Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  The second motif is the apparent inability of any of the inventions to come to grips with land planning policy. Many existing arrangements do pretty well with things that flow and fly: with water supply, sewage, smoke control, pest control and, to a degree, even with traffic and transit. If things that fly and flow were all that need be considered, we might expect the metropolitan problems to come under reasonable control in time, with existing devices.

  THE FIXED ANARCHY

  But something very fixed is involved: the land. And land planning remains in complete anarchy. This anarchy touches everything. It is the road which in the city is zoned to serve as a fast-moving arterial feeder, but at the city line becomes a stop-and-go road town.*5 It is Suburb A zoning for heavy industry against the residential district of Suburb B. It is School District C, divided so swiftly into builders’ developments that, before anyone realizes, it has no way of getting money to support the schools it needs. It is the suddenly vanished open land that had given the city relief and recreation. It is the new bridge approach, tearing out the heart of an old community or cutting off school from students. It is the ever greater segregation of low income and minority populations in the core city, daily increasing the cleavages and conflicts with which Banfield is so concerned. It is an ever longer journey to work. It is shopping centers, whose inpouring of traffic and lack of buffer territory cast blight.

  Anarchy in land planning makes new metropolitan problems faster than they can be solved. And it is the untouchable among metropolitan problems. Perhaps the best example of dealing with it thus far is Nashville, and there only the negative step can be taken of county veto on proposed zoning changes. Even Miami and its environs, which have just voted in a form of federated metropolitan government for Dade County, have left zoning and planning to local municipal control. Schemes like the Lakewood Plan, referred to above, are devised mainly to keep land policy thoroughly local because land planning policy also involves who your neighbor shall be, or in what way you can make money from your holdings and how much.

  Regional or metropolitan planning in the land area is always set up as a voluntary or advisory arrangement because everyone recognizes that anything else would be politically impossible. But, as Planning Director Henry Fagin of the Regional Plan Association in New York points out, the advisory regional planning board with no metropolitan governing officials to give advice to is a “floating” body, by definition politically irresponsible—and it acts politically irresponsible. “It does not need to come to grips with the real conflicts, as effective decision makers do,” says Fagin. “Too often the ‘lesson’ it teaches is that planning is futile or undesirable.” At best, Fagin thinks, the floating planning board can indicate realistically what it thinks is going to happen anyway, which is useful information. This is mainly the role played by those regional advisory boards, such as Detroit’s, which have managed to earn respect.

  Law Professor Charles M. Haar, analyzing the statutes by which 22 states authorize regional planning activity, notes how boldly they prescribe research, studies and the drafting of a master plan, and how vague they leave the question of what is to be done with it.*6 “Even the process of preparation is not drawn up so as to elicit public support nor to be illuminating either to the general citizenry or to the planning staffs and boards. Certainly the procedures for adoption are not devised with the thought of…having the final acceptance of the plan, which after all sets basic goals that affect the lives of the citizens in many intimate ways, a matter of public concern. Without clarification, there is small hope for a reconciliation of divergent interests, without which planning becomes simply a pleasant intellectual hobby.” He notes that 90 major planning surveys have been made of metropolitan areas, of which only three can lay any possible claim to having had any effect. But hope springs eternal. In June, Chicago civic groups finally succeeded in getting a metropolitan planning commission past the legislature. It will be advisory—because nothing else is politically possible.

  FEDERAL SOLUTIONS?*7

  This missing link—lack of means for adopting genuinely effective metropolitan land planning policy—is important to keep in mind when considering the second “possible approach” toward metropolitan government: the use of federal cooperation, aid and authority. The main point in this approach is that the federal government has highly effective ways of getting tax money out of localities and, in returning it as expenditure, can use the powers of decision that accompany powers of money disbursal. The hope that federal means will succeed, where the means available to cities and states cannot, is implied in current bills for establishment of a cabinet rank Department of Urban Affairs and proposals for a White House conference on urban problems.*8

  The federal government does already have an enormous influence on metropolitan land planning. For instance, Federal Housing Administration and Public Housing Administration policies, between them, have probably had more to do with the progressive ghettoizing of core cities, the class segregation of the suburbs and the form of metropolitan scatteration, than any other factors. These results have not been deliberate, however; the two agencies have been unable to formulate policies that take cognizance of each other, let alone take cognizance of the metropolitan situation as a whole. The great federal highway program now getting started will influence metropolitan land use for good or ill more than all the metropolitan land planning ventures of our time put together, but there is no sign that this is understood by those who wrote the legislation or those who will administer it. While these great forces blunder about blindly, doing “planning” on true metropolitan area scale, the Urban Renewal Administration applies its little poultices and encourages municipalities to produce plans—on a municipal scale.

  Most proposals for a Department of Urban Affairs recognize this unhappy situation; they list among the Department’s proposed functions investigation of the impact of federal programs on cities and coordination of such programs.

  Is such coordination actually possible? With all its money and authority, can the federal government succeed in producing rationality where the cities and states have not? First, there is the difficulty of federal programs coordinating among themselves. “No community ever approaches its government problem in toto, for it never exists that way historically,” notes sociologist Albert J. Reiss Jr. This is spectacularly true of the federal government, as witness the current misidentification of urban rebuilding with the depression-fighting theory out of which it was born, or the inability of the HHFA coordinator to coordinate the historically separate FHA and PHA.*9

  Second, there is the difficulty of coordinating federal programs with the local situation. “Planning by its nature looks to the coordination and integration of governmental functions,” points out lawyer Jerome J. Shestack. “There is an overall and continuing aspect to planning that requires involvement of all the community resources.” At the most optimistic, even assuming that the federal government could miraculously coordinate its own parts with respect to their impacts on the metropolis, it is impossible to imagine Washington filling a planning role satisfactorily for the metropolitan area. “All of the community resources” means many with which the federal government cannot possibly be concerned or be aware of. On the contrary, if and when we do get effective metropolitan governments, one of their most pressing tasks will certainly be to bend, educate and influence federal aid and controls as they apply to specific metropolitan areas.

  THE FEDERATED CITY

  Most students of metropolitan government are now agreed that the most logical aim is the third “possible approach”: some form of federation of governmental units within a metropolitan area, with the units surrendering some of their sovereignty to a metropolitan government.

  This is by no means a “simple” approach. There is nothing simple about such relationships, as the entire history of our federal-state partnership attests. The only metropolitan federation in operation thus far in North America—the federation of Toronto and 12 suburb
an satellites (all in one county, with some planning powers overlapping two other counties)—is a little too simple, in fact.*10 So much power resides in the metropolitan council, and especially in its chairman, that, for U.S. consumption, it embodies many of the objections that apply to consolidation.

  The nearest approach in the U.S. is the Miami plan (again involving one core city and its satellites in one county) which the voters have just accepted. The Miami scheme does not provide for unified planning as such, but it does give unified powers over slum clearance, traffic, and parking drainage, for instance—activities which in practice determine many great questions of land planning policy.

  Powers of this type are probably the great opportunity for achieving metropolitan government. For they are the handle, several authorities believe, by which we can best grasp hold of reasonably unified planning and administration.

  Jones suggests, for example, that the way out of the impasse of having single-minded authorities or special districts is to form their governing boards from elected officials of the municipalities and counties concerned, as the San Francisco Bay Area Air Pollution Control Board is organized. The next step would be for the same local officials to serve on new special boards as they are created. This collection of boards with the same elected officials on them could evolve into a metropolitan district with many general powers of government, an integrated view of the many different but related problems and, eventually, a popularly elected chief executive.

  Haar suggests that the state is the logical instrument of federation—or at least federated planning—because its role is already so large in many matters affecting metropolitan and regional development: flood control, highways, schools, for example. The state judiciaries, he argues, are already “plunged into the vacuum of [planning] power,” with intercommunity disputes about land use increasingly thrust on them.

  Fagin suggests that a practical first step would be to abandon the idea of the floating regional planning board, but by no means abandon metropolitan and regional planning. Instead the regional planning staff should be attached as a working instrument to a regional agency which has decision-making powers over key aspects of regional and metropolitan development. This could be a federated metropolitan council or it could be a regional agency of the state. To govern properly, many states have already decentralized the administration of parks, roads and health into districts. Such districts could be redrawn and pulled together to permit them to deal with their functions on a metropolitan level. To them could be added powers over pollution or over transit, over almost anything which the states now delegate to special districts or authorities. The point would be that these powers would be exercised consciously in the context of a broad area plan, and that the plan, for its part, would be formed in the context of genuine decision making.

  Like Jones, Fagin thinks the agency of federation should be composed of elected local officials, but Fagin would add elected officials of the state, including some from the areas involved. After experimentation with the process of delegating some powers of the state “downward” to a region, and some of the powers of the local communities “upward,” the scheme might be regularized. The states, long the declining stars of our national firmament, might well become more important in their role as senior partners in state-city federations than in their role as junior partners in the nation-state federation.

  This or any other federated scheme would work, Fagin thinks, only if the metropolitan or regional body were firmly confined, probably by a “constitution type” statute, to matters of regional import. This would not preclude a joint underwriting of certain minimum standards throughout the area, with option by the communities to better the standards locally, a concept already familiar in many types of state aid. It would preclude centralization of all real decision making and the degeneration of local units into janitorial government. For example, how the suburb of Bronxville, N.Y., wants to zone the commercial district around its railroad station, or what internal street pattern a builder chooses to put in his housing development, would be of no regional import. But whether New York puts public housing or port facilities on its waterfront, or where a parkway runs and what borders it, likely would be. Litigation would draw the effective lines between what is regional and what is local—a process already under way, as Haar has shown, but with no planning framework or theory at present to assist the judges.

  There are several persuasive reasons for the states to take over the new function of metropolitan government. Metropolitan areas are dynamic, not fixed, and a state regional body (even one made up of local officials) could have a matching flexibility of jurisdiction, difficult to build into a distinctly new layer of supercity government. Where metropolitan areas cross state lines, state governments are the logical units for making pacts and setting up joint bodies or programs. Most important, the states have a strong and well-understood tradition of popular government and of give-and-take with localities, something that has to be worked into, slowly and chancily, with new managerial layers of government.

  There is a further reason, little noted yet, but vital. In California, where the future seems to happen faster than anywhere else, two of the “Lakewood Plan” incorporations in Los Angeles County happen to be rural dairy-farm districts which incorporated to protect themselves from urban encroachment. Agricultural conservation is going to become deeply enmeshed, in many places, with the metropolitan problem.*11 Thus the very “rural mindedness” of the state legislatures, long a burden to the development of the cities, could be a valuable pressure on the metropoli of the future. Certainly no scheme of federation which overlooks the problem of agricultural conservation—or is set up to deal with it strictly from an urban viewpoint—will be suited to making planning policy for our monstrously growing metropoli.

  If the problems of achieving metropolitan government seem formidable, and even the thinking about means to achieve it maddeningly tentative, it is well to remember that nobody has been trying very long. Most planners and many theorists were unaware of the metropolitan government idea until Jones’s Metropolitan Government was published in 1942. Most government officials have learned of the idea only within the past three or four years. Some have not yet grasped its importance to them. Predecessors of current state governors showed no public awareness of the concept, but several present governors have, notably Ribicoff of Connecticut and Williams of Michigan.*12 It is, in fact, encouraging that the era of experiment and of investigation (much of it with foundation money, as in Cleveland and St. Louis) should have begun so quickly and should be enlisting so many lively and practical minds.

  And for those who despair that it can ever be worked out with neatness and certitude, it is well to remember architect Henry Churchill’s wise words: “Within the broadest possible framework of the general good, disorder must be allowed for, lest the people perish. Any form of initiative is disordering of the status quo and so needs encouragement, not suppression, if democracy is to retain vitality.”

  * * *

  *1 Jacobs returns to this question in chapter 21 of Death and Life, “Governing and Planning Districts.” However, there she comes to different conclusions: “Workable metropolitan administration has to be learned and used, first, within big cities, where no fixed political boundaries prevent its use” (p. 427). In other words, before cities can govern and plan effectively at a regional level, they must solve these problems at the neighborhood level.

  *2 See “The Hundred Billion Dollar Question,” Architectural Forum, July 1957.

  *3 Before the early twentieth century the problem Jacobs identifies here—American cities finding themselves at the center of a “jackstraw heap” of competing municipalities—was comparatively rare. During the long industrial boom that began in the nineteenth century, outlying municipalities or unincorporated areas offset costs of infrastructure improvements by allowing themselves to be annexed by swelling cities. Only a very few exclusive residential districts risked rebuffing annexation bids. By
the 1910s and ’20s, however, as cities got larger and more expensive to run, more and more outlying areas began to resist annexation or tried to incorporate to control their own destinies. By the middle of the twentieth century many small industrial cities, suburbs, or towns at the fringe of a great city were far more likely to go it on their own and hold themselves out as an escape from the increasingly crowded city, with its relatively high taxes, expensive and aging infrastructure, and tension between classes and races. With this resistance came the classic social shape of the divided metropolis of the mid-twentieth century—a city with a declining office and commercial downtown surrounded by industrial neighborhoods undergoing racial transition and a few prestigious white neighborhoods, all encircled by booming wealthy, middle-class, and working-class white suburbs.

  *4 One of the leading conservative political scientists of his generation, Edward Banfield (1916–99) was well known, particularly after the publication of The Unheavenly City in 1970, for his critiques of liberal social welfare policies. He blamed crime and social disorder on the inherent “culture” of the lower class, which he said disavowed future-oriented thought and indulged in instant gratification. Government largesse would only encourage this tendency and so could only deepen the “urban crisis.” His ideas fed many of the conservative social policy initiatives of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s—particularly the “broken windows” theory—that sought to criminalize low-level disruptions of order and heighten policing of the behavior and movement of the urban poor. Here Jacobs seems to agree with Banfield’s argument that regional solutions to metropolitan fragmentation are impractical because they are likely to run up against the closely defended lines of race and class that divide metropoli, a judgment that later critics of metropolitan fragmentation would contest, however much it may have reflected experience on the ground and the difficulty of solving the problem. Not surprisingly, metropolitan fragmentation remains one of the great problems besetting cities today.