Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure: An American View

Abstract

Savvy planners around the globe have always used infrastructure as a key tool in their box. Today in the USA, the strategic use of infrastructure is being revived, and offers a new opportunity for the planning profession and academy. This essay assesses links between infrastructure and city planning. The aim is to show how infrastructure provision can improve by being in the hands of planners, and how planning can improve by employing infrastructure strategically. It suggests that infrastructure services and the cities and activities that they support benefit greatly if planned, designed, and financed comprehensively, using a life cycle approach, with the form, function, and sustainability of the city in mind. Building on this insight, infrastructure provides a basis for an invigorated planning practice that is strategic and visionary, yet grounded and pragmatic — a combination suited for effective planning leadership.

Notes

The industrial city represented an unprecedented change in the scale and pace of urban growth, which was due to technological advances that were manifest in infrastructure. First steam and hydro, and later electrical energy provided the power to transform crafts and trades into industries, and towns and cities into metropolises. These energy sources plus oil powered new transportation technologies, which were woven together into infrastructure networks. The crowding occasioned by industrial metropolises, and the pollution caused by fossil-fuelled infrastructures, led to the miseries of the industrial urban condition: disease, air and water pollution, concentrated poverty in slums, and so on. The extent to which the industrial city was cleansed was equally due to sanitary infrastructures developed in response to rapid and large scale industrial urban expansion (Benevolo, 1967; Hughes, 1987; Melosi, 2000).

In the golden years of the 1960s, Governor Pat Brown led a water-education-highways investment triumvirate that propelled the state for decades.

Some of the major projects include the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Main Street Corridor Light Rail, Harris County Administration Campus, Enron Field baseball stadium, Reliant football stadium, a downtown sports arena, Convention Center expansion, plus millions of square feet of new office space, hotels with thousands of new rooms, new parking garages with over 10,000 spaces, 5000 new housing units, and institutional projects such as Jones Plaza and the South Texas College of Law. This data is compiled from a wide variety of sources from the Houston city planning department from 2000 to 2006.

Based on author's interviews in Houston from 2000 to 2006, and personal communication from long time resident and activist who is also a professional planner with an international consulting firm.