Physical Planning Thought:

Retroscpect and prospect.

        Nowadays, we can’t conceive a city that has no planning, I mean that modern cities are thought and reasoned about their growth; for some, it is unimaginable that there are a group of people that think cities -its physical and economical growth- but those thinkers exist, and they have a very important roll in society. Anticipating our future will allow us to be better prepared for it and be at the vanguard of challenges, the leaders of the cities should be minded to identify opportunities and manage any risks the cities may have.

         The article “Physical Planning” mentions a series of 5 punctual questionings about a city’s growth and how it defines its form, it is important to highlight that these questionings are only a few of the issues that affect a city, there are many other factors that contribute to its growth. We shouldn’t overlook any of these aspects in order to achieve an equitable growth, for example, if we start to pay more attention to a particular affair, cities will grow unmeasured. As a result, there’s the housing boom, which tends to be an excessive consumerism of land without any relation to the population’s needs, an idea that is transmitted to the impression that any land is “fertile” for any use, from residential, hotelier, commercial or for great infrastructures, etcetera, and nobody cares nor worries about the way the city is growing, the local incidences, culture or natural patrimony that one is attacking don’t matter.

Quoting Jane Jacobs, who was not an architect, and perhaps didn’t have a clear idea of what urbanism is, but was very assertive, made a compendium of how cities should be, which is very close to what this article mentions about the form of a city and its growth, Jacobs mentions that:

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two… 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there…”  ― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Many researchers, according to the article, have tried to interpret the growth of the cities and the way that this has developed through time, when doing this kind of analysis, I consider that one must always take into account social, economical, political, historical and cultural aspects of the city, such as: employment, security, accessibility; and I believe this should be the main concerns of the urban inhabitants, because these are strongly related or correlated to the urban form of the cities, adequate density policies, land use, public space, infrastructure design, and services which can make a difference in the quality of life at a fair price. The design of a spatial model that responds to the worries and concerns of the citizens is the way to deliver a better city.

A good urban planning will positively impact the urban economy, and will help making sure that there are enough jobs, which is a priority for its leaders. Urban planing coordinates the localization and spatial distribution of economical activities, which enables retaining the value of public investment.

Referring to the article, and in my opinion, the researchers that collaborated in it, could have thought more specifically in the uses of a city and think about it today, in this interconnected context, where nothing happens in the vacuum, its presence is associated to a region that surrounds it, with which they share resources and opportunities. It is a matter of taking into consideration the current panorama of a city, and then make critical decisions in order to make a significant amelioration of the urban fabric, and considering the efficiency of the space, which will generate larger economies, and empower the city’s negotiations.

It is very accurate that successful cities guarantee the continuity of their urban planing, with changing cycles in politics and public development, the investment  made will only succeed at long term, of course, but it has a large and positive impact on the urban development. A cities land use planning is should not be exclusively attached to how much a city grows, rather than how it grows and which are the current needs and problems. The uncertainty about a city’s form could be reduced if we start working on these areas, previously mentioned, in order to achieve better conditions and equipment for the urban area.

What should the Architecture schools be teaching? Firstly, that their students know the city where they live. Secondly, that they realize that city has its strong points that maybe undercover. We should learn how to walk in the city, to think and rethink the city, how to be a citizen, towards knowing one’s environment and creating a perspective as a citizen, not just like any other entity in the world.

“But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded.”  ― P.D. Smith

Cities are part of the reality, there will always been settlements and they always will affront different kind of problems. Nevertheless, everything has a solution even if there are many variables. The point is to constantly think the best for the future.

Urbanism emerges in the 20th century after many problems, discussions, plannings and test about people’s life that we call society. Urbanism is the necessity of a master plan that makes every part inside a society could work perfectly together. Urbanism could be the converge among economic, political and social citizenship.

As the fist definition, physical planning is concerned with the general pattern of land-use, the character and location of public buildings and structures, the design of streets, the location and development of transit and the transportation systems. Same as all other physical facilities, which are necessary to promote the economic betterment, comfort, convenience and the general welfare. (Webster 1958,p.137). Later the definition was change with new ideas of urban design and environmental planning; which includes terms like topography, utilities, transportations, density, open spaces, ecosystems and more over.

After many variables, the real problem had been lost. There are no more balance between land-necessities and people’s needs. The cities have been expanded so much that resources can not be for everyone. The core is almost empty. There are no more core in the cities. “The fringe dominate while the core stagnates”. In the last years, people realize about this problem and they started to think possible solutions such as the importation of products to supply people’s needs. As a result, cities could have an internal economic, politic or even social collapse.

If we look at the past, we can see that there have been several changes about this term but always around five questions about physical planning that emerged in the nineteenth century. What are the forces that shape land-use and the infrastructure that supports it? What is the evolving physical form of urban and regional settlements? What are the possible and desirable futures for physical development? What are the social, economic and ecological impacts of current and future physical urban forms? What institutional means are available for guiding physical development?

These five questions only respond to some of the main points of physical planning that help to improve the urbanism planning. Questions can be summarized in some tips. For example, people who planning cities have to know what cities make, then take decisions about the future of the same. Also, they have to understand how the city and its environment works and develops for taken decisions about the growing of both. Furthermore, a city needs multidisciplinary professions to take in account different scenes about what it’s going to happened in social, political, cultural and economic areas. They must know the past to understand the present and make better decisions for the future. Some current problems can be because of lack of information in areas that planning people never thought about it. As a society who needs an ecosystem to live, we have to start of thinking about the environmental impacts we are making and what it is going to happened if we do worry about it now.

There are many institutional means that can help the future of urbanism, the point is that the scholars have to inform about it. There are many technologic advances, computer program, devices, research, explorations and many other things that could help us to make better future for everyone. People in charge of planning cities must understand the situation as well as means to make the best.

It is understandable that when people try to make out the forces that shape lands turns complicated because other facts influence the shape, such as the mode of production, accessibility, land rent, taxation, political, economic and social issues, etc. There are many ideas that planners thought to improve cities like open spaces, civic centers, better transportation and industrial zones but many of them failed because of a social or economic structure.

In 1909, Chicago School offered a  social-ecological approach bases on competition, invasion and successions among social groups and the attention were putted in how public facilities development patterns to divide the city. In the industrialization era, they create a new concept called suburbanization. The new strategy was to separate industrial city from daily life. The idea was to separate suburbs n subdivisions and districts by urban highways with the main business city. This model worked in its time, but nowadays the situation of life and land has changed so the planning must change also.

Critical regionalism is an approach to architecture that tries to compensate the lack of design using the environment around the site, such as the topography. It is a cultural strategy that tries to mediate the impact of the universal civilization and mantain a high level of critical thinking.

The Journal of Architectural Panning Research is the compile of the research made by the major international interdisciplinary resource for professionals and scholars in architecture, design, and planning. In the past years the field has grown exponentially, due to the constant research that the universities and specialized faculties have made. Physical planning is the responsible of doing the urban design in large scale, the land-use, and the location of buildings, structures and facilities that lead to a promotion and improvement of the economy, comfort, and the social benefit.

           According to the article, five perennial questions were developed by the mid-nineteenth century writers and thinkers of the field, these ones having endured for long time to understand and re-plan the physical planning field. Being truly relevant for having the ability to predict the impacts on the society and city, all of them caused by the urban planning.

Those questions are:

-       What are the forces that shape land-use and the infrastructure that supports it?

-       What are the evolving physical form of urban and regional settlements?

-       What are the possible and desirable futures for the physical development?

-       What are the social, economic, and ecological impacts of current and future physical urban forms?

-       What institutional means are available for guiding physical development?

          Before the First National Conference on Planning (held on May 22nd in 1909, and considered the antecedent of the American City Planning Institute, which is still working nowadays) the experts tried to understand the forces that were shaping the cities; for its development, they were forced to conduct surveys in the urban areas. Later, they were able to discuss the development of politics, economic and physic factors that influenced the evolution of land-use.

            The perennial questions were one of the key points for the development of the physical planning field at that time, because it completely attracted the attention of the specialists, who had focused their time on diverse issues and topics without reaching an opinion together with the other experts.

           After the expertise met at the First National Conference on Planning, the perennial questions started to find answers. Therefore, many masterplans began to appear where the automobiles were the focus point, becoming the target of the adapting process of the cities. The masterplans drastically restructured the industrial cities planned on the nineteenth century, replacing certain sections to modern ones. Creating a real change, integrating schools, parks and public facilities within the residential area, and taking some previous ideas that emerged years before in some intellectual movements, such as Garden City and City Beautiful.

             When the World War II finished, both the public and private sector were explored by planners implementing highways, house projects, suburban subdivisions, and suburban factory districts. Helping the politic, economic and demographic improvements the contributed to the expansion of the society.

            Afterwards the implementation of the land-use model the experts analyzed the urban impact, such as traffic circulation, natural environment and property values, the results were positive. Therefore the rest of the cities took the same model for improving their own structure.

            During the post-war period, the research about the forces that shaped the land-use were intensified. The results were the development of models that explains the distribution on them, analyzing accessibility and consumption in the private market, and relating the information to the behavior of the people.

            The urban development increased in a fast way, making an urban renewal strategy that was really criticized because of the massive construction and the poor quality of the buildings.

            Later-on the scholars got disenchanted of the traditional master plan they were implementing, questioning their efficacy and focusing from that moment in the plans based on politics, social issues and planning process.

             Near the 1970s, the theories perspectives started to get in conflict, making some of them emphasize in a structural political-economical force that shapes the physical development and constrain the city planning process.  Also some innovative theories appeared, those based on communication and organizational structure.

            Some publications gave the opportunity to open a new discussion about “re-concentration”, “ex-urbanization” and “multi-nucleation”, the ones that focused principally on housing and land issues that were happening in the developing countries and their role in the economy.

              Considering the research made by the specialists, I think it was a real mistake that the experts tend to keep changing their theories constantly, even after having implemented them in certain cities. Is understandable that the models must be proved somehow, but “playing” with a whole city or society may damage the behavior of the citizens and their future development.

              The research evolves till nowadays, where is pointed to keep the investigation in certain points for change conditions and answer unresolved questions. Moreover because of the constant change of the society, we need solutions for an effective urban function that can be adapted from the less developed to the newly industrialized countries. Finding a more flexible land-use and infrastructure planning system that in a future will be able to regulate effective systems that have the capacity of controlling and permitting their balance.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” Alan Lakein. By stating that I am bringing into perspective one of the most important parts of planning: the future, we plan for what isa head, what’s going to happen, not to reverse the past but change the future; that’s why we plan. But we are not talking about life planning or party planning here, we are talking about physical planning.

Physical planning is concerned with the general pattern of land-use, the character and location of public buildings and structures, the design of streets, the location and development of transit and transportation systems, and all other physical facilities, which are necessary or desirable to promote the economic betterment, comfort, convenience, and the general welfare. (Pivo, 1990) This concept hasn’t changed much since it was coined many years ago, but nowadays it includes also urban design, and environmental planning.

Since it was thought of, way before the 20th century; physical planning has been concerned about the growth of the cities. There have been many important planners that have shaped our way of thinking and designing. Planners such as: Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs, and Ebenezer Howard, among others. These developers were planning ahead of their time, thinking about what they wanted to happen to the cities.

Even though they all had different plans or ideas they all took some things into consideration: political, economic, and physical factors that could affect the way that the cities grew and changed. One thing that was very important to them was the infrastructure, because they were sure that this was a major factor when shaping a morphing city. Not everything was like a walk in the park, there were many possible futures and not all of them were desirable, but that was the reason they had to think about every single detail, from ecological to economic and even social impacts.

Today things have changed a bit, not as much as we believe but they’ve changed.  Urban planning or physical planning, whatever we want to call it has become a matter of importance in the past few decades, even more important than before. The reason that this has changed is because we discovered how important it was to have a physical plan for our cities, a plan that showed the way our little town was going to grow and become a metropolis.

After WWII, when physical planning had its peak; the cities were developed and adapted for cars, since the automobile industry was beginning to grow they needed more highways and wider streets. This model was used in almost every city in the United States and in many cities across the globe.  The car became the “user” of these cities, and people were happy with it. Along with this came the separation of housing and industrial districts, it had been happening before but since people now had a car there was no “need” to live close to work.

The previous way of thinking was applied for many, many years and in some ways it worked, but we are now coming to the realization that it was not the best way to plan and design our cities. We have seen what huge highways in the middle of the city cause and that is nothing but massive chaos. The car has taken over our space, we build parking lots because our public transport suck, and that’s because we never really had a plan or the money to develop a system that works.

Physical planning is more about the urban form, public spaces, dwellings, and other aspects of our city, but we do have to remember that in order to have a working plan, economic and social aspects have to be included in the plan. And as impressive as it seems having a well-planed city helps its economy because anticipating something is usually more cost effective than reacting to rising problems.

 Predicting the future is one of the most important reasons why this planning is needed, but not only the future is what matters, our present is important too and as future architects knowing about urban development matters because not only will we know the things that have happened in our past, but we will know how critical it is to think about and develop a plan that works. Usually knowing what works can be analyzed by what already happened, what we want to happen, and also by surveying the crowds.

The immeasurable and unstructured growth that many Latin American cities have suffered has to do with this: they were not thought of, they have let the government and builders make a wreck of things. People have taken advantage of land speculation, of the low prices of land outside the city, and they have totally forgotten about their city centers, only to develop a “nice” and “hip” new area.

When we think ahead of time we have much more opportunities to be prepared for today, that’s not because we know what’s coming; because we don’t, but because we are somehow ahead of many challenges. The users become more important than the cars, hence the public transport works better, because we know that population will grow and that we need to improve the system for them.

On my personal opinion, physical development is an area that we have to take care of, although we know it’s important, most of us act like it’s no big deal, specially the government. We have to demand a solid plan for our future, and most importantly help develop one if we can, because if us that know how necessary it is do not do anything; nobody will do something. Improving our cities is everybody’s concern, but we have to give more importance to urban planners and what they have to say, because they know what they are doing most of the time.  Today is the time to change our cities, and we are the ones who will do it.

Bibliography:

Gary Pivo, Cliff Ellis, Michael Leaf, Gerald Magutu. (Spring 1990). Physical planning thought: retrospect and prospect. The journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 53-70. August 2016

Nowadays the schools are concerned and worried about the education of physical planning, they say that the lack of focus and knowledge is leading to their demise so professional schools of city and regional planning has received serious attention recently in the planning literature. Basically if physical planning is going to have a very important role to the city, they should have a retrospective of the field and a discussion of its prospects for the future.

In order to have physical planning field, it can be organized around five perennial questions:

The first one is: What are the forces that shape land-use and the infrastructure that supports it? We have to know that the forces that shape our cities are very important because they impact the planning decisions, the urbanization and the context activities.

The second one is: What is the evolving physical form of urban and regional settlements? The physical form changes according to the evolution of forces because they are the ones that gives shape to the city, so everything has to change at the same time.

The third question is: What are the possible and desirable futures for physical development? The future of physical development is to have more attention and therefore it will be improve.

The fourth question is: What are the social, economic, and ecological impacts of current and future physical urban forms? Researchers studied the effects of development and also the environmental impact assessment.

The final question is: What institutional means are available for guiding physical development? The studies and investigations of zones determines the amount and location of growth, which is very helpful.

Before the planning of cities exists, researchers were investigating for answers to the perennial questions. Meanwhile, scholars tried to understand the forces that were shaping land-use, they discussed how various political, economic, and physical factors like mode of production, accessibility, taxation, etc. affects the evolution of land-use and physical development.

In 1909 the Chicago school became a leader in describing the forces that shape land-use and the infrastructure that supports it. At the same time, other researchers developed explanations based on the spatial expression of economic forces. Master plans described future adapting the city to the automobile, planners recommends the integration of schools, parks, and public facilities with residential area. The new generation of urban plans were from the architectural profession they made a drastic restructuring of nineteenth century industrial cities by replacing sections with efficient and technologically modern forms and starting over with a clean slate in the countryside.

In the World War II planners explored futures for physical urban development in private and public sectors, in that explorations they found a few solutions like urban highways, slum clearance, public housing projects, suburban subdivisions, and suburban factory districts. All of this because they want to stablish a new wave of urban expansion. The impacts of the physical urban were examined like traffic circulation, natural environment, property values.

By the time of the Post-War period, during the 1950’s and 1960’s researchers try to understand the forces that shape land-use and the infrastructure that supports it. An economic school explained the distribution of land-uses in space. During the 50’s and 60’s there were a growing number of studies of social, economic, and ecological impacts of current and future physical forms. Scholars focused on the need for flexible land-use controls and citizen participation in the physical planning process. A new generation of planners focused on politics, social issues, and the planning process rather than production of physical plans.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s the influence of Marxist scholarship has grown and emphasize the structural political-economic forces which shape physical development and constrain the city planning process. A strong theme that is important to mention is the street and the neighborhood.

Here is the CityAsLab class trailer I edited for Adriana.

CITY AS LAB is an interdisciplinary graduate course and field program that hybridizes social science and design research methods to read, map, and shake up the urban fabrics of Beirut and New York City.