Place Matters (or Does It?)

From even before the beginning of planning as we know it, place has been a determining factor in how, where, and why we build. Take rivers as an example. Some of the first ancient cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India were able to prosper as they did because they located themselves near rivers, which provided water and fertile ground for agriculture, allowing for a food surplus. There’s a reason we refer to these first cities as “River Valley Civilizations” – without rivers, they would not have been able to grow to the size they did. Fast forward over a thousand years to 17^th century American civilization, the situation had not much changed; rivers continued to exert both centrifugal and centripetal forces (forces that drive development outward and inward, respectively) on households and business. Watermills, a key economic component of the time, needed a steady waterflow to operate. In the competition for riverbank land, watermills spread along major rivers throughout the country – a centripetal force. Workers were drawn to watermills as places of work, just as farmers and homeowners were drawn to watermills as places to buy and sell grain. Areas surrounding watermills grew into towns – a centrifugal force. Regardless changes in how or why, rivers continued to be determinative elements of the success/failure of towns and cities for millennia.

And rivers are just one example of many, from the East Coast’s success due to port access to mining towns springing up around mineral deposits to fur trade driving American westward expansion. So then, why does it seem nowadays, place is becoming less and less relevant when it comes to planning? In a sense, it all boils down to two important advances in technology: the automobile and the microchip.

The invention of the automobile represented a paradigm shift because of how it changed human mobility. Journeys that once took months or even years could be completed in a matter of days. Cities that were planned for walkability were unfettered from the ideal 3-mile work-to-home commute and grew explosively. City planning reacted to the personal automobile with rapid decentralization through the creation of suburbia and expanding networks of roads and highways, catering to the growing class of car owners. Provided it was financially feasible, why would anyone want to live in the heart of the city, which was often overcrowded, dirty, with high rent and high crime, when they could live in a safer, cleaner life in a nice suburb and commute to work? Thus spoke the mass migration of those with means from the city center to suburbia. Following the automobile, cheaper plane, boat, and train transportation expanded our mobility even further. Families could move away and not fear they might never see their loved ones again. With advances in transportation technology, development has become less and less limited by the environmental and economic affordances of place.

So to with the invention of the microchip. It is hard to find a technology more world-shattering than the computer, and this is largely because of how it has completely changed our ability to communicate. Changes in communication technology have essentially revolutionized (and continue to revolutionize) urban planning. Nowadays communication is as fast as sending a text or an email – this means that you don’t necessarily have to go to work every day to still be productive, and indeed many do work from home these days. Furthermore, the world wide web is, as indicated by its name, a tool of global communication. Workers and companies can now partner internationally with relative ease, often without ever meeting face to face. The communication revolution has led to practices such as outsourcing, where a firm hires another company for simpler tasks, usually in another country where labor is cheaper. This sudden jump in communication ability again disrupts what was once a given in planning – houses must be close to work, and companies must be close to other companies that they work with. Computers once more remove many traditional limitations on planning.

With the invention of computers and personal cars, it seems to make sense that place is gradually becoming irrelevant in planning. Faraway places are so accessible, and people are so mobile, it is hard to imagine a time where city growth was mostly determined by proximity to natural resources. If the current trend of skyrocketing technology continues, it does not seem impossible that a day may come where place matters not at all.

However, I am not sure that is the case. Though our abilities to communicate and travel have indeed increased exponentially, we often neglect the fact that place is intrinsically entwined in our personal identities. There is a reason that we spent the first two weeks of this class not learning about planning techniques or history, but exploring how place has influenced how we define ourselves. Regardless of physical and digital mobility, cities still have unique cultures that tie residents to them even if they do move. In fact, it was after I moved away from my birthplace of Albuquerque to Tempe, Arizona that I most strongly identified myself as a burqueña. In the end, America is not so much a “melting pot” with all flavors combined as it is a banquet table covered in many different dishes. Place is a formative element of human identity.

Furthermore, the idea that place is not that important has led to some problematic outlooks on the field of planning. To paraphrase one of my classmate’s comments, one important aspect of technological boost to work at a distance is that it lets planners to falsely assume they can make informed planning decisions for communities that they have no sociocultural knowledge of and absolutely zero connection to. In a similar vein, bulldozing our way through barriers of the physical environment has often meant ignoring the consequences of our actions on the planet, something that will surely catch up to us sooner rather than later. Ignoring the social, cultural, and environmental aspects of place will have clear negative consequences for planners and the communities they help build.

I believe that place still matters, but not in the ways we are used to, and not in ways that are immediately obvious to us. Not despite, but because of advances in technology that let us overlook its importance, now more than ever place is something planners must carefully consider.

Sources:

Bluestone, B., et al. (2008) The Urban Experience: Economics, Society, and Public Policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.