Celebrating a Special Anniversary: A Time for Reflection

In 1996, JAPA published Scott D. Campbell's article “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable -Development” (Campbell, 1996). It has become the third most downloaded article in JAPA's history and is -regularly cited and seen on class syllabi. To celebrate the 20th -anniversary of this significant publication, I asked a group of distinguished scholars and Campbell himself to comment, with the wisdom of hindsight, on how well the article captured the important elements of sustainable development, the challenges and conflicts between the different views of sustainability, and the potential for planners to mediate the tension between the different elements. I asked these scholars, in some sense, to decide what Campbell got right and got wrong, what he should have stressed more and stressed less, and what the article should say today that it did not say in 1996.

I provide a précis of the article here so that the commentators do not need to repeat the same material. Each scholar has, of course, singled out one or more elements of the article that I do not describe here to build an argument or to make a point. I seek only to avoid unnecessary redundancy.

In the original piece, Campbell argues that sustainability, a term just coming into its own at the end of the 20th -century, may be too vague and idealistic to be a useful driving force for planners. His work was much influenced by the Brundtland Report (United Nations World Council on Economic Development, 1987), which provides the intellectual underpinning of the different and more sophisticated way he proposes to understand the inherent conflicts between opposing views of the sustainable city. Campbell posits a triangle, as shown in Figure 1, as a simple yet compelling way to understand different visions of sustainable development. The triangle clearly illustrates three competing ontological views of the sustainable city, of how cities could and—more important—should grow. Campbell's idea that these perspectives are inherently in tension, intrinsically difficult to merge, is to me one of the major contributions of the article. The emphasis on conflict, however, may not have been the lesson on which many have focused over the years, as Lisa E. Schweitzer shows here, nor perhaps should it have been, as Sonia A. Hirt argues below.

Figure 1. Campbell's conflicting goals for developing the sustainable city.

Source: Campbell (1996). © American Planning Association. Redrawn by permission of American Planning Association. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

In Campbell's triangle, economic efficiency, or overall economic growth and efficiency, stands at one corner; social equity, or social justice and economic opportunity, stands at another corner. The third corner of the triangle is environmental protection, preserving the natural world. Campbell argues that the conflicts between these three objectives do not arise from mere problems of terminology or differences in disciplinary perspectives. He asserts that the points on the triangle represent, in fact, inherently different views of what a city should be and do.

Campbell's link to planning practice is his focus on how planners can recognize and respond to intrinsic conflicts in the spaces between the three corners of the triangle, none of which can exist alone despite the discord between and among them. Campbell calls the space between the economic efficiency point and the social equity point on the triangle “the property conflict,” the disparity between decisions that support economic growth and those that address social justice. Settling these conflicts “defines the boundary between private interest and the public good” (Campbell, 1996, p. 298).

Campbell labels the space between the economic efficiency point and the environmental preservation point on the triangle “the resource conflict,” the disagreements between the private sector that resists any control on its exploitation of nature, and those that advocate for the ecology utility of the natural environment. The conflict between these two perspectives defines the boundary between the developed city and the undeveloped wilderness, in Campbell's terms. Finally, he names the space between the social equity and environmental protection points on the triangle “the development conflict,” the tensions that arise because it is difficult to both develop or grow business enterprises and simultaneously protect the environment in a steady-state economy. He notes that these conflicts arise on a wide spectrum of spatial analysis, from the global to the local, and points out how environmental racism and economic segregation are closely tied to one another.

Campbell (1996) asserts, “[T]he challenge for planners is to deal with the conflicts between competing interests by discovering and implementing complementary uses” (p. 300). Planners must begin by accepting that the mutual dependence of these three points on the triangle is based in both opposition and collaboration and work to integrate different worldviews. The clash of values about how stakeholders view nature, use nature, and incorporate nature into their system of values can provide a way to better combine disparate models. Campbell (1996) asserts that recognizing conflict is a prerequisite—rather than an impermeable barrier—to applying values and priorities to the world around us, to reaching sustainable development, the “elusive center of the triangle” (p. 301).

Campbell (1996) argues that planners should view sustainability as an incremental process that develops over time, moving society forward in “evolutionary progression” (p. 304). He calls on planners to create an “iterative process” that develops a sustainable city at “the conclusion of contested negotiations over land use, transportation, housing, and economic development policies (p. 304; emphasis added). In short, planners should not spend years trying to establish principles and theories on how to get to the center of the triangle, but should see sustainability as an almost Hegelian journey in which the repeated contests between principles and ideas lead to increasingly better collaborative outcomes over time. Campbell also discusses the creation of normative principles of equity in the same terms; he asserts that in fact we must also contest differing views to create an expansion of socio-spatial equity that includes future generations and other species, for example.

In Campbell's view, planners have two specific roles in this journey: The first is to manage and resolve conflict and the second is to be imaginative and creative in developing implementable solutions. He suggests four ways in which planners can perform the first role: to address conflicts. First, negotiation and conflict resolution are important procedural approaches to resolving conflicts because these processes create outcomes accepted by all parties based on a better understanding of individual stakeholder interests and values. In fact, these processes can lead to win–win situations, although he admits that they are no panacea. These approaches are likely to work best when there is a specific dispute rather than a general clash of ideologies.

Campbell offers a second, procedural path to managing conflict: mediating the different languages used by a variety of stakeholders in these disputes. He sees planners acting as “translators” to ensure that stakeholders can come to understand what others seek and value in the dispute. Planners are uniquely qualified to act in this way because planning education is already interdisciplinary and thus multilingual to some extent. Campbell admits that this approach also has problems because one language (economics, for example) can dominate the debate; moreover, not all disputes are simply the result of miscommunication. Even once all parties can translate the ideas of other parties, intractable differences can still remain. Campbell suggests a third solution, to allow the political process to decide these disputes, and/or a fourth solution, to develop market mechanisms that link a variety of perspectives. As he notes, “The role of the planner in all four of these approaches is to arrange the procedures for making decisions…” (p. 305), not to actually make the substantive decisions.

Campbell does offer, however, a second set of suggestions to resolve disputes that do depend on the substantive knowledge that planners may have. First, planners know a great deal about land use design and control and can offer a wide variety of solutions for new land use patterns or architectural designs that may move us toward a better balance between competing interests. His examples include mandating or encouraging densities that reduce auto travel or developing programs that protect wilderness in the face of development pressures. These are powerful tools, he asserts, even if they do not solve all problems, although he notes the tendency of land use solutions to challenge social justice demands.

Campbell also suggests a second substantive role -planners may take to address disputes, bioregionalism, or the belief that we can rescale communities to the ecological boundaries of an area to encourage sustainable behavior. The approach is both promising and somewhat idealistic, so that it suffers from the same shortcomings that -Campbell finds in the concept of sustainability itself: fuzzy, utopian thinking. Yet, as he notes, “…it can be effective to visualize sustainable regions within an interdependent world full of trade, migration, information flows and -capital flow to know the difference between healthy interdependence and parasitic dependence” (Campbell, 1996, p. 308; emphasis in original). Campbell also suggests that planners can help find technological solutions to inherent conflicts, for example encouraging alternative fuels, recycling, and stimulating or subsidizing approaches that reduce conflicts over scarce resources.

Campbell concludes by questioning whether planners can or should be leaders or followers in resolving these conflicts, noting that planners have a greater natural advantage in certain substantive and procedural areas than in -others. Ultimately, he suggests, “planners must exploit those areas of conflict where they have the greatest leverage and -expertise (Campbell, 1996, p. 309).

In the essays that follow, each of the contributors focuses on very different aspects of the legacy and impact of the Campbell article; Campbell himself also responds. Lisa E. Schweitzer traces the trajectory of the influence of the Campbell article, first counting the initial citations and then following the path of articles that cite those that cited the original article. She finds the article is rarely cited by design journals, which she attributes to Campbell's -passive view of the role of design. She finds it harder and more challenging to accept how few subsequent citations of the article focus on the central theme of conflict over values or the emphasis on justice or equity.

Philip Berke describes the growth in the centrality of the concept of sustainable development since the article's publication in 1996; he notes that the ideas at the heart of Campbell's concept have been incorporated into plans, course syllabi, and doctoral dissertations. He asserts that comprehensive planning efforts, and all plan formulation, depend on incorporating the need to move to the elusive center of the triangle. He questions the impact that the substantial new knowledge we have of all aspects of -sustainable development would have on how Campbell would write the article now.

Sonia A. Hirt contends that Campbell's article has been more influential in framing the parameters of -contemporary planning discourse than any other article published in the last two decades, even as she offers some significant criticisms. She suggests that the ideas at the heart of the article have allowed planners to guarantee an integral role in sustainable development efforts; at the same time, she argues that we need to have a pentagon, incorporating the goals of art and health, rather than a triangle. Finally, she challenges Campbell's focus on conflict, noting that the tensions between the environment, the economy, and social justice may only exist in the short term: In the longer term they may be mutually supportive and fully complementary.

Steven A. Moore notes that Campbell's article reflects the paradigm shift occurring in our views of nature at the time it was published; he feels Campbell reframed the Brundtland Report to allow us to move forward in ways -everyone could understand. At the same time, he suggests 20 years is a long time for a model to exist unchallenged, and he tests the key concepts at the heart of Campbell's study. He is most critical of the notion that sustainable -development will emerge from compromise and negotiation and challenges the idea that we can achieve system transformation from such a process. Moore suggests the outlined and potential sources of the new dominant paradigm that will emerge to make sense of the same issues.

Finally, Scott D. Campbell shares his perspective on his own study, describing his early career and how he came to write the original article. He reflects on the growth and development of the concept of sustainable planning in the last 20 years, focusing on how that idea has evolved. He still feels that acknowledging and addressing “oppositional engagement” between and among different concepts of sustainability are important planning tasks. He notes that his way to view sustainability must continue to evolve to provide the intellectual framework within which to address the tensions between continuing and emerging challenges from global climate changes and an array of potentially destructive social forces.