This excerpt is from an article describing 3 ways to reduce the influence of private cars in our planning decisions. While the article has some good thoughts, it was this portion that described the public and city planners role in the political decision making process, insisting that technical details be humanized. And the idea that the public needs to shift from a reactive, protesting position to an active, positive position about what we want our neighborhoods, communities, and cities to look, feel, and live.
http://www.planetizen.com/node/44299
Transforming Our Cities
Our thinking about planning has begun to change. When city planners built freeways during the 1950s, everyone believed that the decision about whether a freeway was needed was a technical question that the planners should decide by doing studies of projected demand. But when citizens began to oppose freeway construction during the 1960s, they talked about the freeways' effects on the "quality of life." By asking this qualitative question, by asking whether it is good to live in cities built around freeways, they changed the decision about the freeway from a technical question decided by the planners into a political question that should be decided democratically.
This example shows that we can make the fundamental political decisions about what sorts of cities we want to live in if we think about different urban designs in concrete, human terms, if we think about the ways of life that they imply.
This does not mean that we can do without planners. City planners are obviously needed to design the public transportation systems for any of three of the ideal types in our thought experiment - and to design many other details of these cities.
In fact, city planners were among the first to talk about limiting freeway construction, because they were the first to learn the facts about the subject. But there was a big difference between the city planners who built the freeways, who wanted to solve technical transportation problems for a passive public, and the city planners who opposed the freeways by talking about their effect on the quality of life, making freeway construction into a political issue.
We need to go beyond the anti-freeway and anti-sprawl movements, which just aim at stopping destructive developments, and to take positive political steps to make our cities more livable and more sustainable.
City planners understand the changes that are needed: We should build new public transportation infrastructure with pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods around the stations. City planners also know that needed changes are often blocked by angry NIMBYs.
At the deepest level, the problem is that most people think of themselves as clients of the planners, that their only role in the political process is to demand that the planners provide them with more housing, better neighborhoods, more transportation, easier parking, and more environmental protections.
This conventional view of city planning is part of our conventional view of the economy as a whole. The decisions are made by organizations that have the needed technical expertise, and ordinary people are consumers whose only role is to demand more for themselves.
People need to stop thinking about cities as bundles of technical problems that the planners must solve for them and to start thinking about the different ways that they would live in different types of cities.
The New Urbanists have taken a step in the right direction by organizing charrettes: People who are against a development when they hear an abstract factoid about it are often in favor of the development when they go to a charrette and work on drawings of what it could actually look like.
People will stop acting as consumers making demands of the planners and will start acting as citizens who can govern themselves, if they think in this concrete way about cities, regions, and the overall economy - if they recognize that urban design helps to determine how they live, and that they could live better by living more simply.
Charles Siegel's most recent book is Unplanning: Livable Cities and Political Choices. He has written articles and books about a variety of subjects, including economic growth, architecture, child care, and the history of philosophy. He is also a political activist who works on local city planning issues in Berkeley, California.
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