Demographic Futures as a Guide to Planning: California's Latinos and the Compact City

Demographic futures are proposed as an empirical and normative guide for planning. Projections of demographic change help planners prepare future-oriented plans that are better targeted to the needs of a changing clientele. As an example, population changes in California highlight the growing importance of Latinos to the development of more compact cities. Demographic futures also entail normative interpretations of future scenarios as much as they do empirical relationships projected into the future. Several alternative stories are related of Latinos' future situation, each highlighting different value premises, problems, and conclusions. To effectively use demographic futures, planners must be conversant with both projected trends and competing interpretive stories.     

Preparing Planners for the Breadth of Practice

The 1999 survey of planners whose results I report here aimed to reach a broad range of practitioners in order to produce a more complete picture of the profession than previous surveys of more circumscribed populations. In analyzing these results I find many aspects of practice are systematically related. For example, planners' professional affiliations, substantive specializations and whether they see their work as traditional planning are closely related to where they work. Recognizing that in this larger community of planners not all are members of the American Planning Association nor completed a formal education in planning, I recommend that the academic and professional communities collaborate to prepare students for both initial work and future careers, establish systematic transitional education for planners without a formal education in planning, and expand continuing professional development opportunities for practitioners.     

SYMPOSIUM: Putting the Future in Planning

Abstract

Tony de Carlo's image Amidst the Sprawl was created with the area just west of downtown Los Angeles in mind. It is one of the city's oldest neighborhoods and home to the artist, with older single-family homes giving way to freeways and the persistent inching westward of downtown. Its depiction of Latinos and mixed land uses brings to mind just some of the challenges and opportunities facing planners who try to put the future back into planning, as described in this issue's Longer View symposium.

The artist, a Los Angeles native, is the son of an artist mother and has been creating since childhood. A self-taught artist, he exhibits his work regularly throughout the U.S. More of his work can be viewed on his Web site at <http://www.tonydecarlo.com>.

The planning field has been criticized in recent years for neglecting time and the future in favor of present-focused decisions about space. How should planners proceed to put the future back in planning? Each of the four authors contributing to this symposium brings a different perspective to bear. Sam Cole reviews the contributions of contemporary work in the futures field and provides a helpful resource list. Martin Wachs discusses the similarities and differences between forecasting and envisioning, and he provides a commentary on what this means for the identity of planning. Dowell Myers presents a demographic futures perspective that emphasizes alternative interpretations of prospective demo-graphic trends. He illustrates this with regard to California's growing Latino population and the impacts it will have on building denser and more compact cities. Linda Dalton provides a commentary on the preceding papers and finds ample room for expanding planners' emphasis on the future, both in practice and in accredited planning education. Returning to an emphasis on the future could help to make planning seem more appealing and relevant to both citizens and decision makers.     

Globalized Freight Transport: Intermodality,E-Commerce,Logistics and Sustainability

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Recent research reveals growing spatial disparities in warehousing-related environmental externalities, including air pollution and traffic safety concerns, across municipalities. The existing research, however, fails to present how institutional factors contribute to spatial variations. In this study, I explore how variations in planning practices contribute to the different trajectories of warehousing development. I interviewed planners, local residents, warehousing developers, and regional agency staff to identify local planning practices and policy elements that affect the location choice of warehousing facilities. My results show land use policies (land use permission, industrial zoning, and land parcel division schemes), job-related policies (job creation initiatives and job density requirements), financial incentives (tax rates and financial incentives), and environmental regulations (building design, land use buffering, and landscaping) are the major planning elements that affect warehousing development. Relative to brownfield redevelopment in the municipalities close to the urban core of a metropolitan area, developing greenfield warehousing facilities in suburban cities is likely to cause more environmental concerns in the near future. However, unmeasured factors could be responsible for some of the warehousing development patterns I find in the data.

Takeaway for practice: Knowledge, communication, and collaboration are needed to cope with the rapid growth and, in particular, the disproportionate concentration of warehousing-related environmental externalities in certain municipalities. In this study I also provide planning strategies to regulate excessive warehousing development, including land use- and job-related policies, financial incentives, and environmental regulations. With these strategies, planners in warehousing-intensive cities can determine the best way to reduce the impacts of environmental externalities on local communities in the long term.     

Planning for Place and Plexus: Metropolitan Land Use and Transport

Problem: Human and natural systems will probably have to adapt to climate change impacts, but this cannot be planned for using the traditional approach based on predictions because of the subject's great complexity, its planning horizon more than 50 years away, and uncertainty about the future climate and how effectively CO₂ emissions will be reduced.

Purpose: This article proposes a more appropriate basis for planning climate change adaptation. Anticipatory governance is a flexible decision framework that uses a wide range of possible futures to prepare for change and to guide current decisions toward maximizing future alternatives or minimizing future threats. Rather than trying to tame or ignore uncertainty, this approach explores uncertainty and its implications for current and future decision making.

Methods: I review and summarize the literature on anticipatory governance and provide three case studies to demonstrate its application to climate change planning.

Results and conclusions: Denver Water, New York City, and the City of Phoenix are all using scenarios to anticipate the range of global climate changes that may impact their communities and to develop adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Each is developing a decision framework for implementing adaptation strategies incrementally based on climate monitoring. An incremental approach minimizes the resources that must be allocated to address these risks and has allowed these cities to plan in spite of the high uncertainty associated with climate change science and social change.

Takeaway for practice: The complexity, uncertainty, and distant planning horizon associated with climate change cannot be managed sufficiently for the traditional predict-and-plan approach to yield good decisions about the significant social and capital investments likely to be required for adaptation. To be successful, social institutions must embrace new methods that explore uncertainty and that provide strategic guidance for current and future decisions.

Research support: None.     

Cultural Insights for Planners: Understanding the Terms Hispanic,Latino, and Latinx

Abstract

Planners use various terms—Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx—to refer to people of Latin American descent and from Spanish-speaking countries. Understanding the differences among these terms is relevant to planning given that Hispanics/Latin/o/a/x are a fast-growing group in the United States and terms have evolved over time and differ between users. I ask three questions: Why do planners need to better understand the ethnonyms Hispanic/Latin/o/a/x? How can planners understand the evolution of Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx terminology? Which strategies can help planners to decide which terms to use? Recommendations for practicing planners include hiring more diverse planners; developing a context-specific manual of style; organizing conversations with local organizations, their state APA chapter, or planning school about ethno-racial identity; mapping identities; and creating equity plans at the department or city level. By becoming more culturally competent, planners can plan for and with the Hispanic/Latin/o/a/x community more effectively.     

Metropolitan Transportation Planning: Lessons From the Past,Institutions for the Future

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There are more than 400 U.S. metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseeing multiple transportation projects totaling billions of dollars, yet these crucial organizations and their history and current role are generally unknown or confusing to many planning practitioners and scholars. MPOs face major challenges in developing meaningful long-range regional transportation plans, challenges rooted in their history that planners should understand as they grapple with metropolitan planning efforts. MPOs may approve projects and their funding, but disparate agencies and often competitive local governments control budgets and actually build projects. MPOs, moreover, do not fully represent all regional interests and have no control over the local land use decisions that would support less autocentric communities and human-powered modes. I provide a metareview of the history of regional transportation planning and the MPOs responsible for it, describing U.S. metropolitan transportation planning from the early 20th century. Federal legislation in the 1960s first suggested a regional forum for conversations about metropolitan transportation. Federal legislation in subsequent decades made incremental if incomplete progress toward creating a meaningful regional forum, adapting institutions and practices to increase stakeholder involvement as well as the scope of transport planning, yet MPOs have multiple limitations that planners can address.

Takeaway for practice: History suggests that MPOs can be a force for regional change. Planners and policymakers could anchor future reforms to MPOs’ existing legal and administrative frameworks. Planners should revisit the membership and voting structures of MPO boards to ensure better stakeholder representation and permit some MPOs to generate and direct transportation funds at the local level.     

Reasserting the importance of qualitative methods in planning

The goals of this paper are to suggest what is lost by ignoring field research and to reassert the significance of qualitative research methods to the field of urban and regional planning. I assume that methodological choices between quantitative and qualitative methods are a matter of determining which research method is best suited to capture a particular ‘data slice’. Research methods are techniques to retrieve data and carry no theoretical baggage to bias their data set. To illustrate the significance of field research I discuss three points. First, I illustrate some of the technical strengths and weaknesses associated with qualitative research approaches, and highlight three important issues that are lost without field research methods: a link between planning researchers and the people they plan for, quality of life issues, and informal/illegal activity. Second, I propose that by pursuing a mixed-method research methodology, some of the issues lost by ignoring field research methods can be recaptured. Finally, I give an example of how I researched informal street vendors as part of the urban landscape through a mixed-method approach. This paper argues that until planning research re-evaluate what is being lost by their pursuit of quantitative methods, critical problems in the social realm will continue to lack the attention they need from urban and regional planners.Why all that obsession with Method? Because it was through Method that you arrived at the solution... (Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1989, p. 384)     

The Actions of Discontent: Tea Party and Property Rights Activists Pushing Back Against Regional Planning

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The Tea Party's effects on local and regional planning efforts, given the movement's fierce support of property rights and equally fierce opposition to sustainability goals in regional planning efforts, have received little study. I wanted to understand how Tea Party and fellow property rights advocates became involved in regional planning efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta, GA, and how planners perceived and dealt with their objections and tactics. Interactions between the two groups were marked by philosophical differences over the role of government and the necessity and value of regional planning. However, these actors were also deeply divided on plan content and the authenticity of the public outreach process. Tea Party and property rights activists were not the only ones with substantive and procedural concerns about regional planning efforts; tactical -coalitions of unexpected allies emerged, aligning on plan viability, finance methods and funding, project costs, impacts, and process. My research shows that common ground can be negotiated between -opposing groups on matters of content and process. The concerns of the various stakeholders involved parallel questions often addressed by scholarly planning research, providing evidence of continuing challenges and flaws in planning.

Takeaway for practice: The planning community should not dismiss the opposition of Tea Party and property rights advocates; these activists could catalyze new coalitions of opponents if planners do not attend to the substantive and procedural concerns of participants.     

Scenario Planning for Urban Planners: Toward a Practitioner's Guide

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Scenario planning has promise as a planning tool when compared with more common approaches, yet planners have had limited success with scenario planning in part because of the complexities of the scenario-planning process itself. We address these issues by constructing the key building blocks of a scenario process for public sector planners. We review and synthesize 63 articles and 25 projects from 2004 to 2014 to construct a planning typology with nine components that capture the important variations in scenario projects, such as the project scope, desired outcomes, and the types of scenario construction and evaluation tools used by planners. Although the typology is based only on a select set of projects from the industrialized world in English, we nevertheless further use our review and synthesis to characterize the key subcomponents or possibilities within each component and discuss the overlaps and connections among them. We then use the typology to code a subset of the reviewed projects to identify the associations among the subcomponents of different components and to explore whether planners should promote or avoid these associations. Finally, we offer some instructions on how planners may use the typology to create a better scenario–planning process.

Takeaway for practice: Our typology illustrates the combination of variables that comprise a scenario-planning process and the tradeoffs planners make when choosing one set of factors over another. Planners can use our typology to construct a variety of scenario processes that are participatory, transparent, and future oriented and are an improvement over traditional planning approaches.     

Institutions and Sustainable Transport: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Economies

With the increasing use of GIS by planners, statistics routines are needed that quantify relationships taking into account spatial location. Spatial statistics is a branch of statistics that includes measures of spatial distribution, spatial autocorrelation, and spatial association. Five statistics packages are described here that calculate various spatial indices useful for planners. In the future, planners will use these methods along with GIS programs to draw more rigorous and quantifiable deductions from their data.     

Peter Marris (1927–2007): Planning in an International Context

Spatial planners and policy makers currently struggle to understand the peri-urban area, with its mixture of land uses and its transitional status between the urban and the rural. This paper presents the concept of transition, derived from complexity science, to allow planners to analyse peri-urban development in terms of a number of interacting processes, some induced, some evolving autonomously. Drawing on four case studies of European urban regions, the research finds that many of the dynamic processes underlying peri-urban development are not susceptible to the influence of planning agencies. This should enable planners to develop a more adaptive approach in the future, identifying areas where productive and case-specific interventions can be made.     

城市规划70年的回顾与展望

新中国成立以来城市规划发展的70年,是规划工作因应国家战略,为社会主义建设提供配套服务和有力支撑,成就卓著的70年;是规划观念不断更新和调整,积极响应社会经济发展的根本诉求,与时俱进的70年;是规划类型不断拓展,积累相当丰富的实践经验,开拓进取的70年;是规划法律法规体系逐步建立,技术标准规范日趋完善,有法可依的70年;是规划技术方法不断进步,新技术广泛应用,日新月异的70年;是规划前辈艰苦探路,几代规划人前仆后继、拼搏奉献,书写传奇的70年;也是经历过坎坷与挫折,关键时刻挺身而出、迎难而上,可歌可泣的70年。展望未来,广大城市规划工作者应当切实提升对接和服务于国家重大战略的专业能力。     

Beyond top-down/bottom-up: Village transformation on China’s urban edge

In describing the rapid transformation of China’s villages, scholars, planners, and policy makers have consistently turned to a single spatial metaphor of transformation: top-down versus bottom-up. While not unique to China, this metaphor has become so pervasive that it now serves as one of the fundamental assumptions in discussions of, and interventions in, China’s peri-urban settlement transition. The top-down/bottom-up framework indexes planning, thereby limiting potential interventions to those originating from within the top-down planning hierarchy and delegitimizing potential alternatives. As a result, top-down/bottom-up has encouraged the rapid homogenization of China’s urban edge, eliminating sources of diversity and dynamism that could prove invaluable for the nation’s future sustainability. As an analytical alternative, I propose four socio-spatial dimensions: scale, territory, networks, and temporality. I then explore the intersection of these dimensions through an ethnographic investigation of three rapidly transforming villages in the municipalities of Guangzhou, Suzhou, and Chongqing. These case studies show that top-down and bottom-up, planned and unplanned, are mutually constituted in all instances of settlement transition. The unique intersections of these initiatives produce the idiosyncratic and indeterminate nature of village transformation. This analysis thus points to the need for planning institutions that are better able to integrate diverse sources of village transformation.     

Do Practicing Planners Value Plan Quality? Insights From a Survey of Planning Professionals in Ontario,Canada

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Researchers have developed conceptualconsensus on core plan characteristics that contribute to plan quality, but rarely assess how practitioners view plan quality. I explore how Canadian planners view the characteristics thought to create quality plans. I asked planners in 290 municipalities across southern Ontario (Canada) their view of the importance of plan quality and asked that they identify additional plan quality characteristics, rate the infl uence of various plan characteristics, and explain why they omitted certain characteristics in their offi cial plans. I find that practitioners valued quality plans because they facilitate implementation and help inspire the community while adding credibility and legitimacy to planning processes and the planning profession. Planners did not value all plan elements equally; they felt that clear and enforceable polices were crucial, but that it was less important to report participation in plan preparation or discuss monitoring or interorganizational cooperation in the offi cial plan. Planners did not always include important plan quality elements in their offi cial plans because they lacked suffi cient resources to prepare comprehensive plans and rarely signifi – cantly updated older plans. These case study findings may not be generalizable to other jurisdictions in Canada or internationally, but still offer useful insights.

Takeaway for practice: Scholars should ensure that planning practitioners have a key role in shaping understanding of plan quality. Academics and practitioners should work together to create refl ective practitioners who use plan quality characteristics to guide them as they create or update plans. The profession needs to better train current and future planners on how to prepare and evaluate quality plans through improvements in planning curricula and professional development courses offered by the American Planning Association and the Canadian Institute of Planners.     

Transgressing Local Planning Cultures,the SPURS Program,and the International Studios

Today, we are living in a more interconnected world, as globalization has already reached most urban confines of the planet. However, as this phenomenon becomes ubiquitous, understanding how local planning cultures interact with the effects of such globalization has become a hurdle for the discipline of planning and for the educational institutions attempting to prepare planners for today's multicultural planning environment. Here I present my reflection on the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies(hereinafter referred to as SPURS) and the accompanying MITDUSP abroad planning courses. I offer these experiences as windows into the complexity of teaching multicultural audiences and preparing planners to perform in a varied set of contexts. In this 21~(st) century multicultural world, we need to create a new globalized planner, not one raised on the belief of a globally homogenized culture but one always aware of the cultural and professional differences and open to learning from them.     

American planning in republican China, 1911-1937

This paper argues that in China, between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the onset of the fullfledged Chinese war of resistance (Kanzheng) against Japan in 1937, American planners and Chinese municipal experts trained in American universities initiated significant planning schemes in several Chinese cities. This influence marked a crucial change in Chinese city planning because from the mid-19th century to 1911 it had primarily been British, French or German planners who had exerted foreign influence on Chinese urban form, particularly in the treaty ports of eastern China. Three of the best examples that demonstrate this shift of emphasis to American-based ideals of municipal progress are the plans for Guangzhou (Canton) in the early 1920s, the new capital plan at Nanjing (Nanking) and the greater Shanghai plan in the late 1920s. Although some scholars have analysed the Shanghai and Nanjing plans, few have explored the ways city planning during the republican period reflects a pattern of North American influence in the reshaping of Chinese urban form. In identifying this pattern, this paper will argue that Guangzhou was a first testing ground where Chinese politicians, within a decade after the first American city planning conference of 1909, consciously tried to apply up-to-date American planning principles associated with the 'city functional', the 'city scientific' or the 'city efficient' to a Chinese city that they perceived as inefficient. There were two initial spheres of influence associated with this American connection: (1) an institutional one, in which Guangzhou planners experimented with a commission form of American municipal government which, since 1900, had become popular especially in the American west and midwest; and (2) an influence related to urban space and form, as planners widened several narrow streets of congested Guangzhou and demolished its city wall, thereby following the gospel of Americans such as Benjamin Marsh who, since 1907, had been proselytizing about the ill effects of urban congestion. Guangzhou's planning experiments in the 1920s were at the forefront of further American planning connections, manifested in four ways: (1) through the actions of largely American-trained Chinese municipal experts, who studied in the US using scholarships from the Boxer Indemnity Fund; (2) through American planning advisors, such as Henry K. Murphy, who were hired by Chinese politicians to provide direct planning assistance; (3) through the formation of professional organizations, such as the Association of Chinese and American Engineers; and (4) through publications in English and Chinese that disseminated information about city planning, urbanism and architecture to a professional audience. This paper will discuss these trends as they apply to Chinese cities of the Republican period, with particular attention to Nanjing and Guangzhou. A fuller recognition of these Chinese cities' planning histories, as well as those of others such as Xiamen (Amoy), Shenyang (Mukden) or Fuzhou (Foochow) that followed their lead, demonstrates that American planning efforts in the western Pacific were far more pervasive than has previously been assumed. Although the initiatives of Daniel Burnham and William Parsons in the Philippines after the American military victories there in 1898 are well-established, and although Walter Burley Griffin's Canberra plan of 1913 is even more fully documented, the work of American planners in China, or of Chinese planners deriving their concepts from American practices, is less well understood. This paper clarifies the historical perspective associated with these planning tendencies.     

A Retrospective View of Equity Planning Cleveland 1969–1979

From 1969 to 1979, under three administrations which could not have been more different, the Cleveland City Planning Commission worked in a highly visible way to achieve equity objectives. During this period, advocacy planning became less of a hortatory theory than a tangible effort undertaken within the system and directed toward, and achieving, real ends. On given issues, the Cleveland planners publicly challenged some of our favorite urban nostrums, and they not only survived, but prospered.

This article discusses that period and estimates the impact that the work of the Cleveland planners had on various issues and on the mayors they served. Its conclusions may be useful for planners and others interested in applying their own models of responsible planning and redistributive justice.     

适应新的历史发展需要努力提高我国城市规划设计水平

<正> (一) 改革开放10多年来,我国城市踏着经济体制改革和开放的节律,获得了明显的进展,城市规划也取得了巨大的成就。这主要表现在以下五个方面。 一、“严格控制大城市规模,合理发展中等城市和小城市”方针的贯彻执行和逐步开     

Are we planning for resilient cities in Ghana? An analysis of policy and planners' perspectives

This paper sets forth a set of four principles that define and operationalise the concept of urban resilience. Using these four principles, 105 registered planners with the Ghana Institute of Planners were interviewed and five most recent and relevant national planning documents (four legislation, and one policy) were evaluated to determine how well planning practice advances resilience planning. Findings indicate limited appreciation of the concept amongst planners, despite the national planning documents stating an intention to integrate urban resilience. In addition, these national planning documents do not provide balanced support for all four urban resilience principles, as they advance some principles significantly more than others. More importantly, there is a disconnect between these national planning documents on the one hand, and planning practice on the other, as planning actions are not consistent with the legislation and policies. This paper recommends education of planners on urban resilience issues, credentialing of the concept in the local context, and reconsideration of international agencies' role in resilience planning in Ghanaian cities.