Abstract
Of late, in planning theory, it has become rather unfashionable to praise the virtues of rules. Staid, boring, rigid and predictable, rules fail to cut the mustard in our ‘complex’, ‘heterogeneous’, ‘post-Fordist’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ cities. In a milieu where ‘flexibility’, ‘mobility’ and ‘innovation’ are the order (words) of the day, rules can seem like quaint archaisms. Perhaps most offensively, rules seem to be close cousins of constraints, and who, in a choice-laden, consumerist society, has the time or patience to be constrained? Against this backdrop, it is refreshing to find in Beth Moore Milroy’s Thinking Planning and Urbanism an implicit yet impassioned apologia for the place of rules in planning.
But these are not rules about just anything, and they are not just any kind of rules. As the opening chapter explains, they relate singularly to ‘urbanism’, defined as ‘reflection on and practices directed to shaping and managing urban space using some combination of normative ideas, data, and practicable actions’. Here Milroy draws heavily on Françoise Choay’s (1997) contention that urbanism has been historically dominated by two images of thought, two ‘figures’ or ‘types of mechanisms for generating built-space’:
One was via rules used to generate solutions in space; the other was via models to be applied as solutions. [Choay] shows that the first arose in an architectural treatise [i.e. Alberti’s De re aedificatoria], a study of urban configurations that meet natural laws, human needs, and aesthetics [i.e. Alberti’s neccessitas, commoditas and voluptas]. The second emerged in the utopian form of writing [as exemplified by More’s Utopia], which presents criticism of an existing solution counterpoised by its solution in the form of a model of its opposite.
To these two figures, Choay adds a third, ‘the theory of urbanism’. Emerging in the late 19th century, coincident with the rise of ‘modern’ planning, this figure amalgamates traits of the ‘rule’ and the ‘model’ in varying ratios, supplemented by injections of scientism, social science, disciplinarity and medical/curative approaches to urban space.
Of this triad, the ‘rule’ (or, at least, a rule-inclined ‘theory of urbanism’) emerges as the privileged figure for both Choay and Milroy. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the ‘rule’ is on the side of creativity and innovation; in the hands of Leon Battista Alberti, at least, it bespeaks a generative process where matrices of intersecting axioms produce a veritable ars combinatoria. The ‘rule’ is also associated with close engagement with site and context, though a certain primacy is accorded physical qualities and spatial configurations per se, in keeping with Alberti’s audacious hypothesis concerning the mythic origins of communities:
Some have said that it was fire and water which were initially responsible for bringing men [sic] together into communities, but we, considering how useful, even indispensable, a roof and walls are for men [sic], are convinced that it was they that drew and kept men [sic] together (Alberti, 1988: 3).
By contrast, the ‘model’ is always at one remove from creativity since ‘it always proceeds from preliminary work on and against a given reality whose values are to be inverted’ (Choay, 1997: 150, cited in Milroy). The ‘model’ only engages with site and context in order to negate them; consistent with the etymology of ‘utopia’, context is rendered as a ‘not-place’, a blank slate for the realization of an ideal set of social circumstances.
Importantly, Milroy stresses that the emergence of the ‘rule’ and the ‘model’ pre-date ‘modern’ planning by centuries. Planning does not found a specific, autonomous discipline for the construction of space; it arises at the tail end of a pre-existing discipline or field of activity: urbanism. Planning does not inaugurate anything; it merely refigures, disrupts and intervenes in a long-established discourse on building urban space. In a sense, Thinking Planning and Urbanism is an extended exploration of the consequences of these observations. What happens to planning when its practitioners and theorists fail to see their activities as embedded within urbanism? More particularly, what happens to planning when it neglects one of urbanism’s founding figures, the ‘rule’, allowing it to be sidelined?
While Milroy’s opening meditation on the relationship between planning and urbanism is alone worth the price of admission, its primary function is to frame the task that will occupy her for the better part of the book: a painstaking reconstruction of planning processes associated with Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas area, from 1994 to 2008. A retailing and entertainment precinct with a rich and varied history, by the early 1990s the Yonge-Dundas area had developed a seemingly entrenched character of seediness, along with a reputation for crime and poverty. The city planning department was asked to ‘do something’ and do something it did, issuing two dramatically different proposals, more or less simultaneously.
The first of these operated implicitly beneath the aegis of a rule-inclined ‘theory of urbanism’, and amounted to ‘a gentle regeneration style solution’. The focus of this highly contextualized phase of planning was on patterns of built-form and land-use in the area, supplemented by cognizance of their interactions with social and economic factors. The planners asked: ‘Is there something unique about this place? If yes, should the uniqueness be retained?’ Responding in the affirmative, ‘a range of relatively modest initiatives’ were proposed – incremental adjustments to rules and policies – with a view to creatively enhancing existing place identity. For example, minimum size and wattage requirements for signs were designed to ‘encourage a bright lights, high-energy, slightly garish, ungentrified look’. These proposals were supported by a substantial urban design study, a less substantial land-use survey, community participation, and the knowledge and experience of public sector planners.
In parallel, a radical market-led ‘redevelopment’ scheme was assembled and quickly usurped the ‘regeneration’ process. Aligned implicitly with a model-inclined ‘theory of urbanism’, this phase bore the hallmarks of many reported cases of ‘entrepreneurial’ planning: public/private partnerships, lack of transparency, absence of community participation, shonky deals, etc. It ‘took the form of a marketing plan devised for the purpose of importing a particular core area image that had been chosen because it was believed that it would work to clean up the Toronto intersection … The project was standard international issue’. The existing place-identity was to be replaced (and many existing users displaced), supplanted by a simulacrum of what a city core ‘should’ look like. Proposals included a public square (Toronto’s very own Times Square/Leicester Square), a cinema/entertainment complex (Toronto’s very own Urban Entertainment Centre) and, of course, an icon (an Olympic Spirit ‘Torch’). The proposals and the process itself were imported models, hoisted holus-bolus onto the city, justified through ex post facto rationalizations.
Across four chapters, Milroy provides an exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, account of political, legal and other machinations associated with both phases of planning; 10 appendices supply further details. The book’s penultimate chapter paints a generally sorry picture of the built-form outcomes, including ‘The Torch’ (which looks, appropriately enough, a bit like an abductee to another planet – lost, dishevelled and bewildered), and Dundas Square (‘a not-quite-public public square’). The benefits of this thick writing are at least twofold. On the one hand, it provides an important and comprehensive account for posterity. On the other, it facilitates detailed engagement with what did happen (rather than what ought to have happened, in theory), providing a rich empirical basis for testing the adequacy of contemporary planning theory. Milroy finds the latter wanting along four key lines; the order in which she discusses them is inverted here so as to leave the most contentious (and original) argument to last.
In the first place (last place in her book), Milroy suggests that planning theories should draw finer distinctions between ‘planners’, ‘activities labelled as planning’ and ‘planning frameworks’; planners should not be scapegoats for ‘planning activities’ that are not their own. She underscores the oft-overlooked importance of planning frameworks, making the charming observation that:
An official plan sounds like an archaic device in these fast-moving times, but for urbanism it is like the commons – valuable as a kind of social contract by which players in urbanistic endeavours agree to abide, at least for a specified period of time, willingly or by force of law (p. 235).
Planning frameworks set forth the rules of engagement, the rules of the game, and, as Rollerball reminds us, no player must be greater than the game itself.
By extension, the game is open to a variety of players, not just planners, but also developers, designers, architects, lawyers, engineers, politicians, etc.; the ‘planning centredness’ of many planning theories needs to be re-thought. Not content to remove planners from the core of planning theory, Milroy also wishes to de-centre planning itself. To reiterate, the rules of the game are not about just anything; perhaps most importantly, they are not just about planning. Rather, they relate specifically to the shaping and management of urban areas, in a word, ‘urbanism’. Urbanism subsumes planning, the latter being but a bit-player in a larger field, a broader discourse.
If urbanism comprises planning’s context, for Milroy it also constitutes planning’s substance. This proposition has the potential to bind the ‘process’ and ‘substance’ of planning more closely than many extant theories. For example, the ‘figure’ of urbanism that dominates, whether rule, model or theory of urbanism, will have significant impacts on process and outcome alike – as the Yonge-Dundas case ably illustrates. Milroy does not dwell on this prospect; in her view, tensions between process and substance are irresolvable and probably productive. She argues for the need to maintain these tensions by dissolving the traditional hierarchy in planning theory that foregrounds process at the expense of substance.
Finally, Milroy contends that the ‘analogue’ between planning and social science has been ‘overextended’, leading to the dissemination in planning theory of denuded understandings of space. When planning theorists follow social scientists in rendering space as the product of socio-economic relations – and almost singularly so – they permit a partial perspective to masquerade as the total view: ‘Social science approaches to planning subordinate principles of spatial organization rather than allowing that they could also generate good planned milieus.’ More particularly, they fail to capture the ‘technical-aesthetic facets of space … Perspective, height, depth, light, movement, smell, sound, colour, scale, pattern, proximity, containment, and so on’. In short, such approaches elide, even eclipse, the ‘rule’.
While the principal function of this argument is to (partly) explain the sidelining of the ‘rule’ in planning theory, there is a further sting in its tail: social science approaches to planning can generate theories that uncannily mirror, without necessarily critiquing, the worst that contemporary planning practice has to offer:
The social science theories most often used in conjunction with planning describe space as being socially constructed through a variety of complex and reciprocal relations and exchanges that involve money, power, gender, ethnicity, and so on. In the second [Yonge-Dundas ‘redevelopment’] proposal, space was conceptualized as nothing in and of itself but instead as what can be created out of it by people who seek to use the space to advance their goals, be they economic, social or political.
This might be construed as a ringing endorsement of the perspicacity of these planning theories; alternatively, it might be read as self-fulfilling prophecy and unwitting complicity. With ‘technical-aesthetic facets of space’ all but excised from the core of planning theory, practitioners are left without the vocabulary, concepts, examples, arguments and alternative orientations to space that might be deployed to counter the worst excesses of cases like the Yonge-Dundas redevelopment.
Thinking Planning and Urbanism is a multi-faceted book, laden with insightful observations that often emerge almost by the by as different empirical issues are addressed in the case study. It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, with considerable potential to open new lines of enquiry in planning theory.