Metropolitan Strategic Planning after Modernism

This article reflects on the nature of strategic planning in the contemporary world after modernism. It focuses on aspects that contrast with features that distinguished modernist strategic planning. The central element of that planning was a spatial blueprint that positioned the intended distribution of land uses and transport routes at a future end date. The strategic plan was based on the forecast population for the region at that date. It involved a rationalist plan-production process, controlled by planners, that established goals, identified and compared alternative possible spatial strategies, and set out implementation mechanisms for the preferred alternative. Planning standards and planners’ judgements were used to develop the spatial structure. But the modernist strategic plan eventually lost its usefulness because of changing planning contexts and planning experience. The blueprint-based plan proved to be an unreliable benchmark for development because unforeseen exogenous factors had not been taken into account, or could not be predicted. Moreover, a blueprint did not recognise that social and economic activities are not static, but interact with each other to create fluid, relational space that cannot be captured in a blueprint frozen at a future point in time. In addition, the nature of plan-making changed as governance, involving multiple actors along with government itself, became dominant, allied in many cases with an emerging neoliberal hegemony. This meant that a range of different aspirations needed to be reflected in plans, which a single blueprint could not accommodate (Healey, 2006). But despite such concerns, strategic planning in practice has not fully departed from the modernist approach, with rational precepts still influential.

Overall, modernist strategic planning was grounded in a decision environment that was simpler than today’s in a number of ways, generating some expectation that strategies could effectively guide future development. In practice, this expectation was too optimistic. While some strategic plans did achieve important outcomes, such as the preservation of the Green Belt as set out in the 1944 London plan, for the most part subsequent development outside the intentions of the strategy occurred because of factors that planners could not foresee (Faludi, 1987). This uncertainty about the future is increasing as technological change and global warming accelerate and old ways of governing are challenged, posing fundamental questions as to how after-modernist strategic planning should be done.

In response, a central feature of after-modernist strategic planning is a more direct incorporation of uncertainty, contra the spatial fixity of modernist Euclidian plans. As a result, Healey (2006) sees planning as having to shift “to a more complex appreciation of the multiplicity of relational dynamics to be found in urban areas” (Healey, 2006, p. 267). This is evident in the replacement of modernist blueprint plans by spatial strategies that are more relational (Searle & Bunker, 2010), with fuzzy boundaries and arrows that reflect the flows and interactions constituting metropolitan regions. The governance of relational strategies is paralleled by relational, ‘fuzzy’ governance involving overlapping sets of agencies and actors (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2009). This relational turn reflects a wider realisation that plans can never accurately set out the future, that an almost infinite set of possibilities can emerge to change the shape and direction of a region (Hillier, 2007)

A current example of the challenge that uncertainty poses for strategic plan-making is the effect of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on urban form. The recent debate on planning for AVs in Planning Theory and Practice highlighted this. Thus Harris (2018) has alternative scenarios of densification and sprawl as the result of widespread AV use, while Reardon (2018) similarly suggests AVs will halve or double greenhouse gas emissions depending on which effects predominate. One such effect is the extent to which in-vehicle time is used for non-driving activities. Other technologically-driven changes pose similar strategic uncertainties. The rise of Uber and other app-enabled ridesharing services have had (thus far) uncertain impacts on transport mode share, road congestion and the geographical dispersal of entertainment and retailing, inter alia. The long term impact of drones on traffic patterns can only be guessed at now. Similarly the spread of Airbnb use has caused tourism accommodation to become less spatially predictable. But in another way, such technologically-driven uncertainty is not new, and finds a parallel in the early twentieth century when the expansion of car travel allowed dwellings and activities to disperse to a much wider range of locations that was seen as a positive outcome, embraced by planning. But today planners are more conscious that new technology may or may not yield results that are in the public interest, while any such results will not be known until the technology is well established. Given such uncertainties, the AV debate suggested that planners needed to lead strategic discussion about co-creating mobility visions (Reardon, 2018), accepting that full vehicle autonomy may be much further away than many believe, and focusing instead on vehicle-related planning that makes sense today, such as parking policy (Guerra & Morris, 2018).

If uncertainty prevails, one problem for strategic planning centres on whether plans containing generalised, imprecise spatial content that attempts to embody broadly agreed goals, such as sustainability, can contain enough detail to be of use to infrastructure providers and developers in making their future location decisions. Hillier (2007, pp. 287–289) discusses the Norwegian approach in which long term strategies provide broad guidance on how generally agreed goals might be shaped in regional space, and which are supplemented by short term plans that specify the actual location of new development. This might not solve instances where long term spatial provision for future infrastructure is needed, such as highway reservations. The alternative in such cases defaults to a kind of just-in-time planning that requires, for example, hitherto unforeseen compulsory property acquisition in the case of new highways. Or it results in often more expensive solutions, such as tunnelling.

The need for strategic plans that are as comprehensive as those in the modernist past, however, could be lessening. This might be driven by positive action to increase resilience and sustainability rather than by neoliberal-driven splintered infrastructure imperatives (Graham & Marvin, 2001). An example is Sustainable Urban Water Management involving decentralised water infrastructure using water reclamation, grey water recycling, and rain and stormwater harvesting (Leigh & Lee, 2019). This reduces the need for major areas to be reserved for water catchments and sewage treatment, and more flexibility to develop new precincts independently of regional headworks considerations. Decentralised renewable energy generation offers similar potential (Ahmadian et al., 2019), lessening the need for strategic provision of high voltage transmission line corridors (as done in the 1968 Sydney Region Outline Plan).

Modernist strategic planning featured little or no community input. Strategic plans were seen as requiring sound understanding of complex technical concepts that required specialist education and experience. The after-modernism era incorporates communicative planning as a central element. Does this mean that strategic plans have to now be simplified as a result? In Australia, late modernist strategic planning, such as that in the early 1990s in Melbourne (Department of Planning and Urban Growth, 1990), could involve a number of distinct spatial options to accommodate anticipated development, with the preferred option chosen by planners under political oversight. Now, as in the rest of the world, a single option is produced inside planning agencies and put out for community input. The scope for the community to make significant changes is generally low. Even where more than one option is produced for a supposed community decision, the actuality of community choice can be very limited. In Perth, a major participatory process that formed part of the development of a new strategic plan, Network City, fell short of the ideal as the process was considered to be “scripted and stage-managed and lack[ing] sufficient space and time for citizens to engage in genuine inclusionary argumentation and social learning” (Maginn, 2007, p. 331). But the rise of social media in recent years now offers serious new possibilities for incorporating citizen views on strategic choices. In Helsinki, for example, a public participatory Geographic Information Systems approach was used to test the public acceptance of areas designated for densification in the city plan (Kytta, Kahila-Tani, & Broberg, 2019).

Just as troubling as the citizen participation issue is the increased importance of the business sector in after-modernist strategic planning, which has broadly coincided with the rise of a neoliberal planning hegemony. Thus, typical modernist strategic planning concerns, such as urban form that reinforced spatial communities or reflected Garden City principles, as in Abercrombie’s London plan, are now overshadowed by plans that prioritise economic development. Contemporary planning concerns such as affordable housing and amenity are incorporated but by-and-large only in terms of their contribution to economic development (e.g. Raco, 2008).

The role of business organisations in city strategic planning has a long history that emerged early in the modernist era in the US, exemplified by Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. But the neoliberalism of the after-modern era has seen business views become more central to strategic planning in other countries as well. In Sydney, the 2005 metropolitan strategy incorporated proposals published beforehand by the Property Council of Australia (Searle & Bunker, 2010).

The end of modernist era uniform state provision of services (Brenner, 2004) has also been followed by increasing privatisation of infrastructure provision. One result has been a splintering of provision (Graham & Marvin, 2001) whereby more profitable areas are preferred. But this has increased strategic planning’s challenge of coordinating infrastructure supply as private companies seek to maximise profits by selective provision and a reluctance to share commercially sensitive plans. For example, public information about the timing of the rollout of the National Broadband Network in Australia to each location has been lacking. The increasing flexibility built into strategic plans is partly a response to uncertainty, but also a means of increasing the scope for the private sector to insert future investment proposals in general (Balz, 2018) and for infrastructure in particular. The 1995 Sydney metropolitan plan, for example, showed major future transport corridors as arrows without specifying what the transport mode might be, to open the routes to a range of possible private investments.

Where does all this leave us in terms of how after-modernist strategic planning should be done? The starting point is a recognition that strategies based solely on ‘facts’ and quantitative analysis will fail. Two alternatives, amongst many, might be considered. One is to adopt a mixed approach that intertwines technical facts with communicative values in a dialectical relationship (Skrimizea, Haniotou, & Parra, 2019): where there is a high level of uncertainty over the ‘facts’, value commitments should become decisive ‘hard’ inputs. Another is to keep strategic plans to setting out visions and aspirational goals, since evidence-based strategic plans are difficult to fully realise (for the reasons discussed above, inter alia) (Stein, 2018; see also Hillier, 2007). Plans for specific areas or projects can then be accomplished in concordance with strategic aspirations without weakening strategic planning (Stein, 2018). While strategic vision statements can be merely bland statements of vague intentions (Abram & Cowell, 2004, p. 218), Hillier (2007) argues that if the visions are developed through inclusive participation, then participatory actants “may welcome the inherent flexibility and creative potential of broad trajectories over a twenty-year plan period” (p. 288). While this might not adequately address situations where long term specificity is desirable, such as the highway, transit or airport reservations, after-modernist strategic planning can nevertheless gain legitimacy by involving communities at a level with which they can connect and engage meaningfully.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glen Searle

Glen Searle is Honorary Associate Professor of Planning at the Universities of Sydney and Queensland. He was Director of the Planning Programs at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. He has also held urban planning and policy-related positions at the UK Department of the Environment and the New South Wales departments of Decentralisation and Development, Treasury, and Planning, where he was Manager of Policy.