Every so often I read something so good that I just have to post to alert to it, even if I don’t have much to add. This essay by Thomas J. Campanella is one of those pieces. It looks at the influence of Jane Jacobs on the urban planning profession, and in particular how her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities led to a decades long funk from which the profession has never really recovered.
It’s a great article because it puts so many of the issues facing the profession into a historical context; looking at it from the other direction, it shows how one of the fundamental, entry-level planning texts still taught at universities continues to shape debate. I love Jacobs’ book, and I love the story around it: it is one of the all-time classic instances of an outsider to a profession coming in and, with Emperor’s New Clothes-style clarity, completely demolishing everything that those smart-alec professionals believed. And, of course, she was right: you can quibble with all sorts of things Jacobs wrote, but her core criticism of the profession – that it was completely ignoring what actually made good cities good – was spot on. Probably no profession has ever made quite as much of a balls-up of their core business as urban planners did in the period after World War II. (No profession that uses as a core text a book as blatantly and completely bugnuts insane as Le Corbusier’s The City of To-Morrow and its Planning deserves anybody’s respect).
Jacobs’ critique profoundly shook the profession, and Campanella bemoans the way in which this has led to planning retreating from its core aims, and becoming timid and reactive in its approach. His discussion of NIMBYism is particularly interesting. I often hear planners in Victoria bemoan the extent of appeal rights in our system, and I tend to think planners need to be careful in demanding more power. I don’t think we have done well enough at either the large-scale planning, or the detail-level administration of the system, to have any moral right to demand that the community simply trust us. But as Campanella points out, if planners can’t effectively move to override the many competing interests of citizens to make a deicsion for the greater good, then who will? And if the planning profession won’t have the confidence to assert some notion of the greater good, what purpose does it serve? I don’t really have an answer to this dilemma, but Campanella’s article is a great piece to promote some thought about it. Certainly, reading the comments in popular articles on planning like this one in The Age the other day, it’s hard not to agree that planning faces a crisis in its ability to identify and communicate a clear mission to the general population.
The other point that Campanella makes is that the profession should look to return to what he terms “physical planning” as one of its core competencies. I can relate to this. I’ve long felt that what we tend – in the local profession at least – to refer to as “urban design” is the area where planning has taken its biggest leaps forward since the 1960s. If a public or private patron has the money, we basically know how to make a good place now: that wasn’t so true in the 1960s, as witnessed by the many desolate Corbu-inspired urban redevelopment projects. What we still have no idea how to do is to manage the city-wide issues, or to create a system that will foster a metropolitan-wide knitting together of individually good places into a desirable city. Instead we are stuck in the post-suburban pattern of building dispersed non-places with the odd bit of exceptional place-making dotted throughout. It is telling that in Victoria at least, urban design tends to get treated as a separate (albeit complementary) discipline to planning: that in itself is telling about the retreat Campanella refers to.
Note that Campanella’s article appears in a new book of essays on Jacobs, Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, that you can order here, or from the carousel below.
Image by “wenzda01,” used under creative commons license; find it here.