The anti-planning heretics can save planning

Planning Inc. would do itself a favor by considering why its heroes aren't products of Planning Inc.

When I write about Planning Inc. or the planning industry, I’m referring to a wide range of professionals whose work deals with the rules and regulations that shape our physical surroundings. They typically have degrees like “urban and regional planning” or “public policy.” They work for private consulting firms, government agencies, think tanks, developers, and more. It’s a much larger industry than that person standing behind the permit counter at city hall.

Since I rant so often about Planning Inc., you might assume I have a planning degree and came up as a local government planner of some type. That’s not the case. I was working towards purchasing an engineering degree in college, so I wasn’t exposed to the planning industry in school at all.

It wasn’t until several years into my career when I took the path towards certified planner instead of licensed engineer that I learned about the many fascinating characters who were held in high regard by Planning Inc. at that time. had planning awards named after them, magazine articles celebrating them, and books written by and about them.

One of the most curious paradoxes I discovered was that the most celebrated heroes aren’t products of the professional planning establishment. The individuals who were recognized by the status quo as having done the most to humanize public spaces, challenge dysfunctional orthodoxy, and promote timeless principles of good design arrived at their insights in spite of the status quo. They learned by watching people in streets and squares, by studying beautiful old places that somehow still worked, and by applying basic economic reasoning.

• Jane Jacobs, a journalist with no formal design training whatsoever, demolished the intellectual foundations of mid-century urban renewal with a book written from her Greenwich Village stoop.

• William H. Whyte, a sociologist and magazine editor, put movie cameras on tripods in Midtown Manhattan and simply counted how people actually used public space.

• Kevin Lynch learned about mental maps by asking ordinary citizens to draw their cities from memory.

• Donald Appleyard measured the devastating social effects of traffic-dominated streets.

• Allan Jacobs walked the world’s great streets and published the photographs so the rest of us could see what works.

• Jan Gehl spent decades counting cyclists and lingerers in Copenhagen before the planning profession noticed that public life could be studied empirically.

• Donald Shoup, an economist, demonstrated that “free” parking is anything but.

• Léon Krier drew polemical plans for walkable, traditional cities while the planning mainstream embraced the superblock.

• Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk took the ideas of those predecessors and turned them into buildable codes and real towns. (I’m not being fair by leaving out Stefanos Polyzoides and all the other great people who helped launch Congress for the New Urbanism.)

Jane Jacobs and William Whyte were the first to take me down the rabbit hole of how to create great places for human flourishing. But it was wild to me that as I was making my way through Planning Inc.’s catalog of greatness, one after the other was an example of rebelling against the very doctrines that Planning Inc. spent the 20th century institutionalizing.

The heroes fought against the separation of land uses, the subordination of streets to parking and traffic flow, the obsession with bland open space at the expense of enclosure and sociability, and so many other factors that deliver a miserable built environment.

It’s also true with the more recent reform movements:

• YIMBY movement exposing the scarcity mindset of NIMBY activism and promoting a path to abundant housing,

• Strong Towns chapters promoting financial solvency and incremental growth (see Chuck with Strong Towns),

• Parking Reform Network illuminating the disastrous consequences of government-mandated parking minimums and sharing ideas for tapping into valuable curbs.

It’s encouraging that so many professional planners are active participants in these movements and celebrate the heroes I listed above. But it’s disappointing that the intellectual energy is still coming from outside the establishment or from planners who first had to unlearn much of what they were taught.

If I was part of American Planning Association leadership, I’d have my members doing some serious soul-searching about why this is. I’d also talk openly about it and encourage vigorous debate.