Planning Interventions: Urban Bias, Social Reform and the City

ABSTRACT

The planning profession struggled for urban amelioration, but avoided confronting the conflict between the redistributive public interest and the goals of industrial capital, resulting in a devaluing of social planning in the US. This article classifies social biases in planning and relates them to sanctuary cities. In the current crisis, launched by the federal government’s hostile rhetoric to immigrants, the planning apparatus is forced to confront what it has sought to avoid – planning for the just, inclusive city that has to reckon with the presence of some of the poorest urban populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning interventions
• urban bias
• social reform
• industrial city
• sanctuary cities

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and/or encouragement, I wish to thank Elliott Sclar, Ira Katznelson, Tom Angotti, Robert Beauregard, John Mollenkopf as well as the editor and the peer reviewers of Planning Practice & Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The CCP argued for industrial decentralization and the reduction of housing density in the Lower East Side, and Benjamin Marsh advocated for comprehensive social planning. As Marcuse notes, ‘the Society for Decongestion of the Population and the movement for reform of the tenement house laws and the National City Planning Conference were originally substantially joint affairs; they separated out only in 1910 in a series of events that signaled the separation of the reform from the deferential technicist approaches of planning’ (Marcuse, 2011, p. 649).

2. Olmsted Jr. argued that planning should be ‘more hospitable to the accommodation and harmonizing of existing city-building forces than to the fundamental reshaping of the metropolis’ (See, Peterson, 1996, p. 53).

3. An alternate classification in Lees’ study of historical and literary discourses of European and American large cities finds that in the 1880–1918 period critical views of inner-city neighborhoods were associated with ‘denunciations and explanations of immorality,’ ‘the dangers of the political disorder,’ and ‘cultural aversions to the crowd.’ The classification in this paper is focused on concerns specific to planning (See, Lees, 1985, pp. 153–188).

4. It is impossible to understand the development of the 19th Western city and the modern 20th century landscape without studying the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The different factors, conditions, and underlining processes that have had a profound effect on the urban environment due to the Industrial Revolution include: a) the dramatic increase in population since late 1700s until early 1900, in particular the growth of urban areas (an example commonly cited – in 1760, Manchester had 12,000 inhabitants, by the 1850s it had 400,000); the increase in life expectancy and the decline in infant mortality (in particular during the second half of the 1800s); b) economic expansion due to technological advances, in particular significant expansion in the provision of goods and services; expansion of transportation and communication systems (railways, steamships, turnpikes, etc.), or in Mumford’s terms the growth of the paleotechnic phase (‘the mine, the factory, the railroad’); c) ‘far-reaching transformations’: increases in mobility (and by some accounts the beginning of the global world), the acceleration of modernity and its forces of creation and destruction in both physical and social senses; and d) the notion of land as a marketable ‘asset’ and the notion that buildings, structures, and even entire communities are ‘replaceable.’ (See, Benevolo (1980); Berman (1982); See Krueckeberg (1983); Mumford (1961)).

5. Differences between the American and English model are notable in the degrees of moral and social outrage over the conditions of the slums and in approaches to amelioration. Yet in both the U.S. and the British model we can detect the articulation of the need for planning to intervene in the economy. As Mears summarized the sentiment of the reformers: ‘without State interference nothing effectual can be performed upon any scale’ (Hall, 1995, p. 19).

6. I thank a peer reviewer for this point.

7. In another article entitled ‘6,000,000 more here in 1930: Evils of City Congestion pointed out by Benjamin C. Marsh’ published on 27 March 1909 in the New York Times, discussing an urgent need for a plan for Brooklyn, Marsh proposed the tenement house law, a reduction in density, and the introduction of zoning as the separation of uses (Marsh, New York Times, March 27, 1909, p. 3).

8. As M. Christine Boyer (1983, p. 67) has argued, while the U.S. was rapidly industrializing and its cities swelling under waves of migrants from the south and immigrants from Europe, social reformers ‘struggled to combat the moral disorder and physical decay that larger cities bred, problems that seemed to require some form of collective action.’

9. Wilson argued moreover that in the context of ‘increasing specialization, rising professionalism, and burgeoning bureaucracy,’ the City Beautiful movement was stigmatized by the City Practical movements as ‘excessively concerned with monumentality, empty aesthetics, grand effects for the well-to-do and general impracticality,’ while the City Social proponents argued that cities ought to be planned for social benefit, remarking, ‘’we have rushed to plan showy civic centers at gigantic cost,’ inspired by “civic vanity… when pressing hard-by, we see the almost unbelievable congestion with its hideous brood of evil; filth, disease, degeneracy, pauperism, and crime. What external adornment can make truly beautiful such a city?”’ (Wilson, 1989, pp. 285, 287).

10. Although this discussion is beyond the scope of the chapter, as a process and an outcome, these planning discourses and their representational aspects were also structured by the specific interests of urban elites and institutions, albeit perhaps not simply predetermined by them. As can for instance be seen in the case of Baron von Haussmann, through the well-known large-scale urban renewal projects in the 1850s in Paris, his planning discourses promoted a vision of a ‘radical break’ in creating a new urban realm in order to legitimize his role and render irrelevant previous forms of urban planning; for this to happen a new ‘urban ideal’ had to be created so that he could demolish and rebuild Paris the way he did. According to Harvey, this allowed Haussmann to ‘engage in creative destruction on a scale hitherto unseen’ (Harvey, 2003, p. 10).

11. Civic groups, government institutions, chambers of commerce, charity organizations, architectural professionals, beautification movements, and business associations proposed in the late 19th and early 20th century conflicting visions for the redevelopment of American cities. The process of mediation among different interests, ‘a many faceted process, simultaneously speaking for contradictory capital interests… and divided among social and economic needs,’ evolved into what became known as city planning. Torn between the need to ameliorate urban conditions for the benefit the public good, and also to respond to the interests of the dominant economic and political constituencies, the planning profession emerged with an economic mandate, the presumption of (for the most part, false) neutrality, and as a mediating force between contradictory interests. Even though planning attempted to represent an ‘ideological reconciliation of these contradictory forces,’ however, it did not assign equal weight to the conflicting interests; rather, planning acted as ‘an effective instrument in the service of capital productivity’ (Boyer, 1983, p. 67 (ellipsis mine), pp. 67–68).

12. Which might, it should be noted, in any case also apply differently to New York from other cities.

13. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,’ 25 January 2017. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/presidential-executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united.

14. This has been the case in the past several decades, especially, since ‘the rise of the “crimmigration” enforcement regime in the late 1980s and 1990s and the federal government’s post-9/11 effort to enlist state and local law enforcement to engage in immigration enforcement activities’ (Lasch, 2016, pp. 159–160).

15. ‘At the height of the sanctuary movement, an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 church members and more than 100 churches and synagogues participated in the sanctuary movement’ which also had support from forty-seven members of Congress. The movement further ‘encompassed a number of religious and faith-based groups around the country, with additional support coming from university campuses, civil rights organizations, lawyers, and a host of other concerned parties.’ (See, Gonzalez et al., 2017, pp.).

16. According to Bau (1994, p. 60), ‘The San Francisco ordinance was passed as a statement of local government opposition to the federal government’s discriminatory treatment of Central American refugees and the city’s own distrust of the INS.’ Bau (1994, p. 50), notes that ‘between 1983 and 1991, the INS denied 97% of Salvadoran asylum claims and denied 98% of Guatemalan asylum claims.’

17. In response to these political biases against the Central American refugees, Ridgley argues that ‘[w]hat began as a group of faith-based organizations in Arizona and California that provided housing, transportation, and legal assistance to asylum seekers who were trying to escape deportation, eventually expanded its base and activities. In addition to providing basic services, many people who associated themselves with the Sanctuary Movement organized to protest U.S. foreign policy and military activity in Central America. Although church congregations and faith-based groups formed the heart of the movement, university campuses, legal, human rights, and civil liberties groups in the United States and abroad also became important sites of activity’ (Ridgley, 2008, p. 66).

18. Municipal IDs can be used to ‘open bank accounts, borrow books from public libraries, and access municipal services such as the public beach, the garbage dump, and public parking’ (Bilke, 2009, p. 186).