The human dimensions of planning
by Lawrence K. Frank

This paper is concerned with planning as a multidimensional problem and is focused upon the human needs, requirements and potentialities that are becoming increasingly significant if not crucial, in all planning. In order to focus discussion, the paper will offer a number of statements or propositions which should be interpreted as topics for critical examination and discussion in relation to all the topics to be considered by the group.
Responsibilities of planners are rapidly increasing today. They are faced with the difficult task of helping to create an industrial civilization which will provide a way of life, a design for living, that is increasingly oriented to human conservation and the fulfillment of the aspirations of people. This is a multidimensional problem involving not only the familiar technical questions of land use, spatial arrangements, materials, designs, costs, the exigent issues of legal, economic, political and social requirements, but more importantly, the utilization of new knowledge and resources for human needs and aspirations. These questions are difficult to formulate, and even more difficult to answer, because the planner looking to the future must be constantly aware of the pervasive changes taking place in our cultural traditions, the large scale alterations in our social order, and the increasing confusion and anxiety of people as they search for some order and stability in their, lives while undergoing many of these upheavals and transformations. Cultural and social changes take place primarily in the minds and hearts of people and become established as they alter their beliefs and expectations and accept new designs for living. Planning emerges as a self conscious effort to guide cultural and social change purposefully, to help us move from today with the immense load of anachronistic survivals to tomorrow. The planner may guide this renewal of our culture, this reorientation of our social order, by designing the housing, the neighborhoods, the towns, cities and regions where people can live and make these transitions from the old to the new without demoralization. Resistance to change, clinging to the past, and rejecting even what will make life better is to be recognized as of the challenging components of planning, like the strength and resistance, the refractiveness and elasticity of the materials to be embodied in the structures of the topography of the land. The planner, therefore, can take little or nothing for granted today.
The planner must be aware of all the crucial questions he must raise, and understand how to seek answers that are valid and informing so that he can self-consciously plan what people need and aspire to. In this approach, the planner operates like an orchestra conductor, who brings together, blends, synchronizes, harmonizes or reconciles the many elements and the variety of professional knowledge, skills and techniques involved in such vital designs. The planner today is embarrassed by the very richness of resources and opportunities, by the variety of choices and vital decisions he must make, the conflicts, technical, professional, social, cultural and ethical, he must resolve. The planner must continuously test every proposed solution to his problem by reference to people, their traditions and their aspirations and, above all, the importance of helping them to maintain a free social order in which the worth of the individual and human dignity will survive.
In planning therefore, the idea, the concept, the vision of what human living can be, should govern the use to be made by the planner of the variety of instruments at his command. Since planning is the attempt to actualize ideas and goal values, a primary task of planning is to clarify these ideas and goal values, to clarify the criteria which the planner may invoke in making choices and decisions. Today we are realizing that social order and cultural traditions are man’s own creations and can he remade. The planner’s task is not that of “adaptation to the environment”, but rather to create the environment, geographical, physical, social, human and symbolic, that is expressive of, and responsive to, man’s new image of himself, his growing recognition of his human potentialities and of his inescapable obligation “to take charge of his own destiny”. Planning may therefore be regarded as the attempt to create the “habitat” (Gropius), the “surround” (Sherrington), the ecological complex for the continual intercourse of nature and human nature through various modes of communication, technical social, economic, political, legal and interpersonal.
Over the centuries planning has been guided by various criteria - protection from the elements and from enemies, to glorify God, or the ruler, as efficient instruments to serve the economy or the State, as monuments and memorials, or as esthetic creations - a variety of goals and purposes in and through which creative imagination, artistic sensitivity, and technical resources have combined to produce the great civilizations of the world. Today planning is increasingly concerned with developing a way of life and advancing toward the goal values we cherish. Probably least recognized and accepted by the planner is what the planned city or region will mean to people, what symbolic fulfillment it will yield or deny. When the plan of necessity requires relinquishment or rejection of what people have long believed in or sought, psychological equivalents must he provided. If we can state this contemporary problem of planning adequately, recognizing these many dimensions, planning can go forward with increasing surety and self-confidence because it will be guided by a conceptual formulation more nearly commensurate with the immense responsibilities that the planner today must assume. The planners offers or proposes a plan that incorporates what people aspire to, although they may not know or realize until it is proposed what is now possible. Neither a statement of what people “need” or of what they dislike and complain of is adequate as a guide to what the planner should provide as a positive step forward, an affirmative statement of what life can provide.
Since planning is concerned with the development of “organized complexity”, of many dimensions, some of the recent advances in scientific thinking may offer fruitful approaches to this problem. Thus it seems clear that as against the mechanistic concepts of classic physics, the planner will find in field concept an approach that is more congruous with the dynamic processes with which he must deal. Examples of the field concept and how it is being utilized in various scientific disciplines and in other professions can he provided, if desired. The field concept asserts that the pattern, the configuration, the organization gives the constituent parts or components their meaning and significance and governs their interrelations. Thus no one factor or element in a whole may be considered causal or independent but rather its significance arises in large part from its location in the larger whole. This is being demonstrated in atomic physics, stereochemistry, biochemistry, embryology, biology, and now becoming increasingly evident in the study of cultures, social orders and the human personality. A field approach therefore may provide a more comprehensive concept for planning and a continual reminder that nothing is irrelevant however minor or insignificant it may seem and that location or spatial arrangements have a profound significance for functioning.
Another fruitful resource for planning will he found in the recently developed communication theory. Thus, it is possible to regard a social order as a communication network wherein we may observe how individuals are engaged in a variety of communications and transactions, utilizing the group accepted rituals, symbols and practices that we call economic, political, legal, social and interpersonal. This approach has the advantage of helping us to realize that the same individual is involved in all of these transactions, a fact that is often obscured or ignored in the usual studies of statistical data by economists, political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and so forth. It also becomes clear that an individual may turn from one to another of these modes of communication and transactions according to his changing needs and purposes and opportunities. Freedom for communication may therefore be as important as freedom of physical movement and adequate transportation.
The theory of circular processes, such as cybernetics, or feedback, also offers some promising approaches to the problems of planning. It should be recognized that a free social order, as contrasted with a dictatorship, or authoritarian regime, is essentially a self-regulating, self-repairing organization, the vitality and adequate functioning of which depends upon the efficiency of its communication network and of the varied feedbacks through which members of that social order continually reorient themselves. Planning should provide for these feedbacks, especially since the improvement of planning involves evaluating a plan by what people think, believe and feel about the plan when in operation. The foregoing considerations emphasize the crucial importance for planners of the question of who shall be sacrificed for whom, and to what extent any planned community or region provides opportunities for individual autonomy within a social order. With the coming of an industrial civilization there will inevitably be an ever enlarging regulation and regimentation in many aspects of living. It therefore will become increasingly important for the planner to provide opportunities and occasions for autonomous, spontaneous living within the framework of the industrialized society. Likewise planners should recognize the ever widening chasm between working in a well planned factory, equipped with every device for orderly, safe, comfortable existence, and serviced for health, nutrition, etc. and living in the usually disorderly neighborhoods, the inadequate, obsolete houses with little or none of the services necessary for living with dignity. Even school children are experiencing this split between the modem school building and their home lives. These discrepancies and conflicts are increasingly difficult to resolve as we see in the lives of people today. Likewise, the coming of industrialization will bring increased leisure time and more energy for living outside and apart from work activities. The planner therefore should envisage a balanced way of life with adequate provision for these non-working activities through which the individual can find fulfillments and the replenishment necessary for human living. Already automation is increasingly displacing the human worker in factories and bringing on a crisis, human, economic, political and social, for which we are almost totally unprepared.
The seriousness of this situation is intensified by the gradual, but now accelerated, change in our orientation and time perspectives: instead of the former preoccupation with life after death and the conviction of the unimportance of living, we are more and more concerned with life today and what opportunities and fulfillments it can offer. People are expecting, if not demanding, more now, and are less willing to accept poverty and demoralization in their lives. These alterations in peoples’ expectations and their capacity for expressing their discontent or dissatisfaction with life, is becoming increasingly important for planning which may unintentionally aggravate an already difficult social-political situation. When a planner starts with people and envisages the human life career from conception through old age, he is faced with the problem of how to provide for the needs and fulfillments of people at those successive age periods, how can he recognize their requirements in his designs, and what economic, political and social organizations and their varied processes are necessary to maintain that way of life. This approach, however idealistic it may appear, nevertheless offers a useful contrast to the approach which may largely ignore people, their aspirations and fulfillments, and concentrate upon the technical and economic problems on the assumption that people can and will adjust to whatever the planner may provide. Obviously in a realistic world, the planner must attempt to reconcile these two contrasting approaches, but can do so only in so far as he is aware of these varied aspects and dimensions, and has some criteria to guide his decisions and choices. Planning has the responsibility for facilitating the many transactions which must be made, seeking to facilitate the large scale transformation in living, setting the rate or pace that is desirable and feasible in terms of how many alterations in living people can achieve and what can be done to reassure and strengthen them.
One large opportunity for the planner is to inventory the many and varied programs and organizations concerned with different aspects of social welfare and of human conservation, to see how far in his planning and designing it may be possible to incorporate these objectives as essential functioning processes or possibilities for human living. For example, how far can the objectives of public health, preventive medicine and health care be translated into the design, construction and equipment of cities and especially of housing, so that family living may more effectively approach the achievement of health at all stages in the life career? Likewise it may be asked, how far the objectives of mental health or healthy personality developments and expression may be recognized and incorporated into planning, not only to minimize frequent sources of human defeat and frustration, but to provide a more fulfilling way of living. We can make this specific by pointing out that health care is not the sole responsibility of doctors and nurses, but is primarily the function of the home and family where the basic tasks of health care take place, in the protection of the individual from dirt, contamination and infection through the incessant tasks of housecleaning, laundering, dishwashing and the like. Health care is approached through the provision of adequate nutrition to maintain vitality and resistance to infections. Health care is provided through opportunities for rest, relaxation and sleep, and in the care of minor ills and disturbances that are normal incidents of living. Thus, to establish and maintain health care, the design, equipment and operation of homes and the provision of facilities for such functions become one of the primary responsibilities of the planner. The approach to mental health likewise is not the sole responsibility of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, but rather of family and neighborhood living, wherein the child is progressively culturized and socialized to become a participant in our symbolic cultural world. How the child is cared for, reared and educated in the family and how, as he grows up, he is helped to achieve maturity without unnecessary stunting, warping and distortion is the great opportunity and the immense responsibility of family living which the planner should recognize as central to his task. Likewise, the planner has the responsibility of minimizing the unnecessary frustrations and stresses and strains in all the activities of life in so far as planning may be contributory, if not crucial to such objectives. Human conservation, in the sense of utilizing the growing knowledge, skills, techniques and facilities for guarding human beings throughout the life span may be viewed as a major responsibility in all planning wherein the planner must look to a variety of different professions and organizations for guidance, but accept the major responsibility for orchestrating these into a coherent, internally consistent conception of what can and should be provided in and through his planning. At the present time this presents a formidable task, the initial approach to which may be undertaken through a consideration of the variety of different forms of human wastage and defeat at each age period from conception through old age, much of which can be reduced, if not eliminated, by farsighted planning.
The more far reaching, if not radical, alterations in living that are proposed by the planner as essential to the attainment of these humanly desirable objectives, the more urgently necessary it is to view such plans as essentially proposals to people that can be attained or approached only in so far as these aspirations are accepted by the people through whom they must be realized. This means that increasingly planning must envisage the task of adult reeducation in the sense of recognizing that every plan, whether it is for a housing development, a neighborhood, a reconstruction of a city, or the development of a region, can become operational only in so far al; people can be persuaded to relinquish their previous living habits, patterns of relationship, and their former expectations, and replace these with others more consonant with the new ways of life they are being offered. Probably some of the most tragic failures of planning come not from the inadequacies of the design, but from failure to recognize, that the most perfect plan is useless, if not futile, if it does not evoke the acceptance of those for whom the planning is intended. This has been shown by the frequent refusal of people in new housing developments to accept what is offered as they cling to familiar patterns and living habits. The immense cost of rehabilitation of neighborhoods and reconstruction of cities today should put the planner on notice that limited vision and timid planning may impose overwhelming costs, financial and human, on the future. How far ahead can planning foresee socially, economically, politically, and psychologically? Just because most of the traditional beliefs and patterns by and for which people have lived for generations are becoming obsolete and inadequate, people are confused and anxious, no longer guided by the “unseen hand” of tradition. In such a condition, people, as repeatedly shown by the history of Western culture, are inclined to welcome some form of authoritarian regime or dictatorship that will provide an “escape from freedom” even at the expense of their liberty. It is not enough, therefore, that the planner provides an adequate design for living on the technical side if he does not at the same time give people a confidence in their capacity for autonomous living, for bearing the burdens of freedom, with a belief in their own worth and dignity. As we look back over the nineteenth century at the development of industrialization and the growth of large cities, we see clearly how the limited vision and constricted conception of their responsibilities on the part of architects and especially of engineers has contributed to the profound demoralization of people from which they must be rescued if we are to maintain a free democratic way of life.
Now that planners are being called upon to design wholly new communities and regions (for example, Canberra in Australia, the new capitals in India and Brazil, and the proposals for large regional developments in various parts of the world), there is need for comprehensive inventory of all the services and functions that are essential to living and the fulfillment of the purposes of these new designs. A tentative statement of these is offered in the Appendix to focus attention upon this question, and invite additional and critical discussion of the various components listed therein. It is suggested that as the Conference proceeds this statement be revised, enlarged and integrated with additional references and illustrations.

APPENDIX A

A suggested list of components of planning for any given location, geographical features, land, climate, etc.

Population: age, sex, distribution married, single, size of families, ethnic-cultural backgrounds, educational attainments, social-economic levels and classes, occupational categories.
Vital Statistics: birth and death rates (by ages) morbidity as available, handicapped, impaired, etc. mentally disordered, etc.
Mobility: transients, moving within one area, moving in and out of area -characteristics of incoming and of leaving groups, changes in social-economic levels.
Social History: traditions, rivalries, aspirations, conflicts.
Economic sufficiency or dependency: Subsidies, grants in-aid.
Housing requirements: families, single, including widowed and separated aged.
Industry: and especially the services and amenities for employees.
Business organizations and functions : stores, banks.
Transportation: local, long distance, public, private; traffic arrangements, parking.
Communication : mass media (radio, TV), telephone, mail, etc.
Distribution agencies: stores, warehouses, depots, delivery agents
Power supplies and distribution
Lighting: public and private.
Water supply
Fuel Supplies and heating: public and private facilities.
Food supplies and distribution: markets, etc.
Governmental regulations and inspection
Churches and Religious organizations and assemblies
Medical and health care
Sanitation: waste disposal
Fire protection
Police protection
Mental Hygiene facilities
Educational: all age groups
Social Welfare
Institutions: custodial, aged
Recreational: leisure time, parks, playgrounds, sports, swimming, games, public areas.
Libraries Museums
Community centers: neighborhood centers 
Theatres, Moving Pictures
Music
Time Perspective: immediate requirements, future requirements, proposed enlargements and extensions or possible rearrangements.
Transitional Devices and Facilities for Redevelopment of Cities and Neighborhoods.
Areas and Activities for autonomous, spontaneous living and free choice.
Expectation of facilities and services to supplement planned neighborhood, community or region.
Group or mass facilities and services and individualized services
Governmental organizations and facilities: local, regional, national.
 
 

next page