, and even implementing, a short-lived pedestrian corridor. Each reflected a focus on planning’s physical capacities. Heller’s biography produces an image of planning as a slow-moving enterprise, and of Bacon as comfortable with contradictions, explaining, for instance, that he sought to use “the Radburn principle”—offering light, air, walkability—but “in a relatively urban context” (p. 78).
Heller’s biography, however, does not clarify or resolve all contradictions. For instance, why did Bacon, animated by a fossil-free future and pressed by environment concerns, leave such a position when he was most likely to affect the change he sought? Did this decision hint, possibly, at a deeper frustration with formal planning and its capacity to respond to social issues—like the Great Society’s short-lived 1966 Model Cities’ Program, which promised to make urban planning beholden to deteriorating social conditions in cities? While Model Cities was quickly sacrificed to President Lyndon Johnson’s tragic war in Vietnam, its constituencies—people of color, the impoverished—are revealed as undervalued stakeholders. Heller argues that contradictions preoccupied Bacon—air and light in the city, preservation as renewal—and were predicated on a level of wealth typically not available to men and women occupying ripped-up and paved-over communities degraded as “blight.” In Heller’s account, planning’s social dimensions appear only to exist to complement, and enhance, its physical successes.
Elsewhere, planning’s social dimensions are overlooked entirely. In Convention Center Follies, Haywood Sanders assembles case studies on the development of convention centers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Atlanta—and in other major cities—where they delivered very little of the economic growth and urban revitalization they promised. Astonishingly, the wildly uneven impact of these centers would not disrupt the “arms race” between cities to build bigger, and more extravagant and enticing facilities. Instead, convention centers reveal limitations in the ability of the political power of landowners and consultants—the key to planning, according to Larson and Heller—to restrain and check private, physical planning.
Sanders’s data-driven story is organized chronologically, punctuated throughout with engaging case studies, focusing mostly on recent decades. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, cities sought to rehabilitate their cores, many of which were being drained by federally backed lending and by building programs that accelerated suburbanization. But as voters increasingly rejected invitations to fund convention centers in the post–World War II era, backers sought out new funding strategies—such as hotel occupancy taxes and restaurant taxes; both targeted visitors and neither required voter approval. Sanders identifies this expressed overruling of local opinions as a distortion of democratic principles, where voters are separated from direct funding (though not necessarily from responsibility for that funding). The result, he explains, was not only to have visitors fund infrastructure; the strategy also insulated “proposed centers from public review and debate” (p. 82). As a result of walling taxpayers from land use development, conflicts over these developments were “hidden from public view,” contained and concentrated in the business community (p. 210). Mining mountains of data, Sanders points to a pattern of “misestimates and overpromising (p. 151).” However, he explains, because of so “little serious analysis or review” and an absence of “public accountability,” the result was paradoxical: more physical building that satisfied fewer social needs (p. 51). The process, Sanders explains, benefited consultants and landowner, as stakeholders, while cutting out the taxpayers and city center residents it was—supposedly—meant to help.
Sanders’s organizing claim—that consultants and landowners profited from the convention hype they sowed—also points to a story of devotion to physical planning that disregards impacts on the social environments that they reshape. It would be nice to know a little more about this social world that Sanders glimpses as he moves through accounts of convention construction. The building of the Phoenix Civic Plaza, which failed as a vehicle of downtown redevelopment, led to the demolition of “much of ‘The Deuce’—the city’s skid row” (p. 14). We are left to wonder about the people these infrastructure projects displaced; was convention construction, like urban renewal, just another urban antiseptic used to reduce poverty to a blemish that could then be wiped away? Did disconnection from tax payer support facilitate the disconnection of physical planning from the social world?
Advancing Equity Planning, the most activist and socially oriented of the five books, sharply contrasts Sanders’s Convention Center Follies by focusing on planning for the least powerful. Noted Cleveland planner-turned-academic Norman Krumholz and Kathryn Wertheim Hexter organize eleven essays in four sections that examine planners’ obligation to move “resources, political power, and participation toward the disadvantaged, lower income people of their cities and regions. They are called ‘equity planners’” (p. 1). The broadcasters, academics, practitioners, community organizers, and public health specialists assembled in these pages speak to planning’s diversity. They also remind readers that social forces create and define the built environment. Krumholz and Wertheim are most concerned with growing, structural inequality—with the separation of middle-class lives from the spaces of poverty that facilitate the demonization of the poor. In this regard, the authors are best acquainted with planning’s central historical mission: creating cities, housing, transportation, economic development, and land use policies that benefit all by helping the least powerful. At the same time, the prospects that it lays out for the future of equity planning are less clear and direct than we find in discussions of convention centers and political power.
Advancing Equity Planning’s first section comprises three essays that explore local planning. Of these, Majora Carter’s “Economic Diversity in Low-Status Communities”—possibly the volume’s most engaging essay—tells a story of a marginalized neighborhood in the South Bronx—Hunts Point, her neighborhood—which she tells us she has only come to appreciate as an adult. She invites planners to embrace a concept she calls “self-gentrification”—where, rather than being pushed out, existing dweller’s benefit financially from neighborhood improvements. She describes her project: identifying and spearheading the revitalization of Hunts Point Riverside Park on land that Robert Moses once claimed—but since abandoned—for a bridge project. Her overriding point is that neighborhoods need to celebrate what they have—that the physical development, whether of a bridge or a park, must be guided by a keen adherence to principles of equity and inclusion, that incorporate rather than exclude the surrounding community.
Advancing Equity Planning’s second section examines regional planning, and includes Chris Benner’s and Manuel Pastor’s overview of planning for the region involving work, transportation, housing, and education. Todd Swanstrom’s terrific essay tackles equity planning in suburban St. Louis—a metropolitan region in which white-flight, Michael Brown’s murder, and Shelley v. Kraemer (which ruled in 1948 that courts could not uphold racial covenants) have made infamous—and marks a transition away from theory. Swanstrom focuses on the suburbs as a “geography of disadvantage” and not of privilege (p. 102). The suburbs, he tells us, are fragmented and he identifies solutions to their poverty outside government, in not-for-profits: “Transit-Oriented Development,” “Beyond Housing” and “24:1 (24 communities, 1 vision)” (p. 111). Both chapters invite readers to look beyond the spaces of the neighborhood to find equity solutions in the larger district.
The third section examines equity planning in the national policy context, in the areas of transportation, workforce development, housing, and planning for older adults. These chapters critique mainstream planning, identify national trends, and propose strategies that could be implemented in local communities to promote an equity agenda. In doing so, authors explore the role of federal policy in facilitating or constraining planning for equity at the local and regional level. For example, Joe Grengs discusses the need to plan for accessibility instead of mobility, explaining, “Accessibility is a measure of how a transportation system is meeting the needs of people . . . [to] help them to achieve well-being and participate fully in society” (p. 128). In contrast, mobility-based planning defines success as easier movement, especially by automobile. The lack of attention to accessibility-based planning can be understood by considering the types of destinations that are not accessible to low-income communities. These so-called “deserts”—food/grocery, park/open space, transit, and health care—point to the need for improved accessibility for all populations in urban areas. After arguing for the importance of accessibility-based planning, Grengs concedes that “accessibility-based planning has not yet been fully embraced in practice” (p. 137).
The volume’s final section looks to the future, more specifically in higher education curriculums, where equity planners are learning to operate in an era of “limited government,” often through technology (p. 241). Despite the optimism of Kenneth Reardon and John Forrester about the future of equity planning, it is not clear that the concept is uniformly central in university curriculums or in leading journals. Michelle M. Thompson and Brittany N. Arceneaux promote the use of Public Participation Geographic Imagination System (PPGIS) as a democracy-enhancing technology, while pointing to an ongoing problem with planning: overreliance on ever-changing technologies. The PPGIS the authors discuss proposes fascinating possibilities, but also presuppose facilitation with technology: time, access, and capacity. Using new technologies may raise important points, but do little if we cannot formulate questions about inequality in the first place. In their conclusion, Krumholz and Hexter issue a call to action: to restore equity—and the social concerns from which they derive—to planning.
Together, these books point to a field at a crossroads. While they celebrate planning’s broad sweep and its rich engagement, they also point to a field divided into coalitions among planning’s pressing social needs and its ongoing physical demands. Social planners like Majora Carter and Robert Gilloth stress the ways that the field exacerbates existing marginalization and precariousness and they look to it as a mechanism of greater fairness, inclusivity, and opportunity. In the process, they enlist a planning trajectory endorsed by historian Peter Hall, who locates planning’s origin in housing and congestion; Jane Jacobs, who rejects planning orthodoxy; Paul Davidoff, who promotes “Advocacy Planning”; and Susan Fainstein, who heralds the “Just City.” 4 Each celebrates ordinary people as stakeholders—landowners, community members, activists, consumers, residential dwellers. By contrast, physical planning is often about growth, economic development, and investment, whether in the form of Bacon’s “growth coalition,” Sanders’s downtown core revitalization, or Platt’s emphasis on experts (who he acknowledges can overlook residents’ needs); physical planning elevates the voices of developers, experts, and investors among stakeholders. But these stakeholders leave us to wonder: is success best measured in economic terms? Collectively, these books present an extraordinary challenge to planners in the United States. As the field grows increasingly dependent on “trickle-down” solutions—from industry, from markets, from government—planners need to consider how far they are willing to stray from the field’s social origins when planning their built environments. At the same time, proponents of social planning also need to consider how, and if, they are willing to occupy those physical spaces being built around them.