ESG-4102: Urban Geography and Planning

Lecture 09: Urban Planning and Governance

A H M Nahid
Assistant Professor
Department of Development Studies
Islamic University, Kushtia

Lecture by A H M Nahid
 Urban Planning
• In theory, urban planning is a process of elaborating solutions that
aim both to improve or requalify an existing urban area, as well as to
create a new urbanization in a given region.
• As a discipline and as a method of action, urban planning deals with
the processes of production, structuring and appropriation of urban
space. In this sense, its main objective is to point out what measures
should be taken to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants,
including matters such as transport, security, access opportunities and
even interaction with the natural environment.
 Cont.
• In the urban planning process, therefore, problems arising from
urbanization are dealt with, such as pollution, traffic jam, urban voids,
ecological impacts, making it essential in the current context in which much
is discussed about the future of cities and the aspirations of sustainability
and mobility as a way of fighting climate change.
• Urban planning is essentially a multidisciplinary activity, which can count on
sociologists, historians, economists, geographers, in addition to urban
planners. In its process, local authorities are also included, whether from
government, private companies or international organizations. When
related to a government, urban planning can generate a document that
contains all the bases and rules for the development of a given region, what
we know as a master plan.
 Cont.
• Urban planning and urban policy are concerned with the management of urban change. They
are state activities that seek to influence the distribution and operation of investment and
consumption processes in cities for the ‘common good’.
• It is important to recognize that urban policy is not confined to activity at the urban scale.
National and international economic and social policies are as much urban policy, if defined by
their urban impacts, as is land-use planning or urban redevelopment.
• Urban policy and planning are dynamic activities whose formulation and interpretation are a
continuing process.
• Measures introduced cause changes that may resolve some problems but create others, for
which further policy and planning are required.
• Only rarely is there a simple, optimum solution to an urban problem. More usually a range of
policy and planning options exists from which an informed choice must be made.
• Planning is carried out within the broad framework of government policy-making and has its
general objectives set out in legislation.
 Main Goals of Urban Planning
1. To improve the information available to the market for making its locational
choices.
2. To minimize the adverse ‘neighborhood effects’ created by a market in land
and development.
3. To ensure the provision of any ‘public goods’, including infrastructure or actions
that create a positive ‘neighborhood effect’, which the market will not generate
because such activity cannot be rewarded through the market.
4. To ensure that short-term advantage does not jeopardize long-term community
interest.
5. To contribute to the co-ordination of resources and development in the
interest of overall efficiency of land use.
6. To balance competing interests in the use of land to ensure an overall outcome
that is in the public interest.
 Cont.
7. To create a good environment, for example in terms of landscape, layout or
aesthetics of buildings, that would not result from market processes.
8. To foster the creation of ‘good’ communities in terms of social composition,
scale or mix of development, and a range of services and facilities available.
9. To ensure that the views of all groups are included in the decision-making
processes regarding land and development.
10. To ensure that development and land use are determined by people’s needs,
not means.
11. To influence locational decisions regarding land use and development in order
to contribute to the redistribution of wealth in society.
 The Value of Urban Planning
• Urban planning is a ubiquitous activity in the modern world.
• The principles and practice of planning have come under attack from both the left
and the right of the political spectrum. In contrast to the positive goals, the value
of planning has been dismissed by the far left which regards it as a state
apparatus attuned to the needs of capital and designed to maintain the unequal
distribution of power in society.
• For some critics on the right, planning is seen as a major cause of inner-city
decline and social unrest through its policies of clearance and decentralization,
rigid land-use zoning and imposition of standards.
• For others the chief problems of planning lie in its interference with the market
and in the fact that, contrary to the goals of planning, a dynamic and prosperous
urban economy requires inefficiency in its structure and land use in order to
permit innovation and experimentation.
 The Types of Urban Planning
1. Strategic Urban Planning (high-level goal oriented)
2. Land-Use Planning (residential, commercial, industrial, municipal)
3. Master Planning (starting from scratch)
4. Urban Revitalization (improving areas that are in a state of decline)
5. Economic Development (greater economic prosperity)
6. Environmental Planning (emphasizes sustainability)
7. Infrastructure Planning (public works, community, safety and
transport etc.)
Roots of Urban Planning
• The United Kingdom:
• Urban planning emerged as a response to the manifest problems
of the nineteenth century industrial metropolis.
• Two types of reaction were evident. The first, represented in the
work of Marx and Engels, was revolutionary and advocated the
overthrow of the social and political system responsible for
creating the polarized social conditions that characterized urban
Britain. The conservative alternative involved basic acceptance of
the urban industrial system but the use of state intervention to
ameliorate its worst excesses. It was the latter argument,
articulated in the UK by the factory and sanitary reformers, and
reinforced by the success of a number of early housing and new
town schemes, that paved the way for the emergence of modern
urban planning.
• The belief that designing new communities offered a means of
escape from the problems of the nineteenth-century industrial city
was central to the ideas of the Utopian socialists.
• Robert Owen (1813) proposed the creation of ‘agricultural and
manufacturing villages of unity and mutual co-operation’ to house
between 1,000 and 1,500 persons and cater for all the social,
educational and employment needs of the community.
• The social reformer and architect James Silk Buckingham (1849)
proposed a Utopian temperance community of 10,000 to be
named Victoria.
• Several smaller Utopian communities were started. Among the
most significant were Saltaire and Bournville.
• The idealism of the Utopian socialists was mirrored at the turn of
the century in the ideas of Ebenezer Howard (1898). Howard, with
London in mind, was strongly critical of living conditions in the
large towns. His alternative was to design a garden city based on
the following principles:
1. Each garden city would be limited in size to 32,000 population.
2. It would have sufficient jobs to make it self-supporting.
3. It would have a diversity of activities, including social institutions.
4. Its layout would be spacious.
5. It would have a green belt to provide agricultural produce, recreation
space and a limit to physical growth.
6. The land would be owned by the municipality and leased to private
concerns, thereby reserving any increases in land value to the
community as a whole.
7. Growth would occur by colonization.
• Howard did not envisage building isolated towns but advocated a cluster
arrangement of six interdependent garden cities, connected by a rapid
transport route around a central city of 58,000 population, the whole
comprising a ‘social city’ of 250,000 people.
• Howard’s ideal of a ‘town-country’ lifestyle led to the founding, in 1899, of
the Garden City Association, which built two garden cities, at Letchworth
(1901) and Welwyn (1920) and was a major stimulus to the formation in 1914
of the Town Planning Institute.
• A second, parallel stimulus to urban planning in the UK was the sanitary-
reform movement. This was stimulated by concern over the health of the
urban population as a succession of epidemics ravaged the densely packed
inner areas of the major British cities. The deficiency of public facilities, such
as a clean water supply and adequate sewerage system, reinforced arguments
for government intervention, and under pressure from enlightened politicians
such as Shaftesbury, Torrens, Cross and Chadwick legislation was passed to
establish basic levels of sanitary provision and building standards.
• The USA:
• In examining the shortcomings of American capitalism this loose-knit group of sociologists,
economists and political scientists, including White, Dewey, Cooley and Park, recognized a need
for public intervention in, through not control of, the economy.
• Among suggestions for government regulation of business, employment and politics in cities
they advocated the appointment of specially trained experts to manage cities.
• Landscape architects such as Olmstead, Davis and Vaux designed residential areas as ‘cities in a
garden’, which led to the building of Riverside IL, Llewellyn Park NJ and Brookline MA as
America’s first planned ‘romantic suburbs’.
• More generally, the City Beautiful movement, which emerged following the Chicago World
Columbia Exposition of 1893, argued for the planned unity of the city as a work of art
supported by a master plan for land use and by comprehensive zoning ordinances to maintain
that plan.
• By 1913 over forty cities had prepared master plans, and more than 200 were engaged in some
form of major civic improvement.
• In 1917 a new professional organization, the American City Planning Institute, was established.
• In practice, however, the forces of privatization were too strong to be contained by public
officials, and ‘urban planners seldom did more than follow residential and commercial
developers with transportation and sewerage systems’.
• The Western Europe:
• Italian Futurist Movement by Marinetti in 1909.
• The Swiss architect Charles Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) proposed a city for 3
million people based on four main principles:
1. As a result of increasing size and central area congestion the
traditional form of city had become obsolete.
2. Pressure on the central business district could be reduced by
spreading the density of development more evenly.
3. Congestion could be alleviated by building at higher density
(1,000 persons to the net residential acre, or about 2,500 to the hectare) at
local points, with a high proportion (95 per cent) of intervening open space.
4. An efficient urban transportation system incorporating railway
lines and segregated elevated motorways would link all parts of the city.
• Although his plans were not implemented in their entirety, Le Corbusier’s
ideas exerted a profound effect on urban planning and the form of cities.
• The Western Europe:
• Notwithstanding differing national circumstances, we can identify three broad
phases of urban planning in Western Europe:
1. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the
focus of attention was on reconstruction and satisfying the backlog of housing
and basic infrastructure.
2. By the late 1950s, increasing affluence and the growth of
centralised planning systems led to comprehensive slum clearance, city-centre
redevelopment schemes, and the construction of urban motorways and large-
scale public housing projects.
3. From the late 1970s, growing awareness of the social
disruption caused by the largescale remodelling of cities led to greater attention
to public participation in planning, and the replacement of redevelopment by
rehabilitation.
• Post-war Urban Planning in the UK:
• The basic principle enshrined in the
1947 Act is that of private ownership of
land but public accountability in its use
so that landowners seeking to
undertake development first had to
obtain permission from the local
planning authority.
• A second principle embodied in the
1947 Act was that of community gain,
rather than individual gain, from land
betterment.
• Planning gain represents the benefits
that a local authority may require of a
developer as a condition for planning
permission.
• Urban Policy in the UK:
• Four major phases can be identified in British post-war urban policy:
1. physical redevelopment;
2. social welfare;
3. entrepreneurial;
4. competitive.
• We can add a fifth phase to this chronology of British urban policy
commencing in 1997 with the election of New Labor. New Labour’s approach
to urban policy is based on CORA:
1. Community involvement, with greater public participation;
2. Opportunity to work or to obtain training and education;
3. Responsibility in the obligation of citizens who can work to do so;
4. Accountability of governments to their publics.
• Urban Policy and Planning in the USA:
• The first comprehensive zoning ordinance was passed in New York
in 1916. The judgement of the US Supreme Court in 1926 that
zoning did not infringe the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution led to widespread adoption of the technique. Under
this procedure, the effective control of land use was transferred
from the state to the municipalities and townships.
• Controls over market-induced physical growth and change are
much weaker in the USA than in the UK.
• Types and critics of zoning
• Smart-growth Movement in USA in the 1990s:
• Major principles of smart growth -
1. Mix land uses.
2. Take advantage of compact building design.
3. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices.
4. Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of
place.
5. Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty and critical
environmental areas.
6. Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities.
7. Provide a variety of transport choices.
8. Make development decisions predictable, fair and cost-effective.
9. Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development
decisions.
• Planning the Socialist City:
1. Limited city size
2. State control of housing
3. Planned development of residential areas
4. Spatial equality in collective consumption
5. Limited journey to work
6. Stringent land-use zoning
7. Rationalized traffic flows
8. Extensive green space
9. Symbolism and the central city
10. Town planning as an integral part of national planning
 Planning for Sustainable Urban
Development
• The concept of sustainable urban development embraces more than environmental
issues and cannot be achieved merely by imposing pollution taxes or by promoting
technical developments to reduce the energy consumption of cars and production
processes. Sustainability must also address the key question of people’s lifestyle.
• In essence there are two broad approaches to sustainable urban development:
1. an environmental protection approach with a focus on a municipal
programme to reduce the consumption of resources and minimize the environmental
impact of development;
2. a holistic approach including an ecological component (stressing the
importance of environmentally sound policies), economic aspects (development
activities and fiscal issues) and social-equity issues (a fair distribution of resources and
the distributional impact of policies).
Models of Future Urban Form
 The Green City
• The desire to plan urban development within the context of the local natural environment was
central to Howard’s concept of the garden city.
• Geddes (1915) also believed that urban planning should be based on a knowledge of natural regions
and their resources, and specifically that the river basin was a suitable natural unit for city
development.
• Foreseeing the impact of the motor vehicle on urban expansion, Geddes proposed a stellar form of
urban settlement that would allow axes of natural space to penetrate into the city. This approach of
‘designing with nature’ was developed subsequently by McHarg (1969),21 who advocated detailed
examination of the environmental condition of an area prior to urban development in order to
identify those areas where urbanization would least damage natural ecosystems.
• Unlike Howard, McHarg was less concerned with the human dimension of urban development than
with its impact on nature. This tradition of planning in concert with the natural environment and the
resource base is continued in the concept of the eco-city, which is based on the principles of
appropriate technology, community economic development, social ecology, bioregionalism, the
green movement and sustainable development.
 The Dispersed City
• The promotion of dispersed or decentralized settlements as an alternative to large
cities is part of the green city genre.
• Key themes of the ideal model include the centrality of small-scale economic and
political organization, grass-roots political empowerment, an emphasis on collective
action, local economic self-reliance, including farming and industry, the use of
appropriate technologies, recycling and re-use of materials, and the value of ‘natural’
ecological or resource areas as potential political boundaries.
• The decentralisation theme reached an extreme in the low-density (one family per
acre) high technology ‘exurbia’ proposed by Wright (1974), in which people would be
closer to nature, encouraging the ‘nomad hermit’ instinct rather than the urge to be
part of the city ‘herd’.
• This ‘non-city’ form of urban dispersion would be energy-intensive and profligate of
resources.
 The Compact City
• Twentieth-century proposals for high-density urban living
are associated especially with high-rise residential
buildings made possible by advances in technology. This is
illustrated graphically in Le Corbusier’s (1929) scheme for
a contemporary city of 3 million inhabitants and in Soleri’s
(1969) three-dimensional city.
• Although these futuristic designs are unlikely to be built in
the near future, the concept of a compact, high-density,
mixed-use city has been proposed as an energy efficient
form of urban development that reduces travel distances
and maximizes prospects for public-transport provision.
 The Regional City
• Various forms of decentralized concentration have been proposed in relation to
sustainable urban development.
• Lynch (1981) advocated creating a regional city comprising a series of separate medium-
size communities surrounded by large areas of open space and connected by major roads.
• Somewhat presciently, Lynch (1961) remarked on the possibility of a ring city with strong
edge-of-city centers being developed around metropolitan areas in North America.
• The ‘galaxy of settlements’ approach also underlay Gruen’s (1973) notion of the cellular
metropolis. This aimed to make the economic, social and cultural benefits of the city
centers available to all residents of an urban region by designing a constellation of thirty
towns, each of 50,000 people and made up of smaller (1,900 person) neighborhoods,
around a central downtown area of 65,000 people—a model similar in concept to a
scaled-up version of Howard’s social city region.
 The Network City
• The transnational political-economic processes that have given rise to
‘world cities’ have also influenced urban form and development at the
regional level with the growth of ‘corridor cities’ linking knowledge-
intensive centers with larger metropolises.
• In these bicentric urban systems, close links have been forged between
places of complementary function rather than simply based on physical
proximity.
• A small but growing number of modern urban agglomerations consist of
an intricate web of corridor cities whose functional and locational
relationships can provide them with holistic competitive advantages
over some of their monocentric rivals.
 The Informational City
• In advanced societies, globalization, deindustrialization and the growth of a
service-oriented economy based on manipulation of knowledge and
information facilitated by advances in telematics have transformed many
industrial cities into post-industrial or informational cities.
• The replacement of the physical offices of certain government services with
electronically mediated touch-screen kiosks in shopping malls can reduce
costs and improve the quality and timeliness of information delivery to
citizens.
• In the informational city, although energy consumption might be reduced by
partially substituting electronic for physical movements, equally it might be
increased as the combined decentralizing power of the automobile and
telematics leads to a more dispersed metropolitan region.
 The Virtual City
• The virtual city is an extension of the concept of the informational city. For some ‘cyberutopians’ the
virtual city represents a future urban environment liberated from the constraints of place-bound
interaction.
• For others, the virtual city heralds a dystopian urban future characterized by the kind of social
disintegration portrayed in films such as Blade Runner and Judge Dredd. These extreme visions of the
future city are based on a form of technological determinism that ignores the power of society to
influence the use made of innovations in telematics.
• More realistically, advances in telecommunications will be used to enhance urban life in at least two
ways: first, via a ‘global positioning’ approach in which telematics is used to attract inward
investment, as is evident in the construction of city Web sites designed to market cities as nodes for
advanced service and manufacturing activities and for elite tourism and conference business, e.g.
<http//www.city.net/>; and second, via an ‘endogenous development’ approach, with telematics
being employed in an effort to overcome the economic, social and cultural fragmentation of
contemporary urban life, thereby reinvigorating the local within a globalizing world. This would
involve initiatives ranging from community television and ‘electronic public spaces’ to virtual cities
such as the Digitale Stad in Amsterdam.
 • Pacione, M. (2005). Urban
Geography: A Global
Perspective. Taylor & Francis.
Ch. 8 & 30.
• https://www.clearpointstrat
References egy.com/blog/types-of-urba
n-planning

Lecture by A H M Nahid