Grandiose visions of urban futures are helpful. Just don't confuse them for plans.

Like millions of people my age, I played SimCity as a kid. It's become a cliché to malign the classic video game: its bad caricature of urban planning done from the top by autocratic master planners is persistent in the popular imagination (among those who think about planners at all), breeding cynicism and mistrust.

Yet SimCity taught me how to look at real cities, too, in a sense. Specifically, the game helped me recognize at a young age that there's nothing inevitable about the form of our real cities. They are the product of a set of choices. I started to see, and wonder about, the DNA of the places I went: the telltale signatures in the world around me of things like zoning and building codes, and the decisions of agencies like the state Department of Transportation. As I got older, I learned how real urban planning works—and how utterly unlike SimCity it is.

There is a lot of real-world value in fantasy visions of cities, though. A good fantasy expands our sense of the possible. It helps us see the everyday environment around us not only as it is, but as it could be. More than that, it helps us understand that what it already is was designed in a certain way and serves certain interests: the status quo is not a neutral or default condition. It's a choice. 

On July 9th, the New York Times op-ed section published a remarkable piece of urban fantasy by Farhad Manjoo, titled "I've Seen a Future Without Cars, and It's Amazing." The piece relies heavily on illustrations and conceptual insight from Vishaan Chakrabarti, a former New York City planner and the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a Manhattan-based architecture firm.

The op-ed sketches a vision of a future Manhattan mostly devoid of private cars—exempting such things as delivery vehicles, rideshare and taxis, emergency vehicles, and paratransit. The piece contains some statistics on the costs of driving in accidental deaths and air pollution, but much of the case is made via artist renderings that show the city transformed by reallocating public space from driving and parking to other uses, including walking, cycling, public transit, street vendors and public plazas. None of them are especially surprising if you're engaged in thinking about urban design for a living—but if you're not, the before-and-after illustrations are quite possibly revelatory.

The renderings are striking, and the whole thing makes a compelling case for something that I think the general public doesn't understand about cars: the cost of the sheer, staggering amount of space they require, both when they're moving and when they're parked. An aerial map demonstrates, for example, that if you added up all the space Manhattan devotes to cars, you’d have an area nearly four times as large as Central Park.

It's a provocation, a discussion-starter. It conveys the costs of car dependence in a visual way that laypeople can latch onto. It's the kind of linkable reference point that makes my job at Strong Towns easier. It's not easy to talk about the underlying patterns that shape our built world, let alone to imagine different ones, to jolt people out of seeing a place they've always known as inevitably looking and feeling the way they've always known it.

So I'm a big fan of graphic-heavy thought experiments like this. You just have to understand what a lavishly illustrated think piece can do and what it can't. And the harm it can do when we let ourselves become confused about that question.

Don't Mistake Urban Fantasies for Planning 

It's often alleged that there's something undemocratic or elitist about this kind of grandiose vision—urbanist fantasies that can be sketched out by any wannabe Baron Haussmann who's uninterested in the actual struggles or voices of real people.  

“An op-ed is not a plan. It’s not even a formal proposal. New York is not going to go out and, tomorrow, start tearing up asphalt to implement Chakrabarti’s concept.”

Let's get the obvious out of the way: an op-ed is not a plan. It's not even a formal proposal. There is no ethical obligation to do robust or representative community engagement before writing an op-ed. And New York is not going to go out and, tomorrow, start tearing up asphalt to implement Chakrabarti's concept.

The Manjoo piece does not get into any questions of process. It makes no assertions about whose voices ought to set the agenda in shaping the future of transportation or public space in Manhattan. It merely depicts one possible such future.

But does it make implicit assertions? In other words, does the very act of publishing a piece like this—long on artists' renderings of redesigned streets, short on grassroots community voices—serve to push an agenda about how planning process ought to work and who ought to be at the table, and what kind of knowledge or expertise is valuable? 

The Manjoo op-ed quickly drew its share of criticism of this nature: that the whole thing reinforces a culture of top-down planning favoring the interests of those always granted an invitation to the table: white people, men, high earners, the able-bodied. Daniella Fergusson, a planner in British Columbia who writes frequently on the exclusion of non-dominant perspectives from planning, put the criticism this way on Twitter:

Do people still not understand that the main audience for that NYT article is decision-makers in local government who will issue a dictat on bike lanes and hire fancy consultants, and that the same people who are always left out of decisions & investment will be left out again?

We've seen this before in fads followed by growth-hungry city officials, from aquariums, stadiums, convention centers and entertainment districts, to the powerful influence of Richard Florida's "creative class" theories on urban economic development priorities in the early 2000s. There is a certain type of local decision-maker easily seduced by a credentialed expert offering One Neat Trick.

And the elevation of technical and design expertise over lived experience can be part of that. Does the fact that Vishaan Chakrabarti and those who work with him know how to make these pretty renderings mean that they should get to set the parameters for designing our world, and my neighbor who uses a wheelchair should sit back and settle for being "consulted" in the form of a survey or opportunity to comment at a hearing?

Technical experts are not unbiased observers of cities: no amount of data wrangling or design chops can prevent you from bringing your own perspectives, experiences, and blind spots with you when you sketch out a vision. Reliance on technical expertise affects what gets our sustained attention and what doesn't. It affects which priorities are seen as "sexy", and it favors priorities of the elite with political capital or access. 

The threat posed by starting with the top-down vision and filling in from there is that the bottom-up details needed to make the vision work for real people—and especially real people with less access to the table of power—will go ignored. The existing unmet needs of people with disabilities in New York—unmet, often, because they're small and don't get sustained attention, not because they're big—are glaring. In fact, here's a thread about them. How many missing curb ramps are there in a place the size of Manhattan? How many subway stations are not fully accessible?

Does that mean it's not also true that a world of far less space devoted to cars, and far more adequate other options, would have the potential to be far better for people with disabilities? I think that's a pretty slam-dunk case.

But you have to get there from the bottom up, with the extremely fine-grained community feedback that will tell you what obstacles people actually face navigating their lives on this block of this street at this time of day, for people in this or that personal situation or demographic group. There's no way around that.

Where Does Fantasy Fit in to Planning?

The criticism of the Manjoo piece that I reject is the notion that there is no value in a vision piece like this, or that it is intrinsically elitist. It's worth contemplating where power actually lies on the issues Manjoo addresses, and where it will continue to lie if we don't engage in rethinking cities in a big way.

“Most people, most of the time, can’t envision the world vastly different from how it is now... So showing people something they don’t know or might reflexively fear can be invaluable.”

Hint: power doesn't lie with the "ban cars" urbanist brigade. Not when federal, state, and local governments spend 500 times as much on highways as on bike and pedestrian infrastructure. Let's be very clear that the critics of car hegemony whose perspective is best represented by Manjoo's op-ed, although they've made strides in recent years, are not a dominant group in city planning or local government. Even in Manhattan.

There's, quite simply, a difference between visioning and planning. And communities historically not at the table should have a much greater voice in both! But we still need technical experts like Chakrabarti who can show us the hidden parameters and built-in biases of the world we live in, and do it in a way that offers a sweeping, panoramic view.

Most people, most of the time, can't envision the world vastly different from how it is now. If you ask people what kind of future they want for their street or community, they're going to give you something informed by what they find normal. I designed dozens of fantasy cities and drew maps of them as a kid, and to my recollection, all had freeway moats ringing downtown. That was what I knew. So showing people something they don't know or might reflexively fear can be invaluable.

The paradox of democratic, grassroots, participatory planning is that the more actual implementation is focused, as it should be, on the urgent, lived struggles of people on the ground, the more important it's going to be that we also continue to discuss visions of the end state we'd like to get to. If we don't, what will actually result is a powerful, and harmful, bias in favor of the status quo pattern of development and distribution of spending and attention. 

This means planners have two jobs at once. One is to humble themselves to let the lived experiences of the people they serve set the implementation agenda. Proceed through tiny steps, in an iterative process, with real public participation (not just consultation) in those steps. This looks like, for example, putting city resources into pilot projects that are community inspired and led, and creating mechanisms to do this at scale, not as one-off experiments that look good in a report.

Two, at the same time as you're doing this work, be wary of the status quo bias that will result if all you do is the tiny steps without an aspirational vision or a set of criteria to guide discussion and critique. Planners, and informal built-environment experts, need be the facilitators of a neverending community conversation about big-picture visions, including but not limited to those like Chakrabarti's that come from design experts. Use them as tools for dialogue and brainstorming and mutual understanding. You have to elevate the conversation by helping people understand the world as it is, not as an inevitability but as the result of a set of choices.

This isn't easy. But it's made even harder by the oversimplistic suggestion that merely participating in this kind of thought exercise is itself an act of oppressive silencing of grassroots voices. It's not.

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