Abstract
As a professor of first-year planning courses, it has been difficult to find a good introduction to urban planning until now. Norm Tyler and Robert Ward’s most recent contribution to undergraduate textbooks in urban planning, Planning and Community Development: A Guide for the 21st Century, is accessible, informative, and insightful. Its two-column page layout, black-and-white illustrations, and nationwide assembly of precedent case study examples combine with clarity of writing to produce an excellent resource to accompany any introduction to urban planning course for undergraduates, citizen planners, commissioners or Zoning Board of Appeals. Sixteen chapters sync well with sixteen weeks of a semester-long course.
Planning and Community Development in the 21st Century is guided by the comprehensive plan and the zoning ordinance. The plan provides the vision and future direction as seen through the eyes of people in the community. The ordinance gives the plan teeth, and provides for implementation of a community’s wishes through maps and text. The plan’s elements address the concerns of planners and communities where people live, work, travel, shop, and socialize. Implementing the plan is inherently political as it attempts to balance the needs of private property owners and the public interest.
The book is designed to support semester-long introduction to planning courses by providing a rich history of the field and recent examples of successful planning and development efforts from cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the United States. Active engagement assignments, seventeen total, build on Tyler’s 1997 problem-based learning Rivertown Simulation still available online at www.cityhallcommons.com.
The book’s three major sections are overview, comprehensive plan, and implementation. The overview of planning practice, conceptual approaches, and scale of planning teaches that all planning is local, with policy being developed at the federal, state, and regional levels. The comprehensive plan addresses importance, history, process, players, and projects in eight areas: urban design; downtown revitalization; housing; historic preservation; local economic development; transportation; and environmental, rural, and transitional land-use planning. The implementation of the comprehensive plan discusses the evolution of land-use controls, zoning and land-use regulations, subdivisions, site plans and site plan review, capital improvement programs and local government financing. Four appendices support the Rivertown active engagement exercises with case study simulation, plan, zoning ordinance, and maps. A useful glossary of over 140 words, 60 abbreviations and acronyms, 50 selected readings and topic index round out the resources included.
The book’s scope and hierarchy of ideas is informative as each chapter unfolds along a logical flow of sequence answering first, the Why or the importance of the topic to planners; second, the What or historical perspective and key principles such as scales of urban design practice, including rules of thumb and guidelines; third, the Where or current projects, highlighted in grey and integrated into the reader’s flow; fourth, the How or the design process with visual illustrations (bubble diagrams, schematic plans, proposed site plan); and fifth, the How or a community charrette process. Finally, the student is engaged in practice as a young planner in Rivertown through problem-based learning exercises.
The national perspective in case study examples displays a similar depth and breadth with street hierarchies in a new town center plan for Channahon, Illinois, a water quality and wildlife habitat enhancement in the Chesapeake Bay, and retail developments in San Francisco, California; Uniontown, Pennsylvania; Kansas City, Missouri; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Memorable also is the total recall and access afforded the reader in the superb index.
The text is a significant improvement over other introductory planning textbooks.
The book’s presentation format is very accessible and easy to read with two columns of text per page, illustrations, photographs, and descriptions of precedent examples highlighted in gray tone using text and photographs. These gray-tone precedents are woven directly into the reader’s path or sequence unlike many books that set them apart as if they were tangential to the argument or extra credit one can skip without missing the full meaning. In undergraduate teaching, timing and sequence is everything. Many of the illustrations are hand-rendered diagrams, plans, sections, and axonometric drawings that are meant, again, to be accessible and invite the reader with meager drawing ability to participate and not feel that the illustrations are beyond the grasp of their general ability.
A most noteworthy example is from pages 171 to 173 where topographic quadrangle maps, aerial photographs, and soil surveys of the same land area are placed in juxtaposition to each other. Now if only they were all on the same two-page layout. An aerial photograph (p. 193) of Poletown, Michigan, after the landmark eminent domain case allowed construction of the General Motors plant is presented in juxtaposition to the surrounding areas of nineteenth-century single-family home street grid.
The active engagement assignments place the reader in Rivertown as a planner confronted with many community planning and development issues, one per chapter. The Rivertown assignments challenge the student/reader to practice what they have learned and learn through practice. The student is asked to prepare a series of topical memos, reports, maps, plans, and proposals that analyze, summarize and recommend program activities, new development sites, a downtown revitalization district, preliminary economic development proposals, required data collection, cost/benefit impacts, parking and tax increment calculations, legal brief and opinion on a taking, site plan review, Capital Improvement Plan budget items, schedule, and rationale. These exercises will help students’ understanding of what planners do because they have done it, and their memory will be stronger than with a multiple-choice question test.
In any PLAN100 class, there are auditory learners who listen, discuss, and take notes; visual learners who look, see, and draw; and tactile learners who do, touch, and build. Today’s students have been part of a multimedia world since birth. They do not just listen; they participate. They do not just sit; they move. Here, Tyler and Ward have addressed the greatest teaching challenge; that of matching teaching methods with learning styles by using project-based learning (Tileston 2005). Tyler and Ward draw on a wealth of communication in their concrete stories of planning projects, hierarchy of ideas, visual bubble diagrams, schematic plans, finished site plans, and interactive plan making and thereby address the demands of a modern classroom where an instructor must respond to multiple learning styles.
Tyler and Ward’s visual communication is not always perfect, as evidenced in two-dimensional images illustrating transit-oriented development, which should be three-dimensional to capture the essence of transit-oriented development success—density, design, and diversity—as discussed by Dr. Robert Cervero of the University of California, Berkeley. The excellent comparison of topographic quadrangle maps, aerial photographs, and soil surveys mentioned above could be improved if placed on one page, thereby reducing the need to flip back and forth.
The Rivertown assignments are sequential yet interrelated, just as a real planning process is. Therefore, Chapter 1 Exercise 1 requires students to review Chapter 16 to match relevant costs to public funding and Chapter 10 Exercise 10 requires students to read Exercise 12 for development inputs to traffic counts. Tyler and Ward have referenced the links clearly but this could be frustrating to undergraduates with short attention spans and demanding academic schedules.
Tyler and Ward provide a hierarchy of ideas in each topic area and travel seamlessly from the general, such as the Ahwahnee Principles of Economic Development, to the specific, “4-times rule” (p. 131) that states that a successful activity must entertain visitors four times as long as it took them to drive to the venue. This hierarchy of ideas within each topic creates a memorable depth and breadth.
Another weakness lies in the discussion of rural zoning, housing density and open space, especially in “sliding scale” zoning (p. 200), where graphic illustrations would add clarity. Likewise the discussion of purchase and transfer of development rights (Purchase of Development Rights and Transfer of Development Rights) in rural areas needs example case studies. Issues of agriculture and open space will become more and more important as planners refocus on sustainable communities and populations begin to migrate back to the Midwest from overcrowded, expensive west and southwestern locations. Young planners should be ready for the challenge.
The book is insightful as to how planning works and exhibits an apprehension of the inner nature of things by discussing stories behind the facts gained from experience. For example, rural planning where the inclusion of correspondence from a former graduate student in “Spotlight on the Experiences of a Rural Planner” informs the reader of certain realities in the field. The young planner’s commute is “slowed down more for buffalo than other motorists,” he is “warned of existence of hanging trees within the county that await any one coming here with idea of change.” He works with a zoning committee charged with writing a zoning ordinance “debating the necessity of zoning as opposed to developing a zoning ordinance, which is their charge,” and “preparing the community for its introduction is far more daunting task” (p. 169).
Tyler and Wood’s Planning and Community Development: A Guide for the 21st Century is accessible, informative, and insightful. I highly recommend it and plan to adopt it for use myself in my first year planning class. It will also be a useful text for faculty teaching sophomore history and theory and for citizen planners, plan commissioners, and members of BZAs who wish to be no ordinary planners. The casual clarity and visual vibrancy of the book exhibit a lifetime of teaching, practice, and personal experience in planning.