Planners in Politics, Politicians in Planning

This volume of Planning Theory & Practice includes a review of Louis Albrechts’ (2020) edited volume, Planners in Politics: Do They Make a Difference? In it, ten executive branch politicians with backgrounds in planning from around the world dissect their own political careers. Reflecting on the impact of their work on political decision-making, they also consider the translation of their experiences back into academic life or professional practice.

Albrechts’ collection includes my chapter, “Storytelling and City Crafting in a Contested Age.” In it, I narrate a “practice story” (Forester, 1999) about the first three years of my term (2016 through 2018) as mayor of Iowa City, Iowa, USA.¹ It recounts my experience as seen from the point of view of one who was both mayor and a retired professor of urban and regional planning who has written numerous publications pertaining to planning theory.²

There is much more to the story than what is conveyed in my essay for Albrechts’ book. Prior to starting my term as mayor, I had just completed a four-year term as a city council member. And almost two decades before that, I had served as a council member for a little over two years (Throgmorton, 2000). Moreover, my story in Albrechts’ book stops at the end of my third year as mayor. I served for one more year and then retired from local politics at the end of 2019.

I do not have space here to narrate details about my 10+ years as a city council member and mayor. What I will do instead is convey some of what I learned and thereby open the door to development of a practical, action-oriented theory about the relationship between professional planners and elected officials and about their shared effort to guide the direction of change in their cities. I make no generalizable claims, for no two cities are perfectly alike and no two mayors will have exactly the same experiences. My learning is based on the experiences of one person in one context during a defined period of time.³ Likewise, I do not claim to have always made the best decisions, either as council member or mayor.

Acknowledging these caveats, I strongly believe that planning theorists have much to learn by taking a close look at how particular elected officials, especially mayors, use their positions and skills to influence the directions in which their cities unfold over time. Put simply, my experience tells me that technical/professional planning and politics are deeply intertwined. They are parts of the same process, a process I have learned to call co-crafting the step-by-step unfolding of a city. In my time as mayor, I explicitly sought to alter the direction of Iowa City’s step-by-step unfolding.⁴ We had considerable success, but the story is far from simple. Details will be provided in a forthcoming book titled City Crafting in a Contested Age.

Lessons Relevant to Theorizing about City Planning

Based on my experience, I offer the following observations and recommendations. First, we should think of cities as what Jacobs (1961) called “problems in organized complexity”; that is, as “organisms that are replete with unexamined but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships” (pp. 438–39). They also exemplify what Bruno Latour terms “assemblages.” As characterized by Beauregard (2015), assemblages exist when humans, non-human things (whether living or not), and technologies (or tools) are brought together into functioning wholes. Complex city assemblages draw various networks (e.g. electric power) and flows (e.g. water) together into specific buildings, neighborhoods, and the city, with the networks and flows extending far beyond the official territorial limits of the city. In this sense, cities are nodes in a global-scale web of links and flows, and hence are the meeting places for a highly fluid and constantly changing set of interconnected paths through which people, goods, services, energy, materials, capital, information, environmental nutrients, and social relationships flow.⁵ Cities are, therefore, inevitably affected by the global economy, by transnational movements of people, by changes in the global climate and other natural systems, and by actions at the national and state levels.

Second, largely because of this complexity, the future of cities cannot be predicted and will not unerringly follow formally planned trajectories (Batty, 2018; Beauregard, 2015); rather, cities unfold (Alexander 2002, 4). By unfolding I mean interactions that produce real outcomes in physical design and the quality of lives at the street level. More precisely, multiple actors (elected officials, professional staff, business people, nongovernmental organizations, and others) interact on a complexly interwoven mix of topics. Their actions unfold step by step in an ever-shifting context, with each actor’s steps affecting other actors who respond in terms of their own interests, values, and stories. All of these actions produce effects that bleed across territorial and functional boundaries, escape the control of the initiating actors, and ultimately cause the city itself to unfold. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, flu viruses, earthquakes, forest fires, and other “actants” (Latour, 2004) also play crucial roles in shaping this unfolding. The extraordinary complexity of cities and city crafting inevitably means that actions generate unintended and unpredictable and consequences, which in turn produce what Rittel and Webber (1973) termed “wicked problems.”

Third, we need to theorize about how to guide that unfolding well. In my article in Albrechts’ edited collection, I offer a tentative outline of such a theory. In it, I claim that elected officials, professional planners, and many others co-craft the step-by-step unfolding of cities. Okay, an attentive theorist might say, but how can we ensure the co-crafting moves in the right direction? To answer this question preliminarily, I offer some insights based on my experiences.

Good City Planning is Not Sufficient

Good planning by skilled technical staff is a necessary part of guiding a city’s unfolding in a preferred, arguably better, direction. But it is not sufficient. There are multiple reasons for this, but the key one is that the values elected officials communicate largely determine which plans will be commissioned, whether those plans will be approved and used to guide action, and how, and for what reasons, the approved plans will be amended over time. From 2016 through 2019, for example, our city council commissioned many plans, including: an affordable housing action plan, a climate action and adaptation plan, a bicycle master plan, a master parks plan, and a transit system study, as well as development of a new Form Based Code for an emerging neighborhood near a new elementary school on the city’s southern edge.

A second reason why city planning is not sufficient is that the future of a city is affected by more factors than the ones normally addressed in the city planners’ plans and recommendations. Consequently, mayors and city council members routinely must address particular topics and issues that affect the future direction of their city; e.g. police-community relations, but which fall well outside the professional planners’ purview. Moreover, all entities involved in a city’s co-crafting might know that many types of “unexpected events” (e.g. floods and pandemics) can be anticipated, but neither city planners nor elected officials can know precisely when such events will occur or how severe they will be.

Note that in the paragraph above I am using the term “direction.” As a candidate for reelection and subsequently in my role as mayor, I explicitly sought to change the direction Iowa City was going. When campaigning for re-election in 2015, I advocated turning away from the “Boomtown” direction and “the Growth Machine” (Molotch, 1976) that had been leading Iowa City and said I wanted to “build on what’s already great about Iowa City and help lead it toward becoming a more ‘Just City.’”⁶ Political values were deeply embedded in the distinction. And they were highly contestable. During my four years as mayor, I consistently used the discretion I had to ensure the City’s actions were bending in this “Just City” direction. Consequently, two good questions planning theorists might address would be, what political values should mayors and other elected officials use to guide a continually unfolding “good city” today, and what combination of political action and good technical analysis/planning is required to bring such a good city to life in particular places at particular times?⁷

To perform their role in co-crafting the unfolding of a city in a good (or at least better) direction, city planners need good elected officials. But what constitutes a good city council member and a good mayor? And how can planning scholars help improve the quality of elected officials and their interactions with city planners and other professional staff members? To answer these questions, planning scholars need to have a much richer understanding of what it is like to be a council member or mayor.

Being a Council Member Can Be Very Difficult

New Council Members have much to learn. In my experience, most new council members in Iowa City campaign for election on the basis of one or just a few issues that matter to them, and they often know their parts of the city but have never travelled through (or know people who live in) other parts. Likewise, most incoming council members have little awareness of the annual and biennial rhythms of council activities, and hence tend to be caught off guard when key elements of those rhythms (e.g. developing a strategic plan, adopting the annual budget, reviewing the performance of council appointees) kick in. Moreover, prior to taking office, most new council members have typically not met most of the city’s department heads, do not know much about what those departments do, and have not visited the departments’ various facilities. And, once having joined the council, new members rather quickly become inundated by a flood of topics and issues they have to deal with, some of which are devilishly complicated. They often feel pressured to act quickly and decisively even though they actually need more time to understand the topics adequately. It can be very hard work, both intellectually and emotionally, and it can often feel quite fruitless and frustrating.

Council members are flooded by issues and have very little time to reflect. Once new members get their feet wet, they typically are so immersed in processing the flood of issues that they have very little time to reflect upon how well their decisions are conforming with their values and campaign themes. Nor do they typically have time to reflect upon where their councils’ decisions are leading their cities. Given the difficulties of being a good council member, planning scholars might fruitfully ask themselves, how can we help these elected officials enact their parts in co-crafting better?

City planners can help if trust is present. As council members accumulate experience, they are likely to discover that many of the issues they confront are interconnected with one another. Eventually, they might begin seeing specific ways in which their city is a “problem in organized complexity.” City planners can help council members understand certain aspects of this complexity; however, many other aspects fall outside the planners’ purview. Moreover, in my experience at least, the planners are not fully autonomous agents; the information and recommendations they provide must first be filtered through the city manager’s office. It is crucial that elected officials feel they are receiving trustworthy information from both the planners and the city manager. If that sense of trust breaks down, then difficulties will ensue. If the city manager exerts strong control over the planners’ recommendations, then council members will be unable to discern whether they are receiving the planners’ best professional advice or the city manager’s politically-inflected transformation of that advice; this interaction between planners and the city manager becomes a “black box” into which council members cannot see. During my years as a council member from 2012 through 2015, my trust in the city manager and two members of our planning staff waned, and it did so largely because of how they had framed council discussions about a few politically-controversial development projects.⁸

After being elected mayor in 2016, I told our newly-appointed city manager that I thought our planners’ recommendations should represent their best professional judgment. If he disagreed with their judgment, he should articulate why he disagreed and then express his own view. Put differently, I wanted to know precisely where the planners and the city manager were exercising their own judgment and discretion. This is one of the deepest layers of the politics of co-crafting.

Being a Mayor is Far More Difficult

If being a council member is difficult, being a mayor is far more so. Moreover, there is a very big difference between mayors who want to keep their cities on their present courses and mayors who, as I did, intentionally seek to alter the direction of their cities’ step-by-step unfolding. Turning a city in a new direction cannot be accomplished simply by identifying the characteristics of an ideal “good city” or adopting new policies. Making that turn also demands hard work on the ground, in the trenches, working with other people, and transforming city policies, plans, budgets, capital improvement plans, codes, and practices where necessary. This hard work requires many diverse skills, each of which can be learned and nurtured.

Good mayors must know their cities. To begin with, mayors who seek to co-craft this kind of step-by-step unfolding have to know their cities’ histories, residents, businesses, and physical/environmental features. They also need to have a good understanding of the specific place-based ways their cities are affected by the global economy, by transnational movements of people, by changes in the global climate, and by actions at the national and state levels.

Novice mayors have much to learn. Regardless of how much they know about their cities, almost all mayors begin their terms without having been taught how to enact the role well. In my case, being a novice mayor meant having to process many difficult and sometimes completely unfamiliar issues while also responding in a timely and effective fashion to an irregular drumbeat of unexpected events, including turnover in key staff and council membership and the election of a president whose polices diametrically opposed ours. Responding effectively to such events had to be accomplished while dealing with the normal rhythm of reading lengthy packets of material every two weeks, voting as a member of the council, and facilitating council work sessions, formal meetings, and executive sessions. During the council meetings, I learned how important it is to remain in the moment; that is, to listen to and observe closely what other people said and how they said it, and to respond authentically. Luckily, I took advantage of opportunities to meet and learn from other mayors, especially through the Mayors Innovation Project and the Mayors Institute on City Design, and to speak to a wide variety of audiences about major topics of mutual interest. These conversations enriched my understanding of the range of discretion mayors have about how (within legal bounds) to enact their roles.⁹

Good mayors must know how to convert aspirations into action. To convert aspirations into action, mayors must be very knowledgeable about the structure, existing legal authority, and standard procedures of their city governments. And, once in office, mayors must be able to skillfully manage council meetings, negotiate interpersonal conflicts among council members, and build strong relationships with city staff based on a sense of mutual respect and trust. The last of these can require a tricky balancing act. When pushing for changes in staff behavior and actions where necessary, mayors must also get out of the way and let the staff do their job. If a mayor and council majority want to change the direction their city is headed, they have to transform their priorities into new plans and then into incentives, regulations, and investments. In my case, this proved especially difficult with regard to land development and climate action. As our city attorney often reminded us, city staffs are committed to following existing city codes, plans, and policies, and often have standard ways of doing their work which are based on their professional training and experience and may very well conflict with professional planners’ code of ethics (Johnson et al., 2017). These existing codes and practices are crucial contributors to “path dependency” (Sorensen, 2015, 2018) and hence can generate conflict between change-oriented mayors/councils and their professional staff’s priorities and the city’s. Resolving such conflicts takes considerable time and skill.

Being skilled at ethically-sound persuasive storytelling can help. Mayors who seek to change the direction in which their city is unfolding must also convey – through speeches, media interviews, guest opinions in newspapers, and formal proclamations – first as candidates and then as spokespersons for their cities, an ethically-sound persuasive story about where their cities should be headed. To tell an ethically-sound story, mayors and others first need to establish, in the here and now, relationships of mutual respect and trust with diverse people (e.g. diverse residents, business leaders, and directors of non-profit organizations). Success will not be possible without those relationships. With such relationships in place, mayors and other council members should actively listen to the stories those diverse people tell, learn how they are being affected by the city’s actions, help them understand how specific policies and actions form parts of a larger effort to turn the city in a better direction, and incorporate the diverse tales back into a steadily-evolving story about where the city should be headed.

Ultimately, this means mayors must also help form and maintain electoral coalitions that are strong enough to put new policies in place and convert those policies into effective action (Stone, 1993). Political conflict does not simply disappear after elections. It continues at a very fine-grained level with each step the change-oriented mayor and council take to commission new plans, alter policies, change the city’s budget and Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), appoint new members to boards and commissions, and so on. In my experience, this proved to be true partly because “the Just City” vision and our Strategic Plan’s emphasis of forging a more inclusive, just, and sustainable city conflicted in important ways with the local Growth Machine’s and the State’s commitment to growing the local/regional economy in traditional ways, which marginalize or ignore social justice concerns and the long-term sustainability of the city and region (Schragger, 2019).

Good mayors must establish and strengthen inter-jurisdictional relationships and be skilled at resolving conflicts. As was revealed quite clearly in several of our council’s debates about development projects, most people and organizations typically seek to maximize their particular interests and display little awareness of, or concern about, the connections between their preferred actions and other aspects of the city’s unfolding. Consequently, co-crafting a city requires communicating with a very large number and variety of institutional actors (both public and private), a great deal of inter-jurisdictional coordination and negotiation, and innumerable face-to-face discussions with a wide range of individuals. At the scale of Iowa City, this is difficult but manageable; at much larger scales, it would be far more challenging. This might be the most challenging aspect of co-crafting.¹⁰

Mayors should use the discretion they have. With each step, mayors should use the discretion they have to ensure that their cities’ actions are bending in the preferred direction. This provides planning theorists with an opportunity to ask a range of “what if?” questions about an actual mayor’s key discretionary actions, such as: Were they wise? Will they keep the city going in the preferred direction? What might have happened if the mayor had made different decisions?

And they must expect the unexpected. Mayors must, moreover, be rather deft on their feet and be able to respond skillfully to unexpected events (e.g. floods, tornados, pandemics, business closures or economic downturns) which are likely to have originated outside of the city’s region. At times, a mayor might have to display moral courage in the face of actions taken by others, and, in the end, will learn there are limits to what she or he controls and can accomplish. No mayor can be perfect.

As one who tried to be a change-oriented mayor, I can tell you that being a mayor who is trying to turn a city in a different direction can be very hard, very stressful, and immensely rewarding.¹¹

In the end, it is not really possible to know or control how one’s city will unfold over time. It is co-crafted step-by-step, and the best one can do is try to keep it moving in the direction that one values. In my case, that meant an inclusive, just, and sustainable direction. Professional planners played a key role in that effort, but they would not have had the opportunity had the council not directed them to do so. Planning and politics are deeply intertwined.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Throgmorton

James Throgmorton taught urban and regional planning at the University of Iowa until retiring as an emeritus professor in 2010. His scholarly work has focused primarily on the roles of rhetoric and persuasive storytelling in planning, especially with regard to making city-regions more just and ecologically sustainable. He served as an elected member of Iowa City’s city council from late-1993 through 1995 and again from 2012 through 2019. During the last four years of his council term he also served as mayor.

Notes

1. Iowa City is a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse city with a 2019 population of roughly 76,000 residents. The second largest city in the Cedar Rapids – Iowa City region, it is also home of The University of Iowa. Two smaller but rapidly growing cities and several smaller towns are located immediately nearby. They and Iowa City are also located within Johnson County and the Iowa City Community School District.

2. Key publications include: Throgmorton (1996, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2013); and Eckstein and Throgmorton (2003). An extensive overview of my scholarly, professional, and political work can be found at: https://persuasivestorytelling.wordpress.com/.

3. Cities are not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution whereas states are. Consequently, cities derive all their powers from the individual states. In some states, local governments can do only that which their states explicitly permit them to do. In other states, some cities (Iowa City included) are granted “Home Rule” authority; that is, they can govern themselves within constraints established by their state governments. Home rule status notwithstanding, states can “preempt” local governments’ authority to act on particular issues. Also, in the U. S., the role of the mayor varies from city to city. Some cities have a “strong mayor” form of government in which the mayor essentially runs the show and typically has the power to appoint and replace key department heads and to veto ordinances passed by the city’s legislative body. Other cities, Iowa City included, have a “council-manager” form of government in which the council formally sets policy, makes authoritative decisions, and appoints a city manager who appoints department heads and executes the council’s policies, plans, and codes, while recommending actions to the council. Uniquely, in Iowa City the city council elects the mayor from one of its members.

4. There is a big difference between being a mayor who wants to keep her or his city on its present course versus mayors who intentionally seek to alter the direction of their cities’ step-by-step unfolding. Almost 40 years ago, Friedmann (1983) distinguished between planning oriented toward system maintenance and planning oriented toward system transformation. The distinction remains relevant today.

5. The scholarly literature on these points is vast. For brevity, I cite only Albrechts and Mandelbaum (2005) and Throgmorton (2003).

6. This was partly inspired by Fainstein (2010).

7. E. Alexander (2017) makes many claims that are quite compatible with my conception of co-crafting, especially when stressing the importance of design, complexity, uncertainty, contingency, reciprocal interdependence, and multiple types of planning practice.

8. There was considerable turmoil within our planning staff from 2014 to the middle of 2018. To a significant degree, this turmoil mirrored political conflicts within the city as a whole. This can be related to ongoing scholarly discussions about the ethical dilemmas practitioners face with regard to conflicts between the planners’ expertise and democratic legitimacy of political decision makers. See Lauria and Long (2019).

9. See Frug and Barron (2013).

10. It also connects with urban theory pertaining to governance by complex multi-sectoral networks at the metropolitan or regional scale. See Da Cruz et al. (2019), Katz and Nowak (2017), and Schragger (2019).

11. For details, see Throgmorton (2019, 2020). Hambleton (2014) calls this “place-based leadership.” See also Grooms and Boamah (2018).