Transport planning in the urban age

Transport shapes cities. In the first instance, observe the way mega transport projects fragment physical landscapes. Research published recently in the journal Science revealed that road building has divided the planet into 600,000 land fragments, most of which are unable to support significant wildlife (Ibisch et al., 2016). This compelling conclusion renders visible the scale (in this case, planetary) of the impact that the freeway agenda of the mid-late twentieth century had, not only on urban planning across western cities (Brown, Morris, & Taylor, 2009), but also on the earth’s landmass. Scaling our attention down from these concerning global impacts, research on transportation planning has perhaps found greatest currency at the neighbourhood and city-region urban scales. Transportation planning can incentivize the intensification of adjacent land uses and be a catalyst for street-level urban design, which then might afford greater levels of pedestrianization. These shifts are welcomed where there is careful integration of land use and transport planning. But when the planning of new transportation systems results in the dispossession of land, displacement of existing residents, and is motivated solely by an economic logic, the connections between transport planning and public interest claims are brought into critical view.

From the institutional challenges related to promoting walkability, to the transport methodologies that enable its planning, to the resistance forces triggered by frustrations over car-parking, transportation planning has been the focus of some intrigue within the pages of this journal in recent years (Babb & Curtis, 2015; Givoni, Beyazit, & Shiftan, 2016; Heeres, Tillema, & Arts, 2016; Lindelöw, Koglin, & Svensson, 2016; Taylor, 2014). Now, as cities prepare for a future centred on smart technologies, smart infrastructure and smart urbanism, the boundless prospects of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is set to transform the city again; and no doubt set to attract greater scholarly interest in the years ahead. While still in its infancy, the vision of AV technology has prompted praise for the potential to reduce car ownership and road fatalities, as well as move us into an exciting new era of a shared economy (Burns, 2013; Dowling & Simpson, 2013; Greenblatt & Shaheen, 2015). However, in the face of this optimism, others are taking a more cautionary tone, lamenting that this new innovation will reproduce car dependency, undermine existing public transport networks and disrupt the dominant planning policy orthodoxy of compact city and urban intensification (Hall, 2012).

There is great certainty that the future city will be shaped by this technology and its reach mediated by how well planners plan for the changes that lie ahead. Transportation planning remains in many ways a technical exercise characterized by the analysis of cost-benefits, modelling and technocratic decision-making. At the same time, the decisions about the future of mobility will continue to sit at the confluence of market, government and citizen actors, and their respective engagements into these decision-making spaces will be animated by emerging political orderings and democratic processes. Given this landscape, it is too often the case that the public are cast as the passive citizenry for whom the transport task is undertaken, and upon whom transport innovations such as AV are bestowed. But it is those disgruntled, engaged and passionate citizens who will periodically rail against the failures and future excesses that transport planning will produce for the city.

We might dismiss these citizen agitators as being motivated by a concern for local impacts. In liberal democracies, grass-roots advocacy groups who aim to support initiatives that are in the public interest may be called out as the usual suspects – those who relentlessly appear at public hearings, write submissions and provide social commentary on transport matters in the print news and on social media. In the context of transportation planning, managing the disruptive impacts of citizen opposition – rather than the disruptive impact of the technology and of the project itself – can become the final barrier to implementation for government and private actors. For citizens seeking to participate in the shaping of their city, the complex and oftentimes opaque structures besetting transportation governance can make engagement very difficult (Legacy & van den Nouwelant, 2015). To draw from the German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, the blurring of private and public actors, which in transportation planning is reflected in public–private partnership arrangements, can impact upon democratic participation, delivering:

shrinking scope for political choice, combined with declining possibilities for government to address new problems and provide for the future of society and its citizens, [that] will then cause public expectations to decline as well, which will negatively affect political participation (Streeck, 2014, pp. 120–121).

When leadership is provided by the private sector, this can raise questions about democratic accountability. While private sector leadership offers some benefits, particularly as it relates to driving innovation as seen in the emergence of AV technology, in the absence of strong forward-thinking planning, this leadership can undermine government’s grip on strategic planning and ensuring that transportation planning retains its public purchase (Gleeson & Beza, 2014).

In this ‘urban age’ transportation planning will continue to produce localized and global impacts that will both galvanize concerned citizens and spur new imaginaries about the future city. Transport awakens interest. From discussions across the dinner table, to direct action campaigns against unwanted proposals, to Comment pieces advocating for ‘sustainable’ transport alternatives, to local and sub-regional elections won and lost over transport proposals, transportation planning invokes citizen interest and concern. But as the urban age has spurred new technological innovations, it is the governance landscapes, political regimes and urban challenges produced by transportation planning that are also prompting a reimagining of democratic participation in the future city.

A topic explored by Andy Inch (2017) in the previous issue of this journal, planning’s imagination to address future anticipations, lends itself to wider calls for new conceptual frameworks, methodologies and research tools to chart as well as to negotiate these new imaginaries. This call is also relevant to transportation planning as scholars, practitioners and students seek new understandings of the varied ways in which it will reshape the physical, social and governance landscapes of cities into the future. But it is perhaps the changing conditions of transportation governance, that see the private sector gaining greater purchase through the rise in technological disruptions, which require further critical attention.

The papers in this issue engage in various ways in this task by offering new instruments and new reconstructions towards understanding the changing city. The contributions that follow share a disruptive energy going some way to help the discipline intervene by shaping planning itself. The paper by Priscilla Connolly and Jill Wigle takes up this call. Examining planning instruments, in this case digital mapping and spatial calculation, they explore how this technology affects “the social construction and regulation of ‘informal’ settlement by the local state”. This paper challenges us to consider what this form of visualization affords planning practice, including its potential for assigning classifications detailing varied access to urban services and the power this wields to further reproduce social class divisions. This disruptive tone is shared by John Forester and Daniela De Leo whose paper explores how planners shape the world around them, and they do so by examining how the kinds of work, when executed on the ground by planners, can foster justice, self-determination and more democratic politics.

In their own efforts of reimagining, Alex Lord and Philip O’Brien’s paper describes how planning currently intervenes in market processes. They call upon the reader to rethink planning in a way that gives credence to the different ways it both rouses and manipulates development. At a time when there is a plethora of research into the scaling back of government powers to achieve a more market-enabling environment, Lord and O’Brien offer a refreshing account of the central role of state planning to make markets work better to achieve desired, public-oriented outcomes. Shifting our attention away from an interventionist ethos, Quintin Bradley examines how planning can also be mediated across different publics. His paper entitled “Neighbourhood planning and the impact of place identity on housing development in England” examines how understandings of place and community identity are socially constructed, and he argues that this construction is varied across different publics. He also argues that the meaning of place becomes “intrinsically bonded to specific social relationships expressed through a symbolic frame of community identity” and that this identity frame will shape the delivery of housing, including its size and affordability.

Providing another intervention into how we come to know and understand cities, in their paper Kim Dovey and Elek Pafka foreground the role of mapping in revealing the limitations of existing functional mix metrics. Dovey and Pafka examine how we understand cities to work, and by drawing attention to the concept of “mix” they study the live–work–visit assemblage to render new understandings of the mix of functions a place affords. Their work also reveals the extent to which mapping can convey its immense complexity and multiplicity in a way that a simple metric that communicates fix cannot. Then, focusing our gaze on the building and site level, the paper by Thomas Honeck explores, over time, how temporary uses in German cities have influenced planning. This paper offers an interesting account of how temporary use, when carried out for a limited time on vacant lands or in empty buildings, can innovate space, producing new affordances and possibilities that can inform and inspire new ways of thinking, in this case, among “A young ‘generation of urbanists’ ”.

Perhaps at the centre of our reimagining process is a discussion about how values can inform these imaginings. One such value, long of interest to planning, is that of humanism. The Interface led by Ryan M. Good, Juan J. Rivero and Andrew Zitcer explores the fascinating area of humanism in planning by asking “whether humanist planning can be rehabilitated in light of the post-humanist critiques levelled against it … [and] whether the humanist planning project merits rehabilitation.” In acknowledging past critiques surrounding universalism and how it may render invisible different ways of being human, as well as scholarly endeavours to challenge the primacy of the human in this more than human world, the question posed opens the space for contributions from Karen Umemoto, Robert W. Lake, Howell Baum, John Forester and Philip Harrison. Exploring the varied traditions of humanism as they relate to planning, the discussion in this Interface extends to questions about the diverse needs and experiences of humans in cities, the role of planners to understand this experience, the tools at their disposal to facilitate this understanding, and how pragmatism might be applied to understand how inter-subjectivity and subjectivity shape humanism. The Interface concludes with a piece that reflects critically on the limits of the word ‘humanism’ in planning’s expeditions into understanding the relationship with the non-human aspects of cities.

The Comment piece by Carlos Balsas on the recent World Planning Schools Congress in Rio de Janeiro considers the role international meetings play in the ongoing development of the discipline and the opportunities and limitations they present. The extent to which these can provide adequate platforms to build new understandings of planning challenges across various urban, social and political contexts is explored. Jo Phillips’s Comment paper examines the practices of citizen participation in the rollout of the proposed High Speed 2 (HS2) rail line in the UK. Phillips provides an in-depth critique of the unidirectional manner of citizen engagement which typifies transportation planning. In doing so she calls for renewed attention on the application of engagement practices in transportation planning.

Finally, the review by Lisa Schweitzer of Reardon and Forester’s book Rebuilding community after Katrina: Transformative education in the New Orleans planning initiative speaks to the ongoing value of Donald Schön’s reflexivity in planning practice as a guiding lens for teaching. The book shares the experience of Cornell students who produced The People’s Plan after working with residents and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans following the destruction brought upon this community by Hurricane Katrina.

Taken together, the papers in this issue share a common endeavour to challenge contemporary planning orthodoxy and the instruments and methods often utilized in our planning practice. As our anticipations mount for cities reshaped by the rise of new challenges, including those related to transportation planning in this urban age, planning’s project will be to refine and rearticulate its disruptive capabilities. Through sharp examination of its tools, instruments, methods and framings, the hope is that planning will be well placed to intervene in the myriad of forces that will shape our cities into the future.

Crystal Legacy
Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
[email protected]