28 Promises Jeff Speck Says All Planners Should Make to the Public
Recently on the Strong Towns Podcast, we did an interview with professional city planner and author Jeff Speck on the 10th anniversary re-release of his book Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, the best-selling urban planning book of the past decade. The new edition includes an introduction from Janette Sadik-Kahn and 100 pages of fresh material, including the following remarkable essay, in which Speck suggests a new pledge that professional planners should take in order to qualify for certification. It is a trenchant critique of the American Institute of Certified Planners, an organization in which Speck is enshrined as a Fellow—at least as of press time.
Speck informs us that it is a work in progress, and he welcomes thoughts about what further commitments professional planners could make to better serve society.
The Role of Planning
Walkable City begins with the statement that “Jane Jacobs, who wrote in 1960, won over the planners by 1980.” This is largely true as it relates to strategies for the inner city but, on reflection, less accurate when it comes to how our cities and rural areas have been allowed to grow. By 1980, urban renewal was discredited and nobody smart was advocating for more inner-city highways, but the juggernaut of sprawl was only gaining momentum. Anyone who has traveled America over the past 40 years can bear witness to how our cities have been continually decanted outward into the countryside, as even the most rural crossroads manage to attract a tawdry detritus of Speedways and Dollar Stores. Sadly, this growth—destructive as it is to local economy, culture, and nature—was often guided by professional planners, who administer the zoning codes and development the standards that give it shape.
Fighting urban, suburban, and rural sprawl, which many of us have identified as the biggest physical mistake that America has ever made, is where I began my design career, turning only later to the problems and promise of our older towns and cities. We designed new towns like Seaside, Florida, and Kentlands, Maryland, hoping that these traditionally organized neighborhoods, based on walking rather than driving, would become beloved and therefore replace the single-use sprawl paradigm that everyone seemed to hate.
Only the former occurred. Every new neighborhood we built, unless expressly directed at low-income populations, quickly escalated into the luxury market as buyers voted with their feet. Developers took notice. There are now hundreds of New Urban communities around the U.S., but each one is an anomaly, and the car-dependent development pattern continues unabated.
It seems like we’ve tried everything. But that “we” is still narrowly defined, and the fight for more walkable communities actually, unbelievably, lacks the full-throated support of the planning profession. The American Planning Association (APA), the organization that has dictated the conduct of professional planners since mid-century, has never taken a stance on sprawl. It has a Sustainability division—not to mention a New Urbanism division—just as it has a Latino Division and an LGBTQ Division, as if socially responsible planning is some sort of demographic rather than the very reason for planners to organize in the first place. It oversees planner certification and ethical standards with a heavy hand, but it has little to say about the shape of our communities.
I can’t suggest with any confidence that transforming the planning profession from rubber-stamping enablers into anti-sprawl warriors will be enough to reverse 75 years of poor decisions, but it seems worth a shot. As a Fellow of the organization—at least until they read this—I would like here to launch a campaign to make this change. Jumping well ahead to its conclusion, I have proposed a first draft of the open letter that a properly reformed APA would issue to its membership and the media. It contains, in addition to a long overdue mea culpa, something I am calling the Planner’s Pledge, a commitment each planner would make to plan well and not badly. It’s a first draft, but I welcome the APA to run with it.
An open letter to all professional planners and the general public from the American Planning Association.*
As an establishment organization that has pushed for what it believed to be best practices while inevitably advancing the dominant ideology of its society, the American Planning Association wishes to formally apologize for the significant role that it has played in creating the unsustainable suburban development pattern that now constitutes most of the American built environment, reinforcing race and class segregation while burdening the vast majority of citizens with the mandate of car ownership.
To put it bluntly, we have participated and continue to participate in the creation of a landscape that separates us ruthlessly both from different activities and from different people, such that we are inordinately dependent on our automobiles and less connected to one another. While citizens of other nations enjoy daily life in walkable, mixed-use, diverse neighborhoods, the typical American lives in a cluster of economically identical single-family houses where it is impossible to walk to work, school, shopping, recreation, or worship. The outcomes of this pattern of growth could not be more profound. We have gained weight, lost economic resiliency, exacerbated inequity, and undermined the social fabric as our daily driving cooks the planet.
This changes today. Professional planners, who sit in city and town halls across the nation and create the rules that shape our growth, in being directly responsible for the current circumstances, must take responsibility for changing them. Apologies are not enough. We must step forward with a new model of professional conduct designed to undo nearly a century of misdirection.
It will take many years to reverse the zoning laws and transportation standards that created and reinforce our car-dependent landscape. Politics will continue to favor business as usual. The homebuilding and roadbuilding industries will keep pushing for more of the same, and will keep funding politicians who do their bidding. But municipal planners, as a profession, can take a stand. In some places they will be effective in changing the rules—it is already happening in Minneapolis, Seattle, and elsewhere—and every place makes a difference.
This effort is enforceable. Planners are professionally certified within the American Planning Association by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). Not every planner is certified, especially younger ones, but AICP certification is considered the hallmark of full professional status. Maintaining this status, which requires continuing education and adherence to a strictly enforced code of ethics, is something planners take seriously. The AICP certification is the tool that the planning profession can use to hold its members to a higher standard, one that acknowledges that it is neither professional nor ethical to build a landscape that actively damages our health, our social fabric, and our environment.
As of today, the American Planning Association will make AICP certification dependent on signing the Planners Pledge below. Those who object are welcome to create their own, alternative certifying body, perhaps the AICSP, the American Institute of Certified Sprawl Planners. Towns and cities, for their part, are welcome to continue to plan badly, defying everything we know about what makes for sustainable places. But they will do so without the blessing of a profession that is finally acting on decades of evidence that planning around the automobile makes America worse.
Some may say that the American Planning Association is a lumbering institution more concerned with its own preservation than about its impact on society. Most young planners question the value of AICP certification. With this act, we hope to reinvigorate the AICP imprimatur by giving it meaning. Planners who wish to earn or maintain AICP certification beyond 2022 will be planners who can be trusted to implement current best practices, which means throwing off many years of destructive convention. Just as doctors who prescribe leeches are no longer likely to maintain their licenses, planners who create or abet car-dependent sprawl will henceforth be relegated to ply their trade in the proverbial back alley, beyond the bounds of respected practice.
The Planner’s Pledge is as follows:
WHEREAS:
Car-dependent development is destructive to our health, our economy, our environment, and our social fabric.
Planning around the car is a self-fulfilling prophecy: traffic studies and parking minimums perpetuate and worsen the very car dependence that they hope to mitigate.
Land-use zoning, beyond its original purpose of separating housing from noxious uses, creates car dependence.
Most negative impacts of car-based planning will not be alleviated by electrification, especially the wasteful consumption patterns caused by decentralization.
Single-family zoning, invented to perpetuate racial segregation in the face of civil rights laws, is morally bankrupt and destructive to overcoming past injustices.
Income diversity within neighborhoods is a social good that developers will typically not allow for unless required to do so by local ordinance.
Affordable housing is not fully affordable if its residents cannot lead productive lives car-free.
Walkable, bikeable communities provide their inhabitants with a superior quality of life and must be acknowledged as an unmitigated good.
Achieving walkability depends on the creation of a physical framework in which walking is truly useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.
The majority of the American built environment is car dependent. These places should be allowed to grow, but only in ways that lessen that dependency.
Homelessness is a condition that cities can address most affordably by first providing housing and only subsequently placing any demands upon the person housed.
Primary schooling is best provided in neighborhoods in which it can be reached on foot. The same is true of daycare, playgrounds, parks, pools, and other municipal amenities.
I PLEDGE THAT I WILL:
Encourage more housing in walkable areas.
Encourage the construction of schools that most students can reach on foot or bike.
Encourage the construction of small local parks and other amenities.
Mandate inclusionary zoning.
Allow accessory dwelling units everywhere.
Support Housing First policymaking to fight homelessness.
Work to eliminate all on-site parking requirements.
Require all apartment properties to decouple parking fees from rents.
Require all large employers to offer transit passes, bike subsidies, or simple cash payouts to employees who do not drive, of equal value to a parking space.
Work to locate dense development along frequent transit routes and vice versa.
Encourage the implementation of docked bikeshare programs.
Insist that all new streets and roads offer low-stress micromobility routes, either through protected lanes or mixing with truly low-speed traffic.
Encourage congestion pricing for crowded roadways.
Encourage the adoption of Vision Zero policies.
Engineer new roads with a design speed no higher than the desired driver speed.
Advocate for firefighting equipment that fits streets and not vice versa.
Replace traffic signals with all-way stop signs wherever feasible.
Work toward a goal of continuous tree canopy above all thoroughfares and parking lots.
Advocate against bike helmet laws as they suppress ridership and worsen safety.
I PLEDGE THAT I WILL NOT:
Encourage or assist in the consolidation of schools or parks into larger facilities.
Encourage or assist in the proliferation of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft in places with significant transit ridership.
Encourage or assist in the development of any autonomous driving technology (or any technology) that limits the freedom of pedestrians and cyclists.
Build or abet the building of any new highways or highway lanes.
Allow traffic studies to limit new development or mandate wider streets.
Build or abet the building of any new throughfare that does not safely welcome pedestrians and cyclists.
Locate any parking lot between a right-of-way edge and a front door.
Locate any parking structures directly against the sidewalk edge without another use at ground level.
Encourage the destruction of any substantial sidewalk-facing building facade more than 100 years old.
In signing this pledge, I understand that it is equally binding as the AICP code of ethics, and that any violation thereof is grounds for revocation of my AICP certification.
Thank you for your understanding as you consider this profound change to our way of serving the public. For professional planners, we ask for your understanding and compliance. For everyone else, we ask for your forgiveness.
The American Planning Association and American Institute of Certified Planners had nothing to do with this text. It is fiction, a mere proposal. But wouldn’t it be nice if it were real?
*Again, this is my writing and did not involve the APA or AICP in any way.
Jeff Speck is a city planner who advocates internationally for more walkable cities. As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he presided over the Mayors' Institute on City Design and created the Governors' Institute on Community Design. Prior to his federal appointment, Mr. Speck spent ten years as Director of Town Planning at DPZ & Co., the principal firm behind the New Urbanism movement. Since 2007, he has led Speck & Associates, an award-winning design consultancy serving public officials and the real estate industry. With Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mr. Speck is the co-author of Suburban Nation, which the Wall Street Journal called "the urbanist's bible.” His 2012 book, Walkable City was the best selling city-planning book of the past decade. Jeff Speck has been named a fellow of both the American Institute of Certified Planners and the Congress for New Urbanism, and he was the 2022 recipient of the Seaside Prize. His TED talks and YouTube videos have been viewed more than six million times.
What is a city, anyway? Many problems in the urbanism realm boil down to people having different ideas of what a city is and what purpose it has. To be an effective advocate, make sure you and the people you’re talking to are on the same page.