In the mid-1990s I attended a public county meeting in Cornelius, N.C., a town next to Davidson, where I had just been hired as a city planner. Davidson was at odds with the county’s proposed thoroughfare plan. The plan reflected the type of misguided investment that communities have been making for decades, furthering sprawl under the guise of development. Davidson municipal officials hired me because they foresaw that a proliferation of subdivisions and shopping centers would irrevocably alter the dynamics of this old, distinctive college town and its countryside.
When I entered the Cornelius Town Hall, a resident was berating the Cornelius planner, demanding to know who had drawn the lines on the thoroughfare plan map. The lines represented future “major” and “minor” roads, and people understood what they signified: highways clogged with cars and surrounded by parking lots, stale buildings, sad berms and endless subdivisions.
I told the resident I had drawn the lines (although I hadn’t). I explained that he and everyone else in the room had come to live in the countryside, and they had made the choice to drive whenever they wanted to do anything. Suddenly, the meeting became productive, focused on what we were creating collectively rather than on what “the government” was inflicting on people.
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Attempts in the U.S. to make better neighborhoods, towns and cities are a hapless mess resulting from an obdurate approach. If you’ve attended a planning meeting anywhere, you have probably witnessed the miserable process in action—unrestrainedly selfish fighting about false choices and seemingly inane procedures. Rather than designing places for people, we see cities as a collection of mechanical problems with technical and legal solutions. We distract ourselves with the latest rebranded ideas about places—smart growth, resilient cities, complete streets, just cities, 15-minute cities, happy cities—instead of getting down to the actual work of designing the physical space. These “plans” lack a fundamental vision. And they’re not successful.
Our flawed method of city planning started in 1925, developed for Cincinnati by the Technical Advisory Corporation, founded in 1913 by George Burdett Ford and E. P. Goodrich in New York City. New York adopted the country’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, an effort Ford led. Not coincidentally, the advent of zoning, and then comprehensive planning, corresponded directly with the Great Migration of six million Black people from the U.S. South to cities in the North, Midwest and West. New city-planning practices were a technical means to discriminate and exclude.
This first comprehensive plan also ushered in another type of dehumanization: city planning by formula. To justify the widening of downtown streets by cutting into sidewalks, engineers used a calculation that reflected the cost to operate an automobile in a congested area—including the cost of a human life, because crashes killed people. Engineers also calculated the value of a sidewalk through a formula based on how many people the elevators in adjoining buildings could deliver at peak times. In the end, Cincinnati’s planners recommended widening the streets for cars, which were becoming more common, by shrinking sidewalks. City planning became an engineering equation, one focused on separating people and spreading the city out to the maximum extent possible.
We still use similar techniques, planning cities project by project, “balancing” individual property rights and interests and concentrating on administrative processes. We argue for months or years about each project and are never satisfied. What distinguishes city planning from other pursuits is its effect on the whole community. Moving from project to project is not what should matter most in planning; administrators and lawyers can handle that. Exceptional solutions to our major city-planning problems, such as housing affordability and climate resilience, will never be achieved piecemeal.
Planning should be chiefly a design process, not a legal one. Design-based, community-scaled solutions are paramount because populations now must grow within existing places rather than sprawl, which has ruined too much land, generated too many greenhouse gases and wasted too much of our time as we drive for every simple thing. A city and all its neighborhoods must get better with more people in them.
The degree to which a city becomes more equitable and resilient has to do with its physical attributes. How the city changes determines our ability to deal with housing costs, mobility and climate adaptation.
Making places that are resilient and economically, socially and environmentally sustainable requires a different relationship with the land. Creating the incredible amount and diversity of housing we desperately need is possible only when we learn how to design and build in existing neighborhoods and on existing streets. The best solution to building on the vacant lot down the street will not be found in land-use law and litigation.
The best buildings have an overarching concept that leads the design of the details. If we are to tackle our greatest problems, the same principle—an overarching design concept—must apply to cities as well.
Boise, Idaho, where until recently I was the city planner, is an interesting example. The built urban and suburban parts of this midsize city are in close relation with the desert to the south and foothills to the north. Boise can grow entirely within its existing footprint.
The city enacted a new set of citywide rules based on the physical attributes we seek: a denser city with a great diversity of housing where walking and transit are real options for more people; a city that keeps growing but depletes less of our natural resources such as water and energy. Boise’s discussions and decisions are conceived at the scale of the city and aim to unlock the ingenuity of the entire community.
A version of this approach can exist for every city, no matter the size. I’ve explored these issues in a small town, a small city and a big city: first Davidson, then Charleston, S.C., then Atlanta, then Boise. As Atlanta’s guiding treatise, the Atlanta City Design, says: “When we talk about design, we’re not merely describing the logical assembly of people ... and places. We’re talking about intentionally shaping the way we live our lives.” We achieve this goal by understanding how a place’s physical attributes best enable creativity, ingenuity and restoration.
It is significant that the angry man at the county meeting in North Carolina was pointing to a place on the map that people for centuries traversed using the trails of what is known as the Occaneechi Path. This route, which connected communities of Indigenous peoples, was eventually overlaid first by the railroad and then by the interstate, each built atop the disease, violence and death wrought by European settlers, with the builders sowing new devastation and division of their own.
Furthering our most destructive national obsession—the consumption of more land and greater resources, compounded by procedural and administrative waste—will not yield true hope or useful action. Only by committing ourselves to acknowledge, atone, repair and restore as we design cities as physical space will we have any chance to live in meaningful relation with one another, nature and the land.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.