Planning Naked | March 2015
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor
Observations on the March 2015 issue of Planning Magazine.
1. The absence of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) in this month’s op-ed, “Developing Partnerships”, by APA Executive Director James M. Drinan, JD is a conspicuous omission.
2. Informative “Legal Lessons” column by former New Jersey Supreme Court judge, Peter Buchsbaum, on brevity in land use law: 1) speak plain English; 2) avoid invective (e.g. abusive or “purple prose”) language; 3) be concise; 4) the record is king (i.e. proof); and, 5) planning is visual (e.g. show, don’t tell). Judges “want facts and reasoned arguments” (pp. 11).
3. Excellent article on “Putting Berlin Back Together” by Katherine Burgess, AICP with informative maps of spatial information and research & design-oriented approaches in planning policy in the city after re-unification. The article provides a stark contrast to the predecessor articles in this issue on immigration (‘more resources”) and super TIFs (“capture state taxes”), which, once you drill down, are really about feeding on the public purse.
4. Which is immediately followed by an article romancing Sea Ranch, California, “From Romance to Reality” by Christine Kreyling, celebrating the “sublime” supposed environmental sensitivity of a prototypical far-flung mid-twentieth century “utopia” sprawl development with “an average density of one dwelling unit per acre” composed of a 10-mile long maze of cul-de-sacs two hours north of San Francisco along the coastal highway.
5. APA apparently doesn’t like gambling much judging by “When Casinos Are Too Much of a Good Thing” by Jake Blumgart, unless it’s gambling with the public’s money, of course. The benefits of casinos are “uncertain and uneven” but can you name any business or industry where the benefits are certain and even?
6. “Recycling to the Max: Earthship structures cause conundrums for planning departments” by Kristen Pope is a perfect example of a 1st world problem where the industry is ahead of a profession too focused enforcing the rules instead of creating solutions. “Planning departments may have to develop guidelines as various situations arise” as “other communities do not have clear standards for Earthship building” (pp. 46). Jeez.
7. “Golden age of street design” by Reid Ewing in the Research You Can Use section is short and sweet. This should have been given priority over the Sea Ranch, California article.
8. Kimberly Burton’s Viewpoint article, “Planning from Scratch” on travel etiquette on Ghana’s streets is an implicit endorsement of the shared space concept for streets.
Planning Naked is an article with observations and comments about a recent issue of Planning: The Magazine of the American Planning Association.
Oxford University Professor Calls APA’s Institutional Ethics “Dubious” | from Stuart Meck via LinkedIn
Fascinating and completely unsurprising post from Stuart Meck, Associate Research Professor at Rutgers University on the American Planning Association LinkedIn Group from March 8, 2013.
Excerpt:
“I recommend reading “How planners deal with uncomfortable knowledge: The dubious ethics of the American Planning Association,” by University of Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg and forthcoming in Cities. It is summarized below and it is deeply disturbing.
When Bent Flyvbjerg had his coauthored article, “Underestimating Costs of Public Works Projects: Error or Lie?” accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA), JAPA contacted APA to publicize it. Flyvbjerg worked with an APA staff member to develop a comprehensive media strategy to disseminate the article, including a press conference and exclusives with The New York Times and The Sunday Times of London.
Initially, the APA staff member found the study “very newsworthy.” But suddenly there was a complete turnaround by APA, which declined to promote the article, leaving Flyvbjerg on his own to contact the media.
Flyvbjerg learned that “higher ups” in the organization feared that “the media will cast this story negatively and planners will be among the guilty.” Once the article was published in JAPA and Flyvbjerg was successful in obtaining media coverage, APA posted what amounted to a disclaimer on its website, downplaying the study’s findings, which had concluded that massive underestimation of transportation infrastructure costs, based on a statistical analysis of 258 projects, could only be explained “by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.”
Flyvbjerg contends that the APA attempts to project a ” ‘sunny, relentlessly positive’ image of urban planning. ” He argues that APA violated its own ethics code – the AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct -“on at least six counts” in the way it attempted to “deny, spin, and divert attention” from the article. “APA’s moral hypocrisy,” Flyvbjerg writes, “regarding its own Code of Ethics in the case of the JAPA study, and its denial about bad planning and malpractice concerns, should give planners, planning academics, and planning students pause to think about and debate the real ethics of their profession.”
He concludes with nine questions for public debate about APA and its role in setting and enforcing ethics for the planning profession. Observing that professional organizations that stifle critique “tend to degenerate and become socially and politically irrelevant zombie institutions,” Flyvbjerg asks whether APA is “in danger of such degeneration and irrelevance.”
Posted on LinkedIn by Stuart Meck, FAICP, Associate Research Professor, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and
Public Policy, Rutgers University.
The comments section is just as interesting (a few selections are below):
“I was a Charter Member of APA in the late 70s and Joined AICP in 1986. I dropped out in mid 2000, after many years of service in the local Section, because I felt that the organization, as a whole, was failing its members.”
“As a student seeking a BA in Urban and Regional Planning it is disheartening to see the potential denial of APA as an organization. It brings questions to my future and to the issues of credentials to be “officially” recognized as a practicing planner. “
“Being wrong about predictions is one thing, deliberately lying about it, is another thing. That is quite an indictment.”
” I found it very interesting and not a little discouraging, but also not terribly surprising.”
The fact that only fourteen people bothered to comment on this post on the American Planning Association LinkedIn Group page could be interpreted, in itself, as something of an indictment against the professional organization, too.
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“ – Edmund Burke
“VIEWPOINT: Theory Makes Perfect”, was the most read post of the 2014 on The Outlaw Urbanist. We would have never guessed. The Outlaw Urbanist had visitors from 101 countries around the world with the most coming in order from: the United States, followed closely by the United Kingdom and Israel; the last being something of a surprise.
“Good theory leads to good planning. Normative theory – without quantitative observation and validation using scientific method – is nothing more than subjective opinion masquerading as theoretical conjecture.”
Viewpoint | Theory Makes Perfect By Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor
Regularly brandishing the bogeyman of Modernism, the architects of CIAM, and their industrial age vernacular to deride scientific method and endorse normative theory is a late-20th century practice du jour of the planning profession and education. It is a lot like suggesting a rape victim needs to marry her attacker to get over the experience. A shocking metaphor? Perhaps, but it is not a casual choice.
Early 20th century Modernist planning was a normative theory that aspired to science in its assertions. However, Modernism fails even the most basic tenets of being science. It was long on observation and way short on testing theoretical conjectures arising from those observations. Without scientific method to test its conjectures, Modernism in its infancy never made the crucial leap from normative to analytical theory. Instead, the subjective opinions of the CIAM architects and planners were embraced – sometimes blindly – by several generations of professionals in architecture and planning, and put into practice in hundreds of towns and cities. Today, for the most part, Modernism has finally been tested to destruction by our real world experience of its detrimental effects, though we continue to suffer from its remnants in the institutionalized dogma of planning education and the profession. Nonetheless, it has – at long last – made the transformation from normative to analytical theory and validated as a near-complete failure; at least in terms of town planning.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934-35) (Image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation).
Modernism is a failure of normative theory, not scientific method. Ever since Robert Venturi published his twin polemics Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture/Learning from Las Vegas, it has been chic to assert that Modernism – and by implication, science – was responsible for the rape of our cities during the 20th century. A direct line can be drawn from the proliferation of late-20th/early-21st century suburban sprawl to Frank Lloyd’s Wright Broadacre City, and even further back to its infancy in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City. However, like a DNA test freeing a falsely accused rapist, scientific method reveals the true culprit is, in fact, normative theory. The 20th century is a wasteland littered with normative theories: modernism, futurism, post-modernism, deconstructivism, traditionalism, neo-suburbanism and many more ‘-isms’ than we can enumerate. After the experience of the 20th century, it seems absurd to suggest we require more theoretical conjecture without scientific validation, more opinion and subjective observation – that is, less science – if we want to better understand the “organized complexity of our cities” (Jacobs, 1961). Sometimes it seems as if the planning profession and education has an adverse, knee-jerk reaction to anything it does not understand as “too theoretical”. Of course, the key to this sentence is not that it is “too theoretical” but rather that so many do “not understand” the proper role of science and theory in architecture and planning, in particular, and society, in general.
Science aspires to fact, not truth. The confusion about science is endemic to our society. You can witness it every time an atheist claims the non-existence of God on the basis of science. However, science does not aspire to truth. Not only is ‘Does God exist?’ unanswerable, it is a question any good scientist would never seek to answer in scientific terms. It is a question of faith. The value judgment we place on scientific fact does not derive from the science itself. It derives from the social, religious or cultural prism through which we view it. Right or wrong is the purview of politicians, philosophers and theologians. There are plenty – perhaps too many – planners and architects analogous to politicians, philosophers and theologians and not enough of the scientific variety. And too often, those that aspire to science remain mired in the trap of normative theory and institutionalized dogma. The Modernist hangover lingers in our approach to theory. But we require less subjective faith in our conjectures and more objective facts to test them. We persist with models that are colossal failures. When we are stuck in traffic, we feel like rats trapped in a maze. We apply normative theory to how we plan our transportation networks and fail to test the underlining conjecture. The robust power of GIS to store and organize vast amounts of information into graphical databases is touted as transforming the planning profession. But those that don’t understand science, mistake a tool of scientific method for theory. We project population years and decades into the future, yet fail to return to these projections to test and expose their (in)validity, refine the statistical method and increase the accuracy of future projections. And we hide the scientific failings of our profession behind the mantra, “it’s the standard.”
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898).
We require analytical theory and objective knowledge. If the facts do not support our conjectures, then they need to be discarded. In normative theory, ideas are precious. In analytical theory, they are disposable in favor of a better conjecture on the way to a scientific proof. Scientific method is the means to test and validate or dispose of theory. Our profession and communities have paid a terrible price for the deployment of normative theory. However, quantitative observation and analysis of its failings has offered enlightenment about how to proceed confidently into the future. The work of notable researchers in Europe and the United States are leading the profession towards an analytical theory of the city. Even now, we will be able to deploy scientific method to derive better theory about the physical, social, economic and cultural attributes of the city. This leap forward will eventually propel planning out of the voodoo orbit of the social sciences and into the objective knowledge of true science. Until then, we need to focus a bit more on getting there and less time raising the SPECTRE of dead bogeymen to endorse the creation of entirely new ones.
Purchase your copy of Poor Richard, Another Almanac for Architects and Planners (Volume 2) today!
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It has been said that ‘Savannah is all about its squares.’ This is inaccurate. The spatial logic of Savannah is all about the historical loading of front doors along east-west streets in the ward plan. This generates a spatial hierarchy in the plan between ‘outsiders’ (i.e. visitors) principally using north-south streets to enter the town (historically from the port, later via vehicular traffic) before assimilating along the east-west streets primarily used by ‘insiders’ (i.e. residents) (Anderson, 1986 and 1993; Kostof, 1991; Major, 2001 and 2014).
John Reps’ famous 1959 drawing of the historical growth of the Savannah, Georgia ward plan from 1733-1856 (Reps, 1965; 201).View southeast down West River Street: an east-west street in Savannah (Photograph: Mark David Major).View southwest from West River Street to Williamson Street showing the dramatic change in elevation from the bank of the Savannah River (Photograph: Mark David Major).View northwest across Oglethorpe Square (Photograph: Mark David Major).View northeast from Johnson Square down Bull Street to Savannah City Hall (Photograph: Mark David Major).North-south streets, mostly barren of trees or front doors, bear the weight of moving high-speed (in relative terms) traffic through Savannah’s ward plan (Photograph: Mark David Major).(Photograph: Mark David Major)
The spatial logic of the ward plan is imminently serviceable for managing moving traffic, treating most squares as enlarged roundabouts and filtering through traffic mostly along north-south streets such as this one. Over time, constitution (i.e. dwelling entrances) has emerged in a spotty fashion along these north-south streets but not enough (to date) to deteriorate the logic of loading front doors along east-west streets.
(Photograph: Mark David Major)
Despite this, Savannah’s ward plan is suffering under the weight of storing parked vehicles. There are parking garages located on at least four of the squares and two sides of Orleans Square is constituted by surface parking for the convention center. The wall constructed to ‘hide’ this surface parking does nothing to support the functioning of the ward plan or Orleans Square itself. This photo shows the Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission offices occupying a ground level retail space (not a bad idea but poorly designed frontage) on Oglethorpe Square at the base of a seven-story parking garage (metaphorically-speaking, being crushed under the weight of parked vehicles).
Loading of front doors along an east-west street in Savannah’s ward plan (Photograph: Mark David Major).Loading of front doors (including double-loading at ground level and second-floor entries) on an east-west street defining the northern edge of Oglethorpe Square in Savannah (Photograph: Mark David Major).(Photograph: Mark David Major)
Some modern in-fill development adheres to the nuances of how Savannah’s ward plan was historically designed to function (front doors loaded on this east-west street in the development in the background) whereas some actively retards that functioning (garages loaded on east-west street in the development in the foreground, turning this portion of the space into an alleyway with trash cans).
References
Anderson, Stanford. 1993. “Savannah and the Issue of Precedent: City Plan as Resource”, Settlements in the Americas: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Ed. Ralph Bennett). Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Anderson Stanford. 1986. “Studies towards an Ecological Model of Urban Environment”, On Streets (Ed. Stanford Anderson). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Kostof, Spiro. 1991. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd.
Major, Mark David. 2015. Relentless Magnificence: The American Urban Grid. Ph.D. Thesis. Copies available from University College London.
Major, Mark David. 2001. “When is a door more than a door? The role of constitution in strongly geometric configurations”, Third International Space Syntax Symposium Proceedings (Eds. J. Peponis, J. Wineman, S. Bafna), 37.1-37.14.
Reps, John W. 1965. The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
My ‘Secret’ Life as an Anonymous Source by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor
Sorry, this post is quirky and not nearly as salacious as the title might suggest otherwise. However, enough time has passed (15 years) that I can now reveal one of the more interesting episodes in my professional career. This is my ‘secret’ life as an anonymous source for the free-wheeling British press involving a story about London Transport, the Metropolitan Police and, ultimately, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his still-young-at-the-time Labour government.
On November 23, 1998, London’s Evening Standard printed a front-page article by Martin Delgado with the screaming headline “SHUT THE TUBE FOR MILLENNIUM.” The story was about London Transport’s public claims that they would operate between 70% and 80% of the London Underground services for the Millennium New Year’s Eve celebration on December 31, 1999. However, as part of the crowds study group, London Transport was privately reporting they would be lucky to run services at 50% capacity on the night. At the time, there was a three-year crowds study group tasked with preparing Central London for the large number of people expected to attend the celebrations consisting of the Metropolitan Police, London Transport, Department of Culture, Media and Sport, City of Westminster, and their consultants Risk Management Consultants and Space Syntax Ltd.
Front cover of the 23 November 1998 issue of the Evening Standard.
The London Metropolitan Police was extremely concerned about London Transport’s plans to operate at only 50% capacity on the night and leaked the story to the Evening Standard. Delgado’s story quoted an anonymous source in Space Syntax Ltd. to support the position of the Metropolitan Police.
I was the anonymous source.
As I recall, a crowds study group member of the Metropolitan Police referred Mr. Delgado to me to support their position by providing some background information about the study. It was only years later that learned my mistake was asking for an “off the record” conversation ; not realizing this meant I could still be quoted as an anonymous source. In hindsight, I should have asked for a conversation “on background.” Oh well, live and learn. Initially, I took some grief inside Space Syntax for my role in this story but less than you might think because what I said was accurate and correct. The reaction inside Space Syntax about my role later evolved into bewildered amusement because of what next happened.
The story briefly caused a firestorm, which required Tony Blair to respond to Ministers of Parliament during Prime Minister’s Question Time. The story eventually led to the Labour government making wholesale changes to government preparations by refocusing the Millennium celebrations on the River Thames. This was not our idea but it was a darn good one in hindsight because it helped to spread the expected crowds over a much larger area of central London. A change that also required London Underground to operate nearer to full capacity on the night since people would be arriving and leaving via more underground stations. At the time, the concern of crowds study group about this change was our crowd observations were focused around Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, and Piccadilly Circus on New Year’s Eve in 1996, 1997 and 1998.
1:00 am, January 1, 1999 outside Canada House in Trafalgar Square after (very cold) New Year’s Eve crowd observations (from left to right): Beatriz Campos, François Dufaux, Mark David Major, and Tim Stonor.
We worried about missing something since we could not observe crowd movement and space use under the same circumstances before the actual night. However, the Millennium celebrations were a great success, going off without a hitch other than some minor incidents involving stupidity and chance, with no serious injuries due to overcrowding on the streets of central London. I like to think Space Syntax’s role as a consultant on the crowds study – and mine, in particular, as the Space Syntax project manager and anonymous source to this Evening Standard story – helped to ensure public safety on December 31, 1999.
If you are interested in more details about our crowds study, you can read about it here:
Major MD, A. Penn , G. Spiliopoulou, N. Spende, M. Doxa, and P. Fong, 2000, ‘Following the Crowd: Spatial Layout and Crowd Behaviour’, arq Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 3, Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-264, ISBN 0-521-79412-9.
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Planning Naked | March 2015
Flyvbjerg learned that “higher ups” in the organization feared 
The comments section is just as interesting (a few selections are below):
