Framework for Thinking About City Planning

It's funny that the idea of city planning raises controversy. All of us plan every day--what's for breakfast, where will we go after work, when will we pay this bill. It's just that somehow when the government thinks ahead, it reminds a few people of communism. Particularly when it concerns private property.

Don't be put off by the term city planning, by the way. It's simply the name of the discipline. However, the techniques are equally applicable to regions, counties, towns, very small towns, and to some extent, rural areas that want to work together.

Who Plans?

Someone always plans your community, regardless of its size. The question is who.

So if you want city planning in the public interest, to protect the broad population, you will need to involve ordinary citizens. But with some smart, open-minded professionals looking over their shoulders to point out unintended consequences.

If you can't afford professionals, imitate what professionals do in other places. Their work products are easily available on the Internet.

Neighborhood plans address a smaller area but also offer the opportunity for a neighborhood to differentiate itself from other neighborhoods. In urban areas, that differentiation is what keeps the real estate market lively and businesses in place.

A summary of the city planning process includes four main steps:

1. Gathering information and data, including maps and statistics

Neighborhood demographics are important. Demographics means characteristics of the population, such as age, gender, income, ethnicity, and so forth. If you are looking into the future, it's unlikely that everyone in your community will stay the same age for the next 20 years!

You also will need to know what the public sector has in mind for you, what state highway departments and federal agencies might be thinking, and how developers and prospective residents view your community. Not to mention what the business community thinks of your city and whether it is concentrated in expanding or contracting sectors.

Once you've gathered what is likely to be a formidable amount of information, including public attitudes and opinions, you begin sorting through it to see what is important. You thought you needed the name of every property owner in town, but when you looked through it, you didn't see anyone quietly buying up residential lots or any sovereign nation funds buying big chunks of land. So maybe that wasn't so important after all. As the scientists say, negative results are still results.

2. Analysis

So figure out what is interesting, intriguing, problematic, or unusual in your data and information you have gathered. Try to figure out what it means. Ask experts what they think and read this website, but rely on your own intimate knowledge of the community as well.

Imagine and wonder about the future. If you think everyone is happy in Your Town, what will it mean when they are all twenty years older and there are very few little kids? Will your town grow? (Of course you think so, but is there any evidence of that, such as a historical trend or a new major employer nearby)? So what will be the population, and the composition of that population, in 20 years?

3. Think through some alternatives

Start putting together "what if" scenarios. What if we could get rid of that cow pasture in the middle of town? What if we could reconnect Main Street through where that old factory cut it in two? What if we try to bring our artists back downtown to create some 24-hour-a-day presence there?

What if we say that all new developments have to be north of the stream, because we're going to keep south of the stream as open space? What if we say that with our uneducated workforce, we have no chance of competing with our neighbors to the north for back-office operations, so we'll make warehousing our growth industry?

4. Decide

Then lastly, you make some decisions. When we say "you," of course we mean a plural you that includes the citizens. You decide as a community it's logical to separate our residential from our commercial--or not. You say we want to grow like crazy, or not. You figure out that you have a competitive advantage economically if you attract even more doctors' offices. You see that you are going to need more young families to keep up your property tax base, since your state rebates property taxes to senior citizens.

You write this all down so that everyone has an equal opportunity to check out the city planning product. Writing it down is very important, but most places invest way too much money and energy into the form in which it is written. A great plan will take a community in its desired direction, regardless of whether it looks good or sounds impressive. Pretty colored maps may or may not mean something, but most of them don't.

Most Important Topics in a Physical Plan

For a comprehensive plan, the most common key decisions will lie in these areas:

• Land use. This means whether the land is used for residential purposes, or whether it is commercial, industrial, office, cemetery, institutional (schools, churches, charities, and so forth), public (government buildings or facilities), agriculture, open space, park, and so forth. There is no one correct list of land use categories. Use what fits your situation.

Usually single-family homes are listed separately from multi-family, and sometimes mobile home parks are considered separately as well. Sometimes the residential category is divided by densities; density means the number of housing units per acre or square mile.

The idea is to start thinking about the future layout of all the activities that make up a community. If we put all of the houses together over here on one side of the river and all of the shops on the other side, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I've spent a lot of time trying to convince people that they have to segregate different activities from each other, because that's what I learned at the university. But there are many advantages to some degree of mixed-use development.

• Transportation. So far transportation usually means highways, roads, and streets in this country. If you are progressive, you will consider a complete streets program, in which transit, pedestrian, and cycling modes get equal rights. There should be a hierarchy of roads allowing some streets to be faster moving with fewer interruptions. The key streets in a town usually are called arterials, and the street coming out of a subdivision, for example, may be called a collector because it collects traffic from minor streets. Other lists of street and road types are possible.

The key transportation points to keep in mind are connectivity and redundancy. Both are good.

• School size and siting. I know this is an unconventional choice, but let's think about this for a minute. If school planning can be integrated into city planning, so that huge schools aren't being built on the outskirts of town, benefits include more walking to school, more kids being known and noticed, less sprawl, less abandonment of historic school buildings, and better opportunities for school-community interaction. School visioning and neighborhood planning should go hand in hand.

• Open space. Open space may take the form of parks, preserves, conservation areas, or simply undeveloped land. I put open space on an equal footing with land use and transportation in determining the physical plan for a place because open space is easily manipulated to stop growth in one direction and redirect it to another. Also city planning that preserves open space allows protection of floodplains or other environmentally sensitive lands such as wetlands, beaches, or mountains. These are community assets, particularly if you aspire to tourism as part of your economic development strategy. So get everyone to sing the praises of open space, hopefully drowning out developers who as a group tend to think every square inch needs to be developed.

Conservation easements can be a very valuable tool for implementing sound land use and open space plans.

Participants in the Process

O.K. We've established that city planning in the public interest is highly desirable. Now the question becomes how to obtain that community involvement that you have come to think essential.

Why is it essential? Because you want the buy-in. You want people to support and refer to the finished city planning product and not constantly try to cut it down to size.

But to get buy-in, you're going to have to let people really have their say. And yes, there's a danger they will make bad decisions, but that is why you have some really wise people on the team. If you can afford it, it is why you get some professionals who have done this all before.

2. Specific Stakeholders

Besides the general public, you may need to think about involving your stakeholders regularly in city planning. A stakeholder is some entity that can really jump start or detract from implementation. Examples are major businesses, institutions such as schools and universities, utility companies, the state highway department, railroads, federal installations in your town, and churches and other organizations that may be important in civic life.

While a company shouldn't necessarily have more voice than an individual citizen, that company's capacity to make or spoil the town means that the company should be singled out for their input.

Especially when there are some obvious major stakeholders, whether they are organizations or individuals, you may want to consider the intensive charrette method.

3. Children

And remember one more group--the one that actually has the most to gain or lose from a future-oriented activity such as city planning. That would be the children. Civic work with kids isn't for sissies, but you know that kids tell you the truth, state the obvious, and don't stand for a bunch of silly jargon words that don't really mean anything. Ask them what they think the town should be like in 5 or 10 years. If they say more ice cream, is that really such a bad idea?

Useful Rural Plans

However, formulating a common vision for rural areas is incredibly important, even when population is likely to shrink. Even then, you can work out a way to make painful circumstances into a creative way to provide more options for making a living and stretching the impact of your tax dollars.

Believe it or not, the process is exactly the same in a rural situation as in city planning. Only the priorities accorded the topics differ.

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