The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

cities with long histories are palimpsests, the developments of one era self-replenishing and half-replacing those of earlier times’ (Corfield, 2013: 837). However, the term ‘palimpsest’ can evoke an excessive sense of continuity. There are discontinuities apparent in the making of cities – as with Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas (figure 2.2) – whether we are concerned with the spans of time taking us back to ancient history or those of an individual’s lifetime. China may be exceptional as the one continuing urban civilization without permanent interruption (Morris, 1994: 1–2). Paradoxically, the continuity in Chinese civilization may be due to the ephemerality of its imperial city building since, unlike their Roman counterparts, Chinese cities were not built with monuments for eternity (Laurence, 2013). Evidence indicates the inert layering of development in the case of ancient civilizations where ‘the past was not seen as something to understand on its own terms, but rather a source of ideas to reinforce contemporary ideas and practices’ (Smith and Hein, 2018: 109). Modern empires, by contrast, drew on the past but also innovated.

Figure 2.2 Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City

      Source: author

      The interactions of macro-historical layers reveal some of the breadth of the urban planning imagination. Different metaphors that have been associated with the city provide clues to the transformative potential of urban planning interventions. If the city is organized according to cosmological principles, it may be entirely resistant to urban planning. However, ‘if the city is a machine that must function effectively, it is subject to obsolescence, and needs constant tuning and updating … If the city is an organism … it can become pathological, and interventions will be in the form of surgery’ (Kostof, 1991: 16).

      Capitalism, for all its seeming inevitability, is the product of an eventful history. The emergence of capitalism might itself be considered an event (Sewell, 2008: 530); an event by no means inevitable or universal – an easily overlooked insight that must continue to inform alternative urban planning imaginaries, as I discuss in the next chapter. Nor does it totally erase preceding systems, as these continue to play into the urban planning imagination. For example, the UK liberal market in the exchange of land and property operates with a feudal pattern of land ownership and might be considered socialist in its allocation of the rights to development on land. Nevertheless, capitalism is a system that continues to ‘colonize’ not only activities (such as the production of culture) but also parts of the world (for example, societies across Africa based significantly on subsistence agriculture) that are distinctly non-capitalist. The temporality of capitalism is ‘composite and contradictory, simultaneously still and hyper-eventful’ (Sewell, 2008: 517), producing both ‘spatial fixes’ and ‘spatial switching’ (Harvey, 1985) of investment in and out of cities.

Meso-level institutions of states

There is significant inertia in the built environment. The production of the built environment involves sunk costs in land and property which are imperfectly divisible or ‘lumpy’ commodities bought and sold in highly imperfect local markets. In addition, the development of cities is highly path dependent ‘because of the complex of rules, configurations, and relationships of property/infrastructure/governance that are established in urbanization processes’ (Sorensen, 2018: 42); because, that is, of the differently instituted planning systems and cultures of nations that ‘mediate competition over the use of land and property, to allocate rights of development, to regulate change and to promote preferred … urban form’ (ESPON, 2018: vii).

      Sorensen (2018) develops a four-fold set of scenarios that highlight the evolution of the institutions that constitute national and sub-national planning systems and cultures. He identifies ‘displacement’, where the removal of existing rules and the creation of new ones are likely; ‘layering’ of new rules on top of existing ones; ‘conversion’ involving incremental change; and ‘drift’, or a failure to adapt policies to changed circumstances. Two of these processes – displacement and layering – have been apparent in the development of statutory planning systems and cultures.

      The history of urban planning suggests that displacement has been something done across the global south as part of imperial expansion (Home, 2013), including the seizure of lands from indigenous populations and the imposition of norms of private property. In Australia (Jackson et al., 2017) and Canada (Blomley, 2014) these norms displaced ancient customary land-ownership relations and ‘urban’ planning as land management. Displacement has resulted from major political-ideological shifts such as the ‘big bang’ liberalization of land and property markets experienced in some East and Central European countries after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

      Statutory planning in many global north nations might be characterized by a layering of practices and responsibilities, as it has become a generally larger and better-resourced activity that has an expanding, complex range of responsibilities which require correspondingly elaborate divisions of labour. The simple world of the generalist urban planner, as he or she would have been trained at the end of the 1960s in the global north, has become more complex with the need to adjudicate on a range of complex technical evidence, specific new legislative and policy requirements and health and well-being aspirations.

Urban planning thus emerges as a matrix of institutions (Sorensen, 2018) underlining the centrality of urban planning to modern societies. Planning’s institutions are beholden to economic structures and political forces and adapt chameleon-like to them. As such, ‘planning and urban governance present an exceptionally dense and consequential set of institutions that is increasingly important for managing and regulating processes of urban change and capital investment in cities’ (Sorensen, 2018: 42). The institutions of urban planning are a product of past actions (Salet, 2018) which provide a store of wisdom, and while the copying of prior responses has advantages (Hoch, 2019: 99), it may also prove a dead hand on the development of the urban planning imagination. When we view them in geohistorical context, we see both contrasts and commonalities in the evolution of these meso-institutions that are the statutory urban planning systems and cultures I discuss in chapters 6 and 7.

The micro-level

      Modern urban planning in capitalist economies ‘developed at some points in national leaps and bounds whereby local and historic practices were almost entirely irrelevant to its progress’ (Sutcliffe, 1981: 207). One reason for this is the dynamism injected into local contexts by individuals. The effects of micro-historical processes of change should not be ignored when set against macro- and meso-historical forces. Those individuals involved in the planning of colonial outposts in Africa rarely stayed long – sometimes just a matter of weeks or months – but the effects of their visits were lasting (Home, 2015). Individuals were partly responsible for elements of cultural hybridity apparent by the 1700s (Bayly, 2000) and which continued to unfold in the history of modern urban planning under imperial powers (Nasr and Volait, 2003).

      While international exchange of planning ideas and practices was intense by the early 1900s, Ward (2005) notes that, unlike today, the individual planning actors involved could hardly be considered part of a Global Intelligence Corps (Olds, 2002) or a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) (Sklair, 2001). The transatlantic foment in urban planning ideas and practices (Saunier, 2001) during the late 1800s and early 1900s was significant but hardly bureaucratized in the way such exchanges are today. Instead, the forces of exchange were aggregations of numerous independent study groups, exhibitions and conferences. Only a portion of these individuals were what Sutcliffe (1981) regarded as ‘home-based’ in outlook. The remainder were arbiters of increasingly cosmopolitan urban planning tastes.

Individuals remain influential