Day/ Week 1

Plan 502: Theory and Policy for Planning

• Don Alexander:

11 years at VIU

MCIP, RPP

Main direct planning experience has been working with citizens’ groups on land use issues and doing research consulting, never for local government or planning firms

• This will be a voyage of learning together as some of the material is quite challenging!

Welcome to 502!Office Hours: Wednesday 8 to 9 a.m. and by appoint in Building 359, Room 215 or in Planning Lounge. Phone: 753-3245, ex. 2261. E-mail: don.alexander@viu.ca

• Did you survive planning bootcamp??

• On Friday, International Parking Day will be celebrated on Commercial Street in downtown Nanaimo. Set-up at 10:30; operation 11:30 to 1:30.

Housekeeping Items

• Has everyone got a course outline?

• Have you got the one required reading, Readings in Planning Theory?

• Do you want to go over the assignments?

• There are two local examples of projects, either for the assignment where you compare policies across jurisdictions, or for the major case study where you look at the theoretical and practical implications of a given policy or plan:

The heritage policy of the City of Nanaimo, the first public meeting on the review of which was last night, and

The desire by Health Habitat based on Gabriola Island to investigate density policies in the immediate area

Housekeeping Items

Steps to Municipal Policy Review

1-Create a list of phone numbers for each municipality

2-Phone planning department to inquire at each municipal office (see edited questions below)

3-Create a spreadsheet to chart the following:

• municipality

• planning department contact person and contact details

• any multiple dwellings?

• minimum size for secondary dwellings? 

• minimum size for more than two dwellings?

• any restrictions on leaseholds or co-ownership?

Healthy Habitat

4-Proof and formalize above chart

5-Visually organize on a map that indicates municipalities that have existing policies supporting multiple dwellings

- one colour for two 

- another colour for more than two dwellings allowed

7.5 minute Private Video Preview 

Harmony Habitat's Eco Healthy Homes Project

Harmony Habitat on Gabriola Island, BC is a zero net profits research and development enterprise creating innovations in eco-housing and sustainable land use. Harmony Habitat's Eco Healthy Homes Project is uniting inspired minds to make healthy, deep green, ethically built homes attainable for everyone. The multidisciplinary team is developing comprehensive tools for builders to help reduce the health and environmental damage related to today's construction norms while making resilient, healthy

Healthy Habitat

…and durable eco-housing a broadly attractive choice.

Harmony Habitat's Eco Healthy Homes Project is designing a first-of-its-kind demonstration eco-cottage with the highest health, ethical and environmental standards along with a complete builders manual so any builder can customize and reproduce it. The project is also developing a brand new way for two land  partners to co-own land. The new land sharing model will make land more affordable in areas where zoning permits small second dwellings like cottages or lane way houses. The approach enables increased density with a minimal ecological footprint.

Both the eco-cottage design and land sharing template will comply with existing regulatory and zoning requirements in participating regions. The comprehensive resources will spare builders the research, supply, and regulatory hurdles usually involved in building to the highest standards. All the pathways, products and plans required will be provided in one complete package. This provides an achievable solution by simplifying a complex maze of constraints. 

Healthy Habitat

• What are your backgrounds?

• Motivation for doing the Planning Masters?

• This course focuses on theory and policy for planning. CIP has suggested that land-use planning “means the scientific, aesthetic, and orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities and services with a view to securing the physical, economic and social efficiency, health and well-being of urban and rural communities.” Any comments?

Welcome to 502!

Main Reading

• Fainstein, S. and S. Campbell, eds. 2012. Readings in Planning Theory (3rd edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Highly Recommended

• Fainstein, S. and S. Campbell, eds. 2012. Readings in Urban Theory (3rd edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

The required text is available at the bookstore, as are some copies of the latter. The top two are also on reserve.

Recommended

• Michael Larice and Elizabeth Macdonald, eds., 2013. The Urban Design Reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Readings

• The main text (and other of the readings) are heavily U.S. (or Britain)-focused. To correct that, I can recommend:

*Planning Canadian Communities (6th ed.) by Gerald Hodge and David Gordon (Toronto: Nelson Educational, 2014)

Canadian Local Government: An Urban Perspective (2nd ed.) by Andrew Sancton (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2015)

*Urban Canada (3rd ed.) ed. by Harry Hiller (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2014), and

Canadian Cities in Transition: Perspectives for An Urban Age (5th ed.) ed. Pierre Filion, et al. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2015). –only very old edition in library

*IN VIU LIBRARY

Readings (cont’d)

• I’m a bit of a Luddite, so there won’t be any VIULearn (though I have uploaded the outline and may do more), just my web site – see web.viu.ca/alexander2 and then click on “Courses.”

• While there is lots of reading, I have pared it down from what Pam had. Keep ahead of it as best you can and do it before class. If you get caught up, start on the next batch as some weeks are more intense than others.

• We have a 3-hour bloc, so we will mix up lecture with discussion and occasional short video clips and a 15-minute break in the middle. We may also have occasional guest speakers.

Accessing Outline and Assignments

• Please read the outline carefully!

Distribution of Marks and Assignment Due Dates

Assignments (due dates modified from original)

Review of planning policies

You will provide a review of five planning policiesDue 7th week of class

40%

Outline of major paper

Due 4th week of class 10% pass/fail

Major paper Topic is your choice (confirmed by professor and relating to a topic discussed in class/readings)Due 12th week of class

40%

Presentation  

Presentations in the last week of classes

10%

• No incomplete grade (INC) will be awarded except under exceptional circumstances. No substitute or make-up assignments will be permitted in this course.

• All assignments must be submitted in class. E-mailed assignments will be accepted only under exceptional circumstances.

• The correct format for file labeling is: Firstname Lastname Assignment # (for example, Don_Alexander_policyreview_#1).

• Important: References must be quoted in an academic format (recommended format is parenthetical APA style or in the style of a selected academic journal. Be consistent).

Expectations Regarding Assignments

• Pam will go into in depth. I’ll just mention Thomas Adams and the Commission of Conservation.

• Adams was a Scottish architect and planner (1871-1940) who took up residence in Canada. Highlights of his career included:

secretary to Garden City Association in the UK

first manager of Letchworth, the first UK garden city

designer of portion of new area in Halifax to replace Rich-mond neighbourhood destroyed by Halifax explosion (1917)

designer of portion of Cornerbrook, Nfld.

planner of mill town of Témiscaming, QC

author of Rural Planning and Development (1917)

Canadian Planning Traditions

• Adams was also associated with the Canadian Commission of Conservation, established by the Canadian government (1909-1921) to promote the wise

stewardship of human and natural resources. It promoted a form of ‘sustainable development’ almost 70 years before the Brundtland Commission.• While Adams was a progressive, he was more pragmatic than the visionary regional planners in the U.S., such as Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye (founder of the Appalachian Trail), Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and others.

Canadian Planning Traditions

• While Great Britain and, to a lesser degree the U.S., had their garden cities and ‘New Towns,’ Canada was noteworthy for its enlightened company towns such as Témiscaming (Adams) and Kitimat (designed by Clarence Stein).

• There were also some interesting innovations in conservational regional planning

Canadian Planning Traditions

• What are your views on the scope of planning and planning theory?

• Conceivably planning theory encompasses:

the role(s) of planners (examples?)

the social, cultural, political, and economic context in which planners operate (examples?), and

the changing nature of settlements in a global context (examples?).

• The main question the editors of the text seek to address is: “What role can planning play in developing the good city and region within the constraints of a capitalist political economy and varying political systems?”

Planning Theory

• The focus of this course is “on the planning that is done in the public sector by those who are responsible for guiding the future development of particular jurisdictions – typically cities or towns, counties, metropolitan areas, or other sub[provincial] regions…. [I]t is primarily in the local and metropolitan levels that a profession has emerged to carry out the planning process – a profession variously referred to as urban planning, city planning, community planning, regional planning, or some combination of these terms…” (Michael Brooks, 2002, p. 10).

• A key point for Brooks is linking knowledge to collective action.

• He also notes that “…planners do not operate in a vacuum; on the contrary, they are subject , at any given time, to a number of factors beyond their control. The political economy of the nation – capitalist democracy, in our case , does much to shape the planner’s sphere of action.” (p. 12)

Planning Theory

• The challenge is to bridge theory and practice – much theory is overly academic, and many practitioners operate without an explicit theory of what they are up against and, as a result, they muddle through, reduced to a sort of by-the-seat-the-pants pragmatism. We will try to ground theory in this class.

• Planning theory overlaps with all social science disciplines because it touches on the same issues – the role of the state, the market, and civil society, the public good, etc..

• No firm line between planners, real estate developers, architects, and city council members. [W]ho exactly designs, builds, manages, and finally tears down cities?” (Fainstein and Campbell). Is it planners? Our role may actually be quite modest.

Planning Theory

• Theorists divide into those who focus on purpose or goals and those who focus on process (how decision-making occurs).

• Unlike some disciplines, there is no one methodology. Planning borrows from a variety of different methods, both quantitative and qualitative.

• In its focus on issues of place and space, it straddles the fence between the academic and professional worlds.

• The authors argue that having a tension between theory and practice, where each informs the other, is productive, but a chasm is not.

• There are different conceptual elements that link the different branches of planning – community planning, sub-division bylaws, housing, transportation, urban design, even social.

Planning Theory

• Planning theory has some relation to policy analysis, but the latter has no explicit spatial focus.

• The evolution of settlements (cities, towns, and villages) influences planning and vice versa [see companion book Readings on Urban Theory, which is not required reading]

• Six questions of planning theory:

Historical roots of planning (Pam’s class will elaborate on)

Justification for – when to intervene? (e.g. market failure)

Values and ethical dilemmas in planning (desirable vs. possible)

The constraints within which planners operate (political & economic)

What planners do (many hats and roles)

Planning processes vs. desired outcomes

Planning Theory

• On the subject of planning processes, participation nowadays has a digital dimension (e.g. social media), as does research as there so many digital data sources. Data, which used to be scarce, is now often overwhelming!

• The places in which planners work are now more fluid (“space of flows”), as has been noted by geographer Doreen Massey and others. Migration and globalization have meant that places are no longer static, but are subject to constant change.

• This raises the issue/challenge of preserving community identity and amenities in the face of needing to be more competitive in a global environment – e.g. Vancouver’s housing market.

• What is the “public interest”? As we will see in Chapter 5, this is a very tricky and complex question.

Planning Theory

• The legitimacy of the notion was seemingly demolished by post-modern theory, but the latter is now itself in decline. If there is there no public interest, why do planners need to exist?

• In terms of planning’s antecedents, as you will learn in Pam’s class, there are various ancestors – the utopian socialists, such as Robert Owen, and also various housing reformers.

• There were also the authoritarian city-shapers, such as Baron von Hausmann, who redesigned Paris in the mid-1800s.

• There was landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park and Parc Mont-Royal. His son was was later involved in garden suburb development.

Planning Theory

• Daniel Burnham was principally responsible for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and for a very influential plan for Chicago. These two yielded the City Beautiful movement, which was later critiqued for its elitism.

• The ‘urban utopians’ – Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright -- as Fishman describes them, sought social transformation through complete urban transformation.

Planning Theory

• Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), Le Corbusier [Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris] (1887-1965), and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). All three were largely self-taught, and all three wanted to end segregation by wealth and class. They were visionaries in that they did not want to be limited by ‘what is’.

Planning Theory

• All three were rebelling against the nightmare reality (for most people at least) of the 19th/ early 20th century city

Planning Theory

• Such cities, at least for the poor and working classes, were crowded, sunless, airless, and unsanitary. They were firetraps and breeding grounds for epidemics.

• The three visionaries wanted to wipe the slate clean, but they all had very different visions.

Planning Theory

• All three “based their ideas on the technological innovations that inspired their age: the express train, the automobile, the telephone and radio, and the skyscraper.”

• Antiquated social relations and urban forms needed to be brought into alignment with the potential offered by new technology. They were a part of the modernist belief in progress before people had become disillusioned by war, genocide, arms proliferation, nuclear weapons, and environmental decline.

• One failing was that they put too much stress on the individual visionary, instead of seeing that cities are a collective work of art.

• Howard’s ideas were first published nearly 120 years ago and still hold influence. Numerous ‘new towns’ the UK and in the U.S. First garden cities were Letchworth and Welwyn.

Planning Theory

Letchworth – the first garden city

• Howard fostered a generation of planners who sought to implement his ideas into the Anglo-American world.

• Howard offered a multi-faceted and comprehensive plan, and he even addressed the fiscal aspects of how to bankroll them.

• He sought a peaceful path to social transformation and the decentralization of great cities into towns of approximately 30,000 each linked by rail.

• Beauty and symmetry would replace the ‘chaos’ of self-interested individual decisions. The centre of garden cities would be given over to civic institutions – schools, libraries, theatres, hospitals, town halls, and the like.

• Like the City Beautiful movement, the garden city concept put a lot of emphasis on public space and civic beauty.

Planning Theory

• That emphasis in planning has tended to fade away as aesthetic has been replaced with functionality, at least in North America.

• While Howard did not envision a lot of venues for ‘world-class’ culture, in his day people created much of their own culture – e.g. amateur theatre productions and concerts.

• While Howard supported the notion of private businesses, all land would remain in public ownership, with rents returning to subsidize public services. Compared with Canadian municipalities, where a mere 8% of all text money remains, this would be a dream.

• He was influenced by the writings of Henry George who argued that private land ownership led to ill-gotten gain (problems with this notion?). The same could said of general inflation of land values or impact of infrastructure.

Planning Theory

• Howard advanced the notion of the “social city” – a cluster of garden cities that would complement one another.

• He sought a balance of individual freedom and the collective interest.

• Le Corbusier was very different – his model was one of top-down administration through syndicalism. Each industrial enterprise, or syndicate, would be led by a single leader. The syndicates could federate and would meet to create a central plan for the economy. The role of these functionaries would not be to distribute wealth and power, but simply to administer.

• Plans were to be decided without people’s input: “[t]he harmonious city must be planned by experts who understand the science of urbanism. They work out the plans in total freedom from partisan pressures and special interests; once their plans are formulated, they must be implemented without opposition.”

Planning Theory

• Le Corbusier was of the opinion that city planning was altogether “too important to be left to the citizens.”

• Where people enjoyed a realm of freedom was in their home life. The provision was to be fairly egalitarian, with private units and collective facilities and services – workshops, rooms for participatory activities, cafés, restaurants, sports facilities, etc. All cooking, cleaning, child-raising, and laundry, would be performed by specialized staff while people were at work.

• The editors cut out Fishman’s description of Wright’s vision, but he called his “Broadacre City.” Cities would be abolished, apart from small county seats and shopping and employment nodes. People would work on their own acreage and work part-time in factories. Communities and farms would be linked by a network of super-highways.

Planning Theory

Radiant City and Broadacre City

• The James Scott reading talks about high modernism, that ideology that can find representatives across the political spectrum from fascist to communist.

• The high modernists wanted to subject society and humans to a ‘scientific’ version of social engineering. They envisioned a comprehensive ordering of nature and society. A good example is Robert Moses.

‘High Modernism’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUeuQT6t7kg

• High modernism had strong scientific pretensions and was authoritarian. It was based rule by a knowledgeable elite, and was “the ideology par excellence of the bureaucratic intelligence...”

• To be fair, it had well-meaning intentions (“the road to hell”?), and resulted in many improvements in social well-being, and it sometimes faced ill-informed opposition.

• Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was the opening shot in the fight against high modernism. As she noted in her first line: “This books is an attack on current city planning and building.” She dubbed the various currents of modernism as ‘Radiant Garden City Beautiful’. She felt that all strains, despite their differences, were found cities distasteful and neglected to learn from them as they actually existed and functioned.

‘High Modernism’

• You will look at more of her ideas in Pam’s class, but a key point was the modernists’ lack of respect for the positive aspects of poor communities, which were simply deemed as ‘slums.’

• Strathcona, Vancouver’s first residential neighbourhood, bore the brunt of local urban renewal schemes in the Lower Mainland. The neighbourhood, in the post-war years, was a bit run-down, but people loved their community and most residents owned their own homes. Part of the problem was that the neighbourhood was sandwiched in between industry and a city dump, and bankers were reluctant to extend loans for people to fix up their houses. Moreover, being populated by immigrants, the neighbourhood was stigmatized by the city administration and little effort was made to upgrade local infrastructure. In 1956, a city report stated that “Chinese quarter to the east of Main Street is at present of significance only to the people who live there.”

‘High Modernism’

• Despite the vibrancy of the community, the planners and politicians – the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Canadian – began to designate Strathcona as a slum, partly because, given their class and ethnic biases, it didn’t look like their vision of a ‘proper’ neighbourhood. Armed with federal money, they began to make plans to demolish the entire district and replace it with housing projects (sixteen square blocks and replacing them with concrete high-rise and low-rise housing blocks, with a total of more than 3,300 people being displaced, some to enclaves in the city where they were socially and linguistically isolated. They offered residents of the condemned blocks a pittance for their houses, pitted neighbour against neighbour, and threatened the holdouts with expropriation.

• Finally, in the late ‘60s, the residents (most of whom did not speak English or did not speak it well) formed a community association and took their cause to any politician who would listen at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. They were successful in defeating a second phase of the project that would have razed another 15 blocks and displaced another 3,000 people. The ‘renewal’ process was stopped and, based on a pilot project developed by the residents themselves, the federal government launched two new programs to help similar communities upgrade themselves: the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program (RRAP) and the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP). Both programs were later implemented across the country.

‘High Modernism’

Jane Jacobs• Jane Jacobs had a

revolutionary impact on planning theory, emphasizing the importance of the street and sidewalk as a social sphere, focusing on social capital in a neighbourhood context, and the importance of ‘eyes on the street’ which evolved into the discipline of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design.

• In Pam’s class you will talk about Jacob’s principles for successful urban design.

• In her book she criticized Ebenezer Howard, and Lewis Mumford, a disciple of Howard.

• Shortly after the book came out, Mumford wrote a scathing critique in The New Yorker under the sexist title, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.” When the essay was published a few years later, the title had been amended.

• While granting the validity of much of her argument, he makes some good point: Re title “big” does not equate with “great” She offers an uncritical rejection of garden

cities, new towns, and planned urban villages that led to improvements in the quality of life

Many neighbourhoods were dyfunctional even when they possessed her urban design features

Mumford’s Critique

She doesn’t adequately address the need for open and pedestrian-friendly space

She over-valorizes ‘liveliness’ to the deteriment of privacy and having back gardens

She takes a dim view of parks which for decades were safe,

And much more…

• I’ll say a few brief words about Friedmann, one of my heroes in planning school.

Mumford’s Critique

• Friedmann is a major theorist and a big picture thinker.

• In contrast with Jacobs, Friedmann wants images of ideal utopian cities. He suggests strongly that we need visions to compel us to action.

• Planning has always had a utopian dimension.

• Planning processes and desired outcomes must go hand in hand.

• Though people will debate what it is, people need a definition of the public good (see his critique of post-modernism on p. 93).

• He has a number of principles for the good city, one of which is that “Every human being has the right, by nature, to the full development of their innate intellectual, , physical and spiritual potentials.”

• He is critical of the neo-liberal myth of the individual.

• He offers six desirable criteria for urban-regional governance.

Mumford’s Critique