The Planning of Planning: Rationalities and Irrationalities of the Urban Planning Profession Julian Taylor

WHAT IS RATIONALIZATION?

American sociologist George Ritzer categorizes rationalization in four main categories: efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control. He argues that society is becoming more rationalized as time passes, using McDonalds as a prime example.

Efficiency refers to an increase in speed and output, while minimizing cost and input, like the way that McDonald's is able to provide food quickly and at a lower cost than its opponents.

Predictability refers to the consistency with which a job can be carried out to reach the same outcome, or the way that McDonald's provides consistency in it products across all American locations.

Calculability is the level to which profits, output, work, or other important factors can be converted to valuable numerical data; it is the reason that fast food chains can calculate the combination of input, output, number of employees, hours of operation, location, and more that will maximize profitability.

Businesses work to exert complete control over employees and consumers. It explains why customers are guided to specific areas for order and pickup and are incentivized to order specific combinations of food.

A DISCLAIMER: Urban planning is an attempt to rationalize our environment, which should not be mistaken with the rationalization of the occupation itself.

Planning is considered a 'wicked problem' (criteria displayed below). As a result, much of the planning profession requires working with new information and solving unstructured problems. Levy and Murnane (2013) name these two characteristics as broad categories of work that cannot be fully rationalized or replaced by technology. Despite this, strides within planning have been made towards and away from rationality.

A BRIEF HISTORY

Hippodamus of Miletus

According to Aristotle, the first to conceptualize and plan an entire urban landscape was the Greek philosopher, architect, and planner Hippodamus, around the year 500 BC. The city, Piraeus (shown above), was planned in “Hippodemeian fashion," a grid format, with many small streets and fewer major arteries. Hippodamus clearly separated the city by class, also making clear differentiation between private, public, and sacred land.

Planning for Public Health: Edwin Chadwick and John Snow

The division of cities into designated sectors took a new meaning in the mid 19th century when Oxford University published Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. His report studied the poor health outcomes of those living near factories or livestock facilities. Soon after, John Snow mapped a cholera outbreak in London, linking the disease to a specific water source. Chadwick’s report and Snow’s map marked the beginning of the concept that urban layout has much to do with health outcomes.

Urban Planning Roots in the US

Planning in the US took off around the end of the 19th century, highlighted by the following events: The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893, pictured here), The City Beautiful movement, and the First National Conference on City Planning (1909)

ACCREDITATION IN URBAN PLANNING

The American Planning Association

The First National Conference on City Planning led to the creation of The American Institute of Planners in 1917, which later became the American Planning Association (APA). The association boasts more than 40,000 members and is a crucial hub for the accreditation of planning figures and theories, with the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) falling under its expansive umbrella. The AICP provides experienced professional planners with national accreditation. Similarly, the JAPA provides accreditation to planning theories and works, publishing a quarterly journal, since 1935.

Urban Planning Education

The world's first higher education program in urban planning opened in 1909, at Liverpool University. America's first opened in 1923, with Harvard University's program for city and regional planning. In the 1960s and 70s, the profession saw significant growth; this was reciprocated by universities. The Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), founded in 1984, currently “accredits 78 master’s and 16 bachelor’s programs at 80 North American universities” (PAB). A master’s degree in planning opens up job opportunities in every aspect of planning, including design, consulting, government, and even jobs with an economic focus.

Predictability: Accreditation of universities ensures that students can guarantee a quality planning education, and that their degree correctly certifies their abilities. As planning education improves, a planner’s skillset becomes increasingly standardized and predictable. However, planners today also deal with an array of outside factors that influence their progress, some of which act as irrationalities. Three crucial outside factors to a planner’s function are government and regulation, community input, and technology.

GOVERNMENT, ZONING, AND CONTROL

Possibly the nation’s most historic and influential zoning regulation is New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution (pictured Here). The resolution considered structure height as a function of street width. Depending on the area, buildings’ heights were limited to anywhere from one to two and a half times the width of the street that it bordered

Zoning refers to government regulation on the type of structures that can be built in a certain area. Cities enact zoning policies, with the help of planners, to achieve a more predictable outlook. Zoning regulations can provide a conflict for planners, between what is required and what is optimal.

In Apex, NC, for example, the 2045 Land Use Map (below) requires a significant amount of housing that is medium density, which can include single family homes. However, current trends in the profession point towards sustainable urban planning, which includes housing density.

Control: Rationally, a professional with the highest level of academic accreditation for the topic at hand, amongst all involved actors, should receive the plurality (if not majority) of control. In the case of a planner with a master’s degree, much of their planning control is lost to government regulation.

ADVOCACY PLANNING, CONTROL, EFFICIENCY

In 1933, Robert Moses (pictured here) was appointed to lead the New York City Parks Department and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Moses expanded his authority, amassing wealth and power for his departments through highway and bridge tolls. He changed the city landscape forever, through a process known as urban renewal.

Efficiency and control: Robert Moses’s impact is generally viewed negatively, in the current world of planning. His projects displaced many lower class New Yorkers. I believe, however, that this form of the planning profession is far more rationalized than what exists today, on account of efficiency and control. Moses actualized a massive portfolio of projects with a speed that has never been replicated in urban planning since.

Robert Moses’s urban renewal was met with a force of community-oriented activism that changed the efficiency with which planners operate today. In his reckless neighborhood clearance, he was met with the public force of Jane Jacobs (Pictured Here).

Jacobs organized community members to rally against Moses. She could not always defeat him, but her ideals far outlasted his. Current American planning implementation incorporates public opinion. The majority of projects must be granted approval by the town or city council, a body that meets only once a month and can discuss projects over the course of multiple meetings. The meetings allow time for council members and constituents to voice their opinions on proposed projects.

Efficiency and control: The forums for public opinion that planners must attend, as well as the extensive process through which proposals are put (see below), decrease the rationality of the planning profession, via the principles of efficiency and control. Time that planners spend gathering public opinion is time that could be used to practice the expertise that is gained through a planner’s accreditation.

TECHNOLOGY, EFFICIENCY, AND CALCULABILITY

Innovations in planning technology

Geographic information science (GIS): GIS combines the important planning responsibilities of spatial mapping and data. Using updated imagery from satellites, GIS technology gathers data and visualizes it for planners.

Virtual Reality (VR): Some VR platforms allow planners to virtually create realistic renderings of projects that can be manipulated and viewed from all angles. Other forms of urban design technology are less complicated and more user friendly. Planners can save the time and energy that is required to build a physical model of proposed projects, by doing so virtually.

Design Workshop, Inc.’s digital rendering of Winter Park Resort in Colorado.

'Cities: Skylines,' a paid video game, allows users to experiment with city design.

Smart cites: Smart cities are defined by devices that are connected to the 'Internet of Things.' They upload and store data that can be used by planners. An example would be a road or sidewalk sensor that monitors vehicle or pedestrian traffic. When connected to the Internet of Things, this sensor could communicate with stop lights to better regulate the flow of traffic

Efficiency and calculability: Technology brings efficiency to urban planners by reducing the cognitive and manual routine tasks that are associated with gathering data and displaying proposals. New methods of data collection (smart cities), increase the calculability within a planners job, by providing accurate and up-to-date information.

MY TAKEAWAYS

Through the research described on this page, I’ve learned that rationalization within the urban planning profession is not a linear or simple process. Each of rationalization's four principles show up in varying combinations throughout the narrative of planning history. Efficiency is perhaps the most nuanced of the four, showing both growth and recession at different points in time.

The planning profession influences our daily lifestyles, and is therefore a communal topic. Evolving standards and values make a large mark on the changes in planning theory, which impact the way that the profession itself is conducted. Evolution is also the reason that planning has had a varying relationship with rationality. Much of planning is reactionary and has no true formula for complete rationalization.

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