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Intersection in Planning Philosophies

There is one concept to community planning that isn’t marketed well at all, but is very important to know right off the bat: the idea that as community planners, there isn’t a right and a wrong but rather a better and a worse. At first, I was incredibly disheartened to know that as a planner I would never be able to help fix a problem that plagues a place I really care about in its entirety, or even that I may on occasion accidentally make something worse. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that there wasn’t objectively right and wrong answers too, as I had always identified myself as the objective over subjective type of person. This irked me a bit more than it probably should, however as someone who is just beginning her planning journey I am both consciously and unconsciously putting a lot of weight into what I experience in class and otherwise. I thought to myself, “oh man, I am not in the right field – what am I going to do?” Which at year three of an undergrad, isn’t a comforting thought.

However, I thought on it, and realized that anyone who could hope to completely solve wicked problems – issues affecting entire societies with no discernible cause or solution (informally known as clustered “messes”) – and phenomena that are massive and complicated like climate change in their entirety is ridiculous. Think about it: even though we love to paint historical tales with broad brush strokes and to generalize enormously there are very few examples of a group solving entire wicked problems on their own. Even fewer still of people who could boast such a feat by their lonesome. In fact, I can’t think of one such example, though I admit I am not a wellspring of historical planning knowledge just yet.

This particular lesson made me realize that planning is all about doing what you can. Seeing, listening, understanding, and acting on what is within your abilities. Sure, anybody can plan, but your ability to come up with solutions is limited by what you know, and that’s the actual reason we all go to school. We’re all hoping to level up and take on a successively more difficult boss with each battle. Be it bike lanes in rural areas or transport of agricultural crops to improving a major city’s infrastructure or enacting societal change of values with policy. Basically, even if all I do is help put up more pedestrian crosswalk’s, I’m going to be dang proud of that crosswalk because I did something to help a little.

Perhaps this fascination with instant large-scale solutions inspired Urban Renewal. It sounds nice and pretty, but this school of thought that served as the basis for many wide-scale city renovation projects in the 19th century put into practice accomplished what I believe to be more harm than good. Essentially, privately owned parcels of land, whether containing built structures or not, were obtained by the government with the use of eminent domain - defined as the seizure of private property from the government when for public use, usually. This is suspiciously contrary to the high valuation of private ownership in American culture, but incredibly consistent with greed. At this point, though written in the constitution as the fifth amendment, the government would award "just" compensation, in practice defined as nothing more than the fair market value of the location without the cost of having to relocate – keeping in mind that in many cases, the cost of relocating went beyond the monetary. Next, it would either be built on by contractors employed by institution (it was highly common to "revitalize a place" by mowing down everything on it, often a real sticking point with the locale), or by handing out the deed to private developers for their personal use for the price of free or severely under it's worth (also known as “land write down”). This is a process that had been upheld even in the highest court of the land - the Supreme Court. Urban renewal was used to the effect of generating more urban sprawl, more barren land parcels, and more gentrification.

This process, while having occasional benefits, inevitably lends itself more to corruption and oppression. Urban renewal was used in conjunction with redlining to destroy minority communities and assert the powers of the rich over the poor. It was used primarily in places that had fallen into urban decay, but when the only people in office are rich and white than any community not identical to their specific vision would appear to be in that very state of decay that justifies their flattening of community. Even if the institution itself had no inherent motives, other people with money did, and could easily buy off the officials who had the say on what stayed and what went in a city. I get the appeal of starting fresh and building from an empty canvas, but this policy lent itself to far more harm than good, and to this day largely impacts at risk communities with no real solution in sight. Yet another wicked problem for planners to grapple with. Thankfully, with an increase in attention to diversity and activism, this is an issue from the past that is becoming more and more recognized as something that needs to be dealt with and corrected.

Another issue from the 19th century that has not gotten the same attention is density, or the cramming of people into tight spaces. Whenever I learned about problems of the past, it was always about urbanization – the moving of people from rural to urban areas – and the Industrial Revolution. Never in the time leading up to this class did we cover density as one of the primary issues of the time, because of course it would be a big deal! Density being an issue in this time is an idea that shouldn’t have taken this long to enter my brain, quite honestly. In this time period, before sanitation, before mobility beyond walking or horse and buggy are accessibly to many, where mass migration to relatively tiny places occurred as a desperate gamble to make their lives better for themselves, there are people packed in like sardines and diseased like rats. It was actually due to this density and the resulting diseases that people were dying, not old age. That fact surprised me too: cities were genuinely killing people, but you wouldn’t be able discern this trend from the massive population growth because it was predominantly offset by the mass inbound immigration from rural areas as urbanization was taking place. Density problems at this scale have never once been seen again in the modern United States, and that is definitely for a reason, who would ever want to return to that lifestyle even with modern conveniences of this century, like waste management, plumbing, and electricity?

Unfortunately, Dhaka, India is one such place experiencing this problem. I am not suggesting that our 19th century city influenced Dhaka in any way, but I do acknowledge that this is the only city in the world today with a similar density to a common urban core from that era. And it is certainly suffering for that density in both similar and different ways that cities from the past did. Namely, that the impoverishment in Dhaka is absurdly high at rates that are almost unimaginable. Though they are working on it. Now that I know of the immense challenge Dhaka faces, I will be absolutely keep an eye on the city to see how it solves it’s density problem, and then I can maybe gain more insight into why our cities are structured as they are today.

Cited

Cox, Wendell. “Evolving Urban Form: Dhaka.” The Evolving Urban Form: Cairo | Newgeography.com, 2018 New Geography, 8 Aug. 2012, www.newgeography.com/content/003004-evolving-urban-form-dhaka.