Planning Is a Bigger Job Than Planning Can Do
This is part one of a two-part essay by Strong Towns member Tristan Cleveland. You can read part two here.
(Source: PublicDomainPictures.)
There is a team of people who do nothing but paint the Golden Gate Bridge. It is such a big job that by the time they finish painting it, they already need to start over.
Urban planning is supposed to work a bit like this. Local governments write plans for each community, and they are supposed to come back and adjust them every five or 10 years. Ideally, planners could update all their plans in a ten-year cycle, so they could keep them all reasonably up to date, just as painters keep the Golden Gate Bridge orange.
Unfortunately, I’m unaware of a single city that updates all its plans on schedule.
My city, Halifax, Nova Scotia, just finished a new plan for its urban center after 11 years of starting and stopping. At least it has a new plan. A nearby suburb, Spryfield, is stuck with a plan from 1978. The Business Commission there is desperate for more housing and retail space, but they are hemmed in by ancient regulations.
Halifax has a half-dozen other inner suburbs that need plan overhauls. The city is also supposed to write a few dozen “Secondary Plans” for its rural Growth Centres. Then there’s the Active Transportation Plan, Integrated Mobility Plan, Green Network Plan, Regional Plan, and more.
The amount of regulations the city needs to keep up to date is growing faster than our population.
The problem is worse in some places. Halifax at least has a bureaucracy large enough to update some of its plans. Many small towns only have one or two planners on staff, and the day-to-day work of processing applications consumes most of their time.
If the Golden Gate Bridge worked like planning, rust patches would grow to consume the grand old monument, leaving only tiny patches of orange where painters could direct their limited time.
None of this makes sense. Municipal planners complain they lack the money and staff to catch up with the backlog, but this is not the root cause. The problem is that planners have created a job bigger than they can do.
Even if we could update plans every ten years, that would be far too slow. Cities are dynamic, complex systems. Their needs change day to day, not decade to decade (as Strong Towns has emphasized elsewhere).
Today’s zoning codes are too rigid the day they are written, let alone when they are decades out of date.
An Alternative to Planning
14th-century Tunis offers a different approach. It was a beautiful city that met the needs of residents as it grew. It did not have zones for particular neighborhoods. It did not select growth nodes. No one wrote a vision or goals for each neighborhood. Residents did not even need to apply for permits to expand their homes or open shops.
Old town Tunis. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Instead, if residents wanted to make changes, they just had to follow a generalized set of legal principles. Most rules focused on avoiding harm to neighbors or the street. For example, residents were free to open a shop in their front door so long as it was not located directly across from their neighbor’s front door. Rules governed how water could drain through neighboring properties. Laws restricted activities that created odor, noise, or smoke.
A different approach to urban design.
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Critically, each rule was justified by a specific harm or need, enabling judges to interpret a rule by the merits of a case. There were no abstract rules that could stay on the books for decades without anyone remembering why it was there.
Altogether, the rules ensured that residents could make thousands of small changes—adding homes, opening shops, even building bridges over the street—without creating problems that could snowball. Over time, these small changes created a community ever-more adapted to the people who lived there. Tunis has a striking, organic beauty precisely because its leaders let it grow organically.
The Art of Simple Rules
Urban planners today recognize that communities are complex and diverse. They respond, however, by writing byzantine rules for each community, requiring each to stay diverse in precisely the way the planner dictates.
Medieval Tunis demonstrates a different path. It is possible, counterintuitively, to support greater diversity by using the same set of rules for all neighborhoods. The key is to ensure these rules are simple and limited in scope, allowing people to make their own choices, except where those choices would undermine some core requirement for the community’s success, health, or wellbeing. If rules focus only on essential requirements, they can otherwise free residents to change their homes as they like. This then enables communities to grow organically, responding to needs and opportunities as they emerge.
Apple farmers, similarly, provide the same soil, water, and nutrients for all trees, but then let trees grow into complex, self-organizing patterns. The requirements are simple, but they enable an infinite variety of trees.
(Source: Flickr.)
Modern planning attempts to micromanage complexity, like a farmer telling an apple tree where to grow. This approach to planning is doomed to failure. A planner cannot decide where businesses will succeed, or where residents will spend time. And writing such plans requires more work than cities can deliver.
Planning must become a job that planners can actually do in a 40-hour work week. This means we cannot write elaborate 10 year plans with intricate rules unique to each community, because every new plan multiplies the amount of work we need to do without multiplying the number of planners. Everyone in Halifax would need to be a planner to keep up with all of the city’s plans. Planning rules should, instead, focus on the fundamentals, and leave the rest to residents.
In the second part of this essay, I will offer concrete ideas for a more viable approach to planning, inspired by Tunis. I‘ll focus, in particular, on how to create walkable communities.
Tristan Cleveland is an urban planner with Happy City. He is also a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University's Healthy Populations Institute, studying how to ensure communities are designed to support human health.
You can connect with Tristan on Twitter at @LUrbaniste.
In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss the balancing act of building density in a place without wasting natural resources like mature trees.