Timothy Shah

October 20, 2010

PLAN 502
A Holistic Analysis of Planning History in North America

Prepared for: Leonie Sandercock

A planner’s history is one of shame and triumph,

This is his story; listen, comprehend and evaluate,
His tools are capable of transforming a community’s physicality
He will assess, plan and design to reach an optimal vitality,
His influence is profound in embellishing the city,
Slum clearance, master plans, and zoning as tools of rationality,
Urban problems arise and ignite his reactive thinking,
A proliferation of problems suddenly loses his focus,
His attention shifts to a new locus,
David continues to search for Goliath,
Goliath scale planning problems allow him to showcase his heroism,
Blind self-interest may be defeating an act of egotism

What about Bauer, Jacobs and Hayden on the value of community planning?
They are too radical and futile for his simplistic thinking,
Geddes, Adams and Howard define my profession,
Revolutionary ideas putting others in suppression,
Why is he the ultimate and omnipotent human being?
Where is the she, they and people in this story?
His social imagination is constrained and exclusive,
Sharing power with the community must be an illusion,
Pro-active thinking is counter-intuitive in his mind,
To bind with the architects is his ultimate find,
This is his planning story

Frederick Gardiner once said “planning was too often an academic, impractical exercise, an
obstacle to the business of the city, an impediment to bold ambitions” (Bocking, 2006, p. 60).
June Manning Thomas once said “planners were often held responsible for the racial effects of
their actions even though the decision makers often were not planners” (Thomas, 1995, p. 201). I
open this essay with two quotes to illustrate the conundrum that continues to plague planners,
that is, a wide variance in public perception viewing them as both good and evil. The first quote
by Gardiner reminds me that planners have, at times, endeavoured to fight large scale
infrastructure projects that would displace residential communities. Gardiner said this about
planners, because some, in the 1950s, spoke up against the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto
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which was seen as symbolic of economic progress for the city by some; however, the
construction of the Gardiner demolished more than 170 houses and erased many streets around
lakeshore (Slater, 2003).

The second quote by Thomas explains how planners are sometimes victims of their own
professional zeal. While figures like Gardiner blamed planners for delaying massive urban
infrastructure projects, those affected by the project – usually marginalized and low-income
communities – might directly lay the blame on the planner who was vehemently sticking up for
the community in the first place. Indeed, planners can become scapegoats because their
profession is not always clear or understood by the city in which they work. Thomas further
elaborates by discussing how planners were often held responsible for the racial effects of their
actions even though the decision makers often were not planners.

Whether directly involved or not, planners have been accused of helping architects carry out
social segregation, particularly in places like New York City. In my undergraduate urban history
course, I learned a little bit about the malicious and racialized planning in American cities. More
often than not, it was design and racial politics that problematized the planning process. For
example, some bridges in Long Island were deliberately designed to have low clearance (9 feet)
to discourage public transit on the parkways so buses could not pass through them. These buses
would mostly be used by low-income groups and racial minorities who had issues with
automobile affordability (Tuan, 1994). Discouraging public transit and impeding groups from
mobility depicts how physical infrastructure in cities can cause social segregation. It was the
architects who designed these projects but planners were blamed for allowing this type of design
to shape parts of the urban landscape.

These two stories can be seen as contrasting interpretations of planning history. In this essay, I
will draw on two interpretations of planning history. One is offered by David Gordon and Gerald
Hodge in their book Planning Canadian Communities. The other interpretation is drawn from
stories laid out in Making the Invisible Hand edited by Leonie Sandercock. Importantly, I
discuss the dominant narratives, voices and themes of the books, and provide a comparative
analysis of the stories told.
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Story-telling and Planning

Kenney writes “planning has much to learn from histories that foreground political struggle, for
it is through an experimentation of this resistance to discrimination and isolation that the process
of cultural formation and the use of urban space become relevant to planning historians”
(Kenney, 1998, p. 130). This quote is used to describe the activism of the gay and lesbian
experience in the city, specifically mapping the connection between place and collective identity
that is at the heart of the gay and lesbian experience. The chapter on the Stonewall riots
illustrates a picture that traditional planning history forgot to paint. Kenney’s quote above
resonates in the thinking of insurgent citizenship which can be a challenge to modernist
planning. Gays and lesbians help transform inner city neighbourhoods by bringing a new sense
of culture and urban vitality. This is not often discussed in conventional planning history texts.

Hodge & Gordon, while telling their story of modernist planning, discuss it as a state driven and
utopian like process. Their story effectively highlights a number of themes that constitute urban
problems such as congestion, unhealthy sanitation, poverty and health epidemics like cholera and
how the planner responded to these challenges in a heroic and professional manner. Indeed, these
were significant challenges of the 19th and 20th century that affected the urban fabric of the city.
But, who was truly a part of that urban fabric and how did these urban issues relate to the people
most affected by them?

Urban planning as a profession has ineluctably avoided contentious topics like the inclusion of
the gays and lesbians in the urban fabric of the city. Keeney elaborates “there has been extensive
and systematic practices of oppression and discrimination targeting gays and lesbians as threats
to the urban social order, a century of resistance to this oppression, resistance that has been both
overt (in the form of political and social activism) and covert through the establishment of
independent gay and lesbian enclaves and cultural forms hidden” (Kenney, 1998, p. 120). In the
history of planning, vulnerable groups such as the gays and lesbians and minority groups like the
Chinese and East-Indians in Vancouver were forced to surreptitiously gather together and form a
collective cultural and urban identity.

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The Hodge & Gordon book view planning as a scientific, technical and rational process capable
of solving complex urban problems. Their historical overview very much parallels the
contemporary planning definition from the Canadian Institute of Planners (2010): “Planning
means the scientific, aesthetic, and orderly disposition of land, resources, facilities and services
with a view to securing the physical, economic and social efficiency, health and well-being of
urban and rural communities”. The concept of social efficiency is not well understood and
assumes that social circles or social conditions are capable of being engineered to achieve
optimal efficiency. It is this approach that takes a hegemonic perspective where the planner
works with the community to solve their problems, through a set of tools that are deemed to be
municipally appropriate.

The historical community planning framework outlined in the Hodge & Gordon book pays close
attention to concern over city appearance, city living conditions, the environment and city
efficiency. These concerns have historically led to urban reform movements such as the City
Beautiful, or Slum and Sanitation reform or Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept. Their
perspective demonstrates that planners have a significant interest in making cities more livable
and beautiful but the impact of these projects -such as beautifying and making our cities healthy -
can inevitably result in wide-ranging ramifications on the poor. The planning history told in
Making the Invisible Visible sheds light on some of the displaced people impacted by these
planning and architecturally utopian driven projects.

“City beautiful planners had correctly identified most of the main elements of a community’s
physical form with which a planner needed to work: the street pattern, the public buildings and
the park – the elements under public control” (Hodge & Gordon, 2008, p. 75). This statement
assumes that movements like the City Beautiful created jobs for planners, because without them,
there would not be a planning profession. They fail to explain the real social injustices that
emanate from such movements and why planners are the right profession to deal with them.

In Sandercock’s “Framing Insurgent Histographies” chapter, there is a discussion that contrasts

the urban design thinking offered by Hodge & Gordon. Turning our attention to 19th century
Paris, a place familiar with Baron Haussmann’s City Beautiful projects, problems like social

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disorder, congestion, and unsanitary conditions could be remedied by the planner’s domain. The
so-called “purification of the social/urban body” involved massive changes to Paris’ built form
and the expulsion of many residents from the city centre (Sandercock, 1998). “Modernity and
hygiene served as the pretext for the demolition of entire quartiers”.

The population of Paris proper began to decline and many workers were dispersed to outlying
suburbs. The Algerians, who have long been discriminated against in France, lived in unhealthy
blocks inside the city. These areas soon became targets for aggressive renovation in the early
1960s (Sandercock, 1998). Finally, neighbourhoods that had a significant immigrant population
justified a state-driven urban renovation process where the removal of poor dilapidated houses
could ameliorate the social, health, and hygiene problem, ultimately contributing to a better and
more robust urban form.

I allude to Sandercock’s chapter to portray a significant contrast in the interpretation of

modernist planning, one that challenges this state-driven and design focused process. Hodge &
Gordon discuss this process through an urban design perspective which is consistent with the
structure of their book. However, it gives the reader the impression that planners have
historically had professional responsibilities of urban design to improve the overall urban fabric
of the city.

Sandercock challenges this problematic structure and gives us an understanding of how planning
within the capitalist modernization framework has searched for excuses, such as poor hygiene, to
forcefully remove vulnerable groups: “20th century planning used the language of social hygiene
as a rationale for removing immigrants and people of colour from certain parts of cities”
(Sandercock, 1998, p. 18). Planners have a whole range of responsibilities beyond urban design.
The modernist planning perspective is focused on urban design and thus public perceptions
around what planners do focus narrowly on urban design; this may confuse planners’
responsibilities with an architect’s responsibility.

To conclude this section, I offer a story that depicts and urban planning problem that was not
solved by an urban planner. This story is meant to address how “reactive” thinking is sometimes
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not the planner’s strongest suite and touches on the value of pro-active thinking; something that
is now more common in the profession with the rise of community planning. This story is found
in a supremely entertaining book called SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner.
New York City circa 1860s was heavily dependent on horsecars to transport goods and move
people around the city; so dependent that New Yorkers made 35 million horsecar trips a year by
the start of the 1860s. 20 years later, there were even more horsecars to complement a growing
population and to serve transport needs (Levitt & Dubner, 2009).

The unfortunate consequence was an abundance of horse manure that overwhelmed the streets of
New York City. Like other urban problems mentioned in this paper, manure was an egregious
public health concern posing threats to the citizens of NYC. The world’s first international urban
planning conference was held in 1898 and much of the dialogue between delegates focussed on
how to resolve the manure crisis in NYC. A solution could not be agreed upon; instead
technological innovation – through the introduction of the internal combustion engine -- came to
the rescue. Indeed, cars replaced horsecars and the manure problems slowly started to disappear
(Levitt & Dubner, 2009).

I continue to tell this SuperFreaknomics anecdote to my friends and colleagues. However, I have
never analyzed it from an urban planning perspective. What I find fascinating is that a
conference of urban planners could not even find a sensible solution to this urban problem.
While the planning profession was only in its infancy at this time, urban issues such as manure or
cholera epidemics attracted the attention of planners and distracted them from thinking about
public health issues in a pro-active manner. Like the City Beautiful movement, planners thought
that the manure dilemma was solvable in a reactionary urban design approach. Alas, it proved to
be unsolvable by their thinking and the city had the fortuity of the novel internal combustion
engine.

Planners could have identified this problem earlier on by working with New York City
communities to alleviate the immediate concerns instead of waiting for it to reach a larger scale.
If planners are truly concerned about the health and well-being of communities, it is
indispensable that they work with such communities to bring about solutions that are
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collaborative and participatory. This is indeed their core strength. As planners did not employ
this approach to the manure crisis in NYC and similar problems around the world, many could
have seen urban planning as a futile profession where planners were only interested in the issues
once they were large scale and then not have the capacity to solve them. This is just one example
where the reactionary mindset proves to be self-defeating, counter-productive and puzzling to the
profession’s purpose.

Questioning the Tools of Planning

Zoning as a planning tool warrants some historical analysis. Hodge & Gordon discuss at length
the concept of zoning and how it is a common planning tool utilized by municipalities. They
discuss how zoning helps stabilize and protect land values and how it is a legislative tool that
must be uniformly applied and not readily amended. They identify two problems with zoning: 1.
the dilemma between protecting existing land uses and promoting the planning of future land
uses; and 2. the administration of zoning. The topography of an area may render some parcels of
land difficult to build upon and still meet zoning requirements (Hodge & Gordon, 2008).

These two problems associated with zoning are well defined by the authors but are more on the
technical and scientific side of planning. There is a short but critical narrative of the dark side of
zoning in various chapters of Making the Invisible Visible. While this book does not offer us a
general understanding of Canadian Planning history, it nonetheless provides a story that can help
new planners reinvent their social imagination.

We know about the technical and legal rationality of zoning, but its effects on people is often
overlooked. Historically, African-Americans, gays, lesbians and lower-income citizens have
been the victims of this planning tool. In the U.S., exclusionary zoning laws had restricted both
the sale and the rental of housing to a single nuclear family (Kenney, 1998). History in the U.S.
has shown that planners have been involved in establishing not only exclusionary zoning laws,
but restrictive statutory provisions, restrictive housing guidelines and narrow judicial
constructions of the meaning of family (Kenney, 1998). Underlying this historical discriminatory
practice was a common belief that gays and lesbians were sexual deviants as one of the causes of
social disorganization (Kenney, 1998).
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There is a profound narrative within the book that explores the negative ramifications of zoning
on the African-American community. Race riots were common in the first half of the 20th century
and planners had an important role to suppress the riots through legislative tools. The race riots
created industrial, civic, housing and religious issues for city officials. In response to these
issues, planners used residential controls such as zoning to segregate the races and create
restrictive covenants in land titles (Thomas, 1998). The interpretation of zoning - a concept and
tool that is so central to the planner’s toolkit, is distinct in the two books. Unfortunately, zoning
has been used to exacerbate racial segregation in places like the United States.

In Canada, this tool has allowed for a variety of land uses in cities and towns by ensuring a mix
of environmental, economic and social considerations for the people. However, Hodge &
Gordon speak of this tool from a macro-planning perspective, that is, how it controls the
development of neighbourhoods. This ultimately misses a crucial segment of the exclusionary
effects of zoning and the ramifications for vulnerable groups such as gays, lesbians and racial
minorities.

Heritage and Preservation Planning

Hodge & Gordon briefly discuss heritage preservation in the context of urban renewal plans
incorporating historic buildings in new designs. Planning agencies increasingly pressured cities
to protect and enhance districts of historic buildings such as the National Capital Commission’s
Sussex Drive in Ottawa and Vancouver’s Gastown district (Hodge & Gordon, 2008). Over time,
their efforts were successful in bringing about planning policies to protect the built heritage of
districts in many Canadian communities. These planning accomplishments are an important part
of the profession’s history but do not account for how Canadian city districts were transforming
through the expansion of multicultural communities.

Gail Lee Dubrow takes us through a passage of preservation planning in her chapter.
“Preservation planning is an instrument of a democratic and inclusive approach to planning that
has been not widely used in the history of the profession” (Dubrow, 1998, p. 57). Unlike Hodge
& Gordon, Dubrow argues that historic sites and buildings have the potential to bring intellectual
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developments to a wider audience and to raise public awareness of the contributions of diverse
groups to our heritage such as the Chinese, Japanese and East-Indians.

While Dubrow focuses on the United States, she nonetheless provides an interpretation that is
more inclusive by recognizing the history of immigration, multiculturalism and the diversity that
helped shape the United States landscape. In Dolores Hayden’s Power of Place, she discusses
how multicultural dimensions of urban history are relevant to the art of place making. In her
chapter, Dubrow discusses how important cultural resources -- such as the Japanese bathhouse in
Washington State -- have no recognition or protection unless they are documented in the
preservation planning tools.

The Japanese language school in Washington is yet another example of a building that celebrates
the language, traditions, culture and the common Japanese heritage. Historically, planners have
not been as active in embracing and protecting these heritage sites; they have focussed largely on
sites such as the ones described by Hodge & Gordon. Furthermore, the long history of exclusion
and discrimination has undermined the possibility of finding vocal advocates for the preservation
of the Japanese heritage sites (Dubrow, 1998).

In summary, preservation planning is a critical part of the planner’s tool kit. Dubrow argues that
the planner has a responsibility to enforce existing regulatory controls and to determine whether
the protections they confer are equitably distributed. In addition and beyond what Hodge &
Gordon suggest, planners have an ethical and political responsibility to advocate for the
preservation of cultural resources when “systematic inequalities have weakened the power of
particular groups to defend their own tangible heritage” (Dubrow, 1998, p. 66).

Insurgent Citizenship and Modernist Planning

This final section of the essay discusses the differences between insurgent citizenship offered by
James Holston, and modernist planning principles developed by Le Corbusier and the Congrés
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). James Holston explains how planning is
generally used to refer to urban design, derived in large measure from architectural theory and

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practice (Holston, 1998). Moreover, this dominant mode of planning was developed by Le
Corbusier and the CIAM.

Hodge & Gordon do not thoroughly discuss the principles of the CIAM; instead they see it as an
extension of Le Corbusier’s theories of building and planning. At first glance, a non-planner
could be confused as to what the professional differences were between civil engineers and
planners in the 1930s. Hodge & Gordon explain how the Athens Charter recommended that
urban planning be broken into four functions; dwelling, work, recreation and transportation. In
addition, planners would be responsible for rigourous separation of land uses, to be connected to
high speed modes of transportation (Hodge & Gordon, 2008).

The Hodge & Gordon interpretation of the CIAM and the planner’s urban design role is
informative and useful in understanding the four functions. However, it is a plain explanation
which corroborates the problematic and simple definition of modernist planning where the state
itself is the supreme planning power. Holston’s critical analysis of the CIAM attempts to shed
light on its dominant principles such as the theory of colonization to implement the new
architecture-planning-technology to achieve both an objective and subjective transformation of
existing conditions (Holston, 1998). Further, the CIAM model appealed directly to the state
authority to institute total planning of the built environment. The notion of transforming an
unwanted present by means of an imagined future would impose state driven plans on society,
assuming that the model was widely accepted. These ideas would take the form of master plans
which could fix the future.

A major difference between Holston’s chapter and the Hodge & Gordon book is the discussion
of ethnographic planning. Ethnographic planning questions how to include the possibilities for
change encountered in existing social conditions (Holston, 1998). Importantly, it is the best way
to establish the terms by which residents participate in the planning of their communities. This
process must be closely monitored by planners to ensure that power is not constantly at the state
level or held solely by the wealthy. In contrast to the CIAM model, insurgent and ethnographic
planning looks at approaches on how to engage the community in planning and urban design.
Insurgent planning recognizes multiple citizenships based on the local, regional and transnational
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affiliations that aggregate in contemporary urban experience (Holston, 1998). While CIAM
principles are widely embraced in planning today, there has been a major shift in imagination
and planning practice to consider the merits of a more participatory and inclusive approach.

Conclusion

Summarizing the history of planning in North America could take the form of a comprehensive
and rigorous doctorate dissertation. In this essay, I provided an analysis of selected themes and
stories in planning history. Conventional planning texts such as Planning Canadian
Communities, offer readers an informative and adequate understanding of the traditional
planning stories. These stories include the urban reforms movements of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, the influence of Thomas Adams in thinking about conservation planning, the rise
of Le Corbusier and urban design principles, post-World War II suburban development, and
heritage conservation and participatory democracy in the 1970s, to a new urban agenda today of
smart growth, intensification and new urbanism. These stories are profoundly unique to the
profession of planning but are only pieces of the whole puzzle to a critical eye.

Forgotten in these themes of planning history are the people who have been marginalized and
who have suffered from the trade-offs of beautifying and making cities more livable. In this
essay, I alluded to stories offered by Making the Invisible Visible to compare and contrast the
interpretations of planning history with Hodge & Gordon. There is not a single correct and true
version of planning history; it is interpreted in drastically different ways. But for any aspiring
planner – in an age where social imagination and inclusivity are now more accepted – it is not
only critical to understand the progress of planning in transforming our cities, but to also be
cognizant of the inequalities and conflicts that have emerged from this process. In addition, it is
important to understand the limitations of the reactionary approach in planning. I offered a story
from SuperFreaknomics to shed light on the problematic nature of reactionary thinking and why
pro-active approaches are more appropriate for the planning profession.

To conclude, I provide a quote from Jane Jacobs which elaborates on the points I have stressed in
this paper. In essence, how modernist planning strives to reach a utopia through beautifying and
transforming cities when the real issues are not even known or properly addressed. “There is a
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quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest
mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to
exist and to be served” (Elizabeth & Goldsmith, 2010).

References

Bocking, S. (2006). Constructing Urban Expertise: Professional and Political Authority in

Toronto, 1940-1970. Journal of Urban History, Vol. 33, No. 1, 51-76.

Elizabeth, L., Goldsmith, S. (2010). What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs.
In D. Taylor (Ed.), Between Utopias. Oakland: New Village Press.

Gerald Hodge and David Gordon. (2008). Planning Canadian Communities: An Introduction to
the Principles, Practice and Participants (5th Ed), Toronto: Thomson Nelson.

Levitt, S.D., Duber S.J. (2009). SuperFreaknomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and
Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. New York: William Morrow.

Sandercock, L. (1998). Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning. In L.

Sandercock (Ed.), Framing Insurgent Historiographies for Planning. (pp. 1-33).
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sandercock, L. (1998). Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning. In J.

Holston (Ed.), Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship. (pp. 37-56). Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Sandercock, L. (1998). Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning. In G.L
Dubrow (Ed.), Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives on Preservation Planning (pp.
57-77). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sandercock, L. (1998). Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning. In J.

M. Thomas (Ed.), Racial Inequality and Empowerment: Necessary Theoretical
Constructs for Understanding U.S. Planning History (pp. 198-208). Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Sandercock, L. (1998). Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning. In M.

R. Kenney (Ed.), Remember, Stonewall Was a Riot: Understanding Gay and Lesbian
Experience in the City (pp. 198-208). Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Slater, T. (2003). Comparing Gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto and Lower Park Slope,
New York City: A `North American` Model of Neighbourhood Reinvestment`? Bristol,
United Kingdom: Centre for Neighbourhood Research. Retrieved November 2, 2008
from the World Wide Web:
www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/cnrpaperspdf/cnr11sum.pdf

Yuan, Y.F. (1994). Environmental Determinism and the City: a Historical –Cultural Note.
Cultural Geographies, 1, 121-126.

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