The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

reasonably wish to better incorporate into the planning of our cities (Hayden, 1997; Hoch, 2019). Yet it is as well to remember that ‘Citizens, like elites, can be misguided and self-serving’ (Fainstein, 2010: 32), whether in NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) protests against development or in opportunistic capturing of the spoils of urban development. In the absence of political will and bureaucratic resources to address vexed issues of compensation and betterment (chapter 4), local government planners can appear powerless to shape equitable outcomes from the development of cities.

      It is important to recognize citizens as a distinct set of actors in the building of our cities. As ‘users’, citizens have an intense interest in the city form and function even if they are perhaps the least powerful of actors shaping it (McGlynn, 1993). ‘A viable notion of empowerment of the poor requires an appreciation that empowerment is functionally an individual process that deepens with time if individual efforts are consciously embedded in more collective forms of … mutual empowerment’ (Pieterse, 2008: 7–8). Indeed, citizens often participate in groups or clubs of diverse complexion and influence (Levy, 2016: 98), and it is these collective or club forms of mutual empowerment I turn to as a second category of urban planning actors.

Clubs

Access to the public realms we most associate with the city is uneven because most of these spaces generate an inclusion/exclusion problem, derived from some need to ration use or from the costs in time and money needed to access them (Webster, 2002: 398). New York is the setting for numerous private public spaces (Kayden, 2000) and the reality is that ‘most public realms serve particular publics and are better conceived of as club realms’ (Webster, 2002: 398).

      There is a diversity of entities planning, producing and managing urban space that could be lumped together as ‘clubs’. They range from the worst forms of for-profit enterprises, to business-as-usual for-profit enterprises, to radical and socially and environmentally progressive communal experiments. There is nothing essential about these clubs in terms of the aesthetics or equity of their contributions to the built environment or the methods by which they seek to achieve their ends.

      At their best, clubs present viable and innovative contributions to city building. Garden Cities and new towns across the world have been planned and delivered through corporations that provide urban services in the form of club goods. The Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn in the UK were innovative and successful – developed in an orderly way over the business cycle, providing for schools, hospitals and parks without seceding from the rest of the urban system. Yet the same ideas have been part of the perpetuation of systemic inequalities conceived in apartheid South Africa (Skinner and Watson, 2018).

      At its worst, club planning has detracted from cities and reveals ignoble motivations – of free-riding, cost cutting and reneging on promises. New master-planned communities developed by private for-profit corporations outside Jakarta in Indonesia, Johannesburg in South Africa, Santiago de Chile or Buenos Aires in Argentina might be efficient ways to deliver some urban services, but they are barely connected to the existing urban fabric or to one another by adequate road or rail infrastructure, and are sufficiently impermeable to be examples of the secession of socio-economically homogeneous segments of the population from their urban hosts.

      Just as citizens can become empowered in clubs, so the ultimate measure of clubs as actors is whether they can find some of their better nature in a ‘club of clubs’ by which they can continue to make contributions to urban society.

States

Local and national states and the interstate system can be considered a third set of distinctly modern urban planning actors. Although ‘the act of conscious town building … has extended over millennia … Town planning … was different, resting as it did on notions of extension of public control over private interest in land and property’ (Cherry, 1996: 17). Statutory urban planning – the legally prescribed processes by which plans are enabled, made, revised and subject to scrutiny, appeal and enforcement – has a power that the planning of citizens and clubs can rarely match. Although full of unintended and unanticipated consequences, urban planning by states has become indispensable to the continued functioning of capitalism (Scott and Roweis, 1977); so much so that it is statutory planning that we most associate with urban planning. Urban planning in this incarnation expanded its remit from one of ameliorating the worst excesses of citizen and club planning – as a protector of the commons and of the ‘public interest’ – to the point where its basis in private property rights has become obscured (Blomley, 2017).

      Nation states are a recent form of societal organization, dating to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but statutory urban planning itself took another two and a half centuries to become a distinct and important activity. Much of the repertoire of urban planning taught in planning schools pertains to the unique moment (Graham and Marvin, 2000) – a mere century and a half – in which states have assumed much of the regulatory and visionary burden of urban planning. Nation states ‘see’ from above (Scott, 2000) whether building new capital cities (such as Brazilia) or demolishing, redeveloping or extending existing cities.

      However, even within this short history of statutory urban planning, different historical and geographical vantage points make it a difficult enterprise to generalize about. The early ‘experimental’ urban planning undertaken in the name of empires was one of brutal theft and segregation. Yet it was also invested with some nobler aspirations that have today been lost. In the improvement works undertaken in colonial cities, for example, ‘the term “trust” carried with it an implied association with the public good rather than private profit making. Later … in the twentieth century, it was supplanted by the terms “board”, “corporation” or “authority”, although the functions remained similar’ (Home, 2013: 84).

Where once, in the global north, statutory urban planning was central to the building of new societies and commanded popular and political support, its value is now questioned. Even so, the inability of some nation states to exert authority and provide security over their territories often plays into poor urban planning outcomes. In some African nations the state has been absent from knitting together the self-building of citizens and the limited publics of club communities with any residual sense of the public interest (Parnell, 2018). Thus, familiar aspects of statutory urban planning remain on the agendas of supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU), international interstate organizations such as the UN, and innumerable non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that feed off the international interstate system.

      Contrasts can be drawn among national planning systems and cultures which reveal some of the global diversity of statutory urban planning and citizen and club engagements with it (chapter 6). Equally, it can be invidious to apply labels to nations, especially when these speak with language issuing largely from the global north.

Mixes of actors

The urban planning imaginations of citizens, clubs and states continue to evolve in complex ways which generate overlaps in figure 2.1. Statutory urban planning processes remain an inescapable reference point for understanding how the urban planning imagination is shared across actors, as chapter 6 confirms. In the United States (US), the majority of urban planning in the early 1900s was by consultants. The rise of the local government planner in the US, as elsewhere in the global north, took place after the Second World War and with the extension of cities. Even so, perhaps as many as one third of professional planners in the US are consultants today (Pollock, 2009). In Australia, consultants are disproportionately accredited when compared to their equally numerous public sector counterparts (Elliott, 2018: 27). Consultants produce much of the evidence base used in planning in liberal market economies (Batey, 2018). The division of labour in which