TOWN PLANNING DOCUMENTS |
IS COMMUNITY PLANNING THE LAST OF AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUES? |
Its Roots and Results Timothy Patitsas and Stavroula Conrad |
The planning process utilized more or less everywhere in the United States today has at least three main sources. First it was formed in a particular set of historical experiences unique to America, stretching from the arrival of the first European settlers until the post-World War II period. Second, the process derives from solutions proposed for the problems of European cities during the Industrial Revolution, problems which suggested that decentralization was the only hope for public health and welfare. Governing the way we have learned from our particular experience to respond to the globally felt need for decentralization, has been the map making program of Cartesian philosophy, which entered the realm of public policy with a vengeance in the 1930's through the fields of sociology and economics. This explication of these roots will necessarily be selective. It is intended to highlight both what is good about our current system of land use planning, and what may be simply irreparable, no matter how much goodwill were to be exerted under the present process. The Nature of the Current Planning Process Current planning in most of the United States is theoretically guided by a Master or Comprehensive Plan. This Plan divides the territory it governs into regions, which are each classified according to a particular zoning code. These zones aim first of all for the physical separation of uses, such as work, residence, shopping, and culture. They usually provide further separation between socio-economic groups, based on housing costs. In sorting out uses, the plan aims furthermore for the separation of individual buildings within a zone, in the form of either green space or parking. The current plan coordinates these spatial zones by giving paramount importance to the facilitation of traffic. So important is the smooth flow of traffic, that traffic and parking engineers often have the ultimate say on site design. Thirdly, the implementation of this plan is regulated in great detail, so that many pages of ordinance govern street widths, setbacks, spacing, etc. This detail makes utilization of the current code impossible for non-specialists. Finally, the current plan is in theory future oriented. By enforcing zoning codes, planners can guarantee some kind of total integration to the development under their purview, many decades into the future. In practice, this planning process is not so fixed in its future orientation. Any builder or developer who obtains the development rights to a parcel of land is free to challenge the power of the local government to restrict his use of that. Consequently, the three elements of the plan which remain are the separation of uses, the facilitation of traffic, and the detailed regulations. The planning commission is thus faced with implementing not so much a master plan, as a rough process that mainly enforces broad issues of separation of use and traffic flow. Aesthetic or social welfare issues are of necessity pushed to the margins, frustrating the efforts of planning commissions to protect public welfare. The Current Planning Process is very potent. From coast to coast, it has been applied in tens of thousands of developments, with guaranteed results. On the negative side, these include sprawl, traffic congestion, social dislocation, and a generally plastic and cheap feel to the built environment. On the positive side, they include mass home ownership, social self-determination, and freedom from being forced to live in denser settlements such as cities and towns. The current planning process is so effective, that across the country, every place built by it has come to look and feel more or less like every other place. The ordinances of this process are so thorough, in fact, that they make it illegal to build the kind of small towns and villages which Americans once preferred. Roots of the Current Process in American History The immediate origins of the planning process as we now experience it can be traced to the Depression-era efforts of the government to mobilize the building industry out of its recession. The policies then employed were honed during the Second World War, when vast tracts of housing and industry had to be built quickly for war production and the workers to staff it. Finally, in the post-war period, the tools and practices developed during these earlier crises were refined and became national policy, backed up by massive infusions of private and public capital. It is hard for us to imagine amid our current prosperity, but when the War ended, there was considerable fear that the Depression would return, potentially plunging the nation into a crisis of civilized order. Wars are historically followed by recessions. As more than ten million men were demobilized and thousands of factories lost their guaranteed war work, civic leaders cast about for a way to keep the economy moving, and the returning soldiers employed. Three main instruments were ultimately to be wielded in this successful effort. First, the GI Bill meant that the soldiers would not flood the work force, but would instead invest in their own intellectual capital. Second, the Interstate Highway System launched in 1956, provided tens of thousands of construction jobs and improved demand for the automobile. And third, the development of vast tract housing ensued that the construction industry would pick up much of the slack from the war, as well as making widespread homeownership a spark to consumption and a bulwark against civil unrest. Together, these programs forged a new American identity in which social and economic mobility were conflated with automotive mobility and the suburb - The American Dream. Furthermore, they successfully prevented a return of the Depression. One reason these methods were so successful is that they connected with much deeper traditions in the American way of life. Faced with the vast wild continent before them, early American settlers and their governments kept a steady demand for surveyors and for policies that would fill the empty continent with settled; English speaking voters. Straight lines were drawn across the frontier, dividing the great open spaces into manageable parcels, with a percentage of land being set aside for public schools. The further one headed West, the more the country was regarded as a blank space to be demarcated and domesticated according to an abstract rational code. Thus, first County, then even State, lines become perfect geometric patterns, independent of natural formations such as rivers or mountains. Within the smaller rectangular plots, homesteading and settling fleshed out the Jeffersonian vision of the single family farm, isolated and self-reliant. In the post War period, this tendency to view the landscape as formless until some abstract order was written upon it, and the policy of trying to fill the empty spaces with self-reliant homes, was applied on a more local level, through the cookie cutter subdivision and the free standing home, each unconnected to any entangling village or church. In place of farming the 1950's settler of the suburb would tend and mow his lawn. In place of conquering the wilderness himself, he would buy into a subdivision as it ''developed'' another piece of ''improved'' land. The search for a ''geographical cure'' to problems of religious, social or economic status had been the driving principle for the settlement of the United States. The extension of the frontier into the suburb meant that this dream would continue for several more generations of Americans. Americans could continue to equate space with freedom. The current planning process does, at least initially, protect the feeling of spaciousness for the individual homeowner, even if some of that sensation is negated by the traffic it generates. The Garden City and the Philosophical Program of the Map It was an actual American experience on the frontier that freedom could be equated with physical space, with plenty of room to stretch out and reinvent oneself religiously or economically. But after the 1930's, this experience was co-opted by a deeper intellectual program which had been fostered in the O1d World. Although this European philosophy seemed superficially amenable to the American Way, at a profound level it was not. This occasioned a subtle but destructive shift in American politics, catalyzed by the 19th century appeal of the ''Garden City.'' Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement answered the problems of English Industrial cities, which had become horribly overcrowded, attracted and concentrated the rural poor under the gaze of the societal elite, and were furthermore unsanitary. American cities tackled the majority of these problems through improved sanitation and building codes. But before it had sunk in that cities of the future could sustain even much higher densities without public health crises, the cry had arisen to unbuild American cities, whose supposedly intractable ills were symbolized by their remaining slums. A massive feat of social engineering was proposed and initiated. The population of American cities would be pushed around, price-tagged, sorted out and repositioned within a new rational and segregated city order. The tools that were to be employed to effect this monumental task were entirely Cartesian, for they emphasized the following elements: the attainment of visual and spatial order through the arrangement and separation of all human activities according to gross maps (zoning), the objectification of human beings, the slavish reliance on statistical surveys and studies, the neutralization of time and the denial of its very existence, and the concentration of order and planning decisions in a unified perspective, whether formed by an individual or a commission. When it was developed by the philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century, cartesianism had assembled these tools in an attempt to bring man mastery over 'dumb nature.' Descartes hoped to make solid progress in the sciences by limiting what could be termed ''knowledge'' only to that which could be fixed, frozen and analyzed completely, and then arranged in a spatial or written way. To make this possible, issues of time and relationship had to be negated. An image of the Cartesian approach is a young child's butterfly collection mounted under glass. The various species are arrayed in a row, arranged by their degree of visual similarity. The eye can see at once how the species are both the same and different. However, the function of the butterflies in time is necessarily absent from this vision, because the butterflies are all dead. Also erased is their active relationship to one another. The butterflies have become creatures existing only in two dimensions, like lines on a page. They have become spatialized and frozen out of their third and fourth dimensions, verticality and time. The Cartesian map still possesses much to recommend it. First it enables a quick and utilitarian appraisal of the gross physical structure of the objects it studies. Second, it provides for the rapid transmission of knowledge among researchers, for each one can see for himself how the total system of classification is organized. But there are clear drawbacks in applying Cartesian tools to living systems. These tools enhance the observational powers of the scientist by freezing life. However, they have no mechanism, short of the good sense of the scientist, for "unfreezing" that life later, and allowing it to proceed forward. In fact, cartesianism actually pretends that time does not exist, when in fact without time no living thing exists. so while they tell certain truths about the objects they study, such tools tell even greater lies if they are used beyond their proper sphere. From the 1930's until the 1990's, these tools were the main ones used to attack the ills of American cities. Indeed, even to this day, few if any planners or builders have come forward to identify time explicitly as an actual raw material in building. And yet it is an indispensable raw material which all societies - until ours 70 years ago - used without even realizing it. The results achieved by the systematic application of anti-time, single perspective planning in cities were disastrous. The poor and the underprivileged were especially defenseless before the maw of Big Cartesianism which denied their humanity and treated them as objects. Entire communities suffered "nervous breakdowns" in the face of this well-intentioned cruelty. Thousands of businesses and churches were destroyed without a hint at compensation and people were forced into living conditions that necessitated the greatest social pathologies. Communities that had developed over decades were ripped apart and "sown to the winds.'' The greatest possible bitterness and frustration began to grow among the prisoners of the Cartesian occupation of American cities. What Can't Be Fixed in the Current Planning Process Our thesis is that the current planning process for the suburbs is also Cartesian. As such, it has certain inherent flaws which are not the fault of any particular developer or planning agency. The flaws can not be fixed unless the philosophical roots of the process are identified and jettisoned, producing a different process which could then make possible truly different results. Furthermore, any new planning process would have to preserve the benefits of the old system, in a way which respected American traditions of building and property rights. But the Planning Process for the suburbs, with its gross zoning and its overemphasis on speed of transportation suffers from the major characteristics of any Cartesian system. All human activities, which we naturally undertake at different times of day, have been arrayed spatially over vast distances. Instead of neighborhoods which function nearly around the clock in a rhythm of different uses, we have a series of pod ghettos which go dead for most of the day. Only a single perspective is allowed for, that of the mass market developer, who himself is allegedly subject to the Comprehensive Plan, and all other perspectives are denied. This plan itself is supposed to govern the future by remaining frozen in time. Transportation, which in this system can be defined as "the attempt to dominate infinite space in zero time," is of the highest priority and a continual aggravation. Human beings who don't happen to be planners or developers are regarded by such authorities as ignorant almost childlike. Their wants and wishes are only respected when first reduced to quantified statistical categories, and the people studied by these statistics become objects to be arranged on a map. The average citizen has no input to the design of his most intimate public spaces. Nature and place are reduced to blanks waiting to be shaped by an abstract plan, and consequently that design is utterly insensitive to place or to neighboring buildings. In essence, we currently treat living human communities as though they could be frozen, mounted, and simplified with two dimensional analysis. In the process, we have unwittingly taken a scientific system which was desired to grant man mastery over dumb nature, and given some few men mastery over all other men. Although up till now we have failed to see it, reforming the current planning process is actually one of the last great civil rights issues in the United States. Living, time-bound humans residing on the surface of a Cartesian map will naturally feel the following tensions, resulting in the following ills.
Our thesis is that these problems can only be ameliorated, never solved, under a planning process which treat cartesianism not merely as a tool, but as the truth about life. For these problems are not mistakes made by practitioners of the system, but cut to the very roots of the method itself. Despite its positive qualities, our current planning process at its core is at war with our actual human nature. For that nature must swim in time, and dies if it can not. Furthermore, that nature resists being made the object of other people's plans and visions. The Cartesian approach can provide vital tools to a planner or builder, but it must never have the final say where life is concerned. Our current system is employing tools which are inappropriate for living systems, tools which can only deal with living systems by first freezing them, turning them into dead objects. At the deepest level, our current planning process is killing us. The Timeless Way is the only living alternative that gets at the Cartesian roots of our current predicament by reincorporating time, providing for multiple perspectives, and allowing the unpredictable, beautiful and human aspects of buildings and towns to emerge. At least it is the only process that does so of which we are currently aware. We furthermore believe that once people at large become conscious of how the current system treats them, their children, and their lives as dead objects, they will quickly cast off that system, and adopt something more respectful of not only their civil, but their basic human, rights. |