Plans for Today and Tomorrow
by Frederick Gutheim

Among the topics which a well-informed group of city planner would do well to consider on the rare occasions when they meet ire their objectives and their techniques. Since a new type of planning is evolving in the United States, different from what we have known before, and without evident parallel elsewhere in the world, this may deserve some specific mention. To provide some analytical framework that will relate this new technique to the conditions in the United States to which it responds, historical reference will assist.
Most American planners will agree that we are concerned less with plans than with planning; that all elements involved must participate in the planning process; and that the test of a plan’s value and success is whether it is translated into action and accomplishment. There has been little reflection on how new these ideas are, and how different they are from the views held by planners elsewhere. This predominantly pragmatic outlook has been misunderstood, and it is in the course of change today. Before we consider these changes, some further description of the planner’s ideal will be revealing. Through many channels we have become aware that in the making of a plan all factors necessary to the execution of the plan must be considered. Most recently Norbert Wiener has expressed this in the concept of feedback, where strategy is reassured by information concerning success or failure in application. More humanly it was enunciated by Mary Parker Follett, an early student of human relations in industry and large-scale organization. In political life we say that if valid courses of action are to be determined, all who can veto must he present at the conference table when decisions are made. When a planner embraces this viewpoint, he is interested in whether his plan will work, whether it will he carried out, whether it will succeed in these terms. But he is also interested in a more specifically democratic objective: to insure that what is planned is what the people want. As distinguished from the narrower sort of planning that may be done by officials responsible for schools, roads or other public improvements, or even by businessmen locating factories or shopping centers, our planning is comprehensive. It is characterized by balance. Not only are all the elements included, but there is a due proportion among them. There is also a balance between immediately expressed needs, and the demands which we can anticipate in the future. In large regional plans, it may also be necessary to balance the national interest against purely local interests. In securing this balance the planner becomes aware of its dynamic character, but he exploits it not to produce further imbalance but to enhance the strength of the plan as a whole. These characteristics of the balanced comprehensive plan, in which all major interests are represented, and in which the public participates actively, are all new. They are by no means universally found in the official planning departments of American cities. Indeed, in my own city of Washington, the city plan has been heavily unbalanced by a traditional concern with parks and architectural features; the Federal government’s interest overwhelms all others; and the public neither participates in the making of the plan nor does it actually vote! But this is an extreme exception.
By contrast, planning before about 1935 was authoritarian. Planners like Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham dealt with projects, not plans. Their projects could be limited to a civic center, a lake front, a park system, or they could embrace an entire city as a project, as did Burnham’s plans for Chicago, Washington, San Francisco or Manila. The planners of this earlier period were generally architects, landscape architects or certain types of engineers. One may chart them through successive fashions in planning from the concern with parks and “the city beautiful”, through the years of municipal reform in the period 1905-1915, to the more contemporary reigns of the traffic engineer, and the public administration specialist. The architecturally trained planners were eclipsed from about 1925 on, and a period of gloomy mimeographed, reports followed the reaction against “the city beautiful”. Today we are in a period when architectural values in planning are renascent, and when architectural historians are busily rehabilitating the earlier generation reappraising their work and scraping, so to speak, a third of a century of pigeon lime from their statues (1). A real danger exists that with the revived interest in architectural forms of planning, practices will be revived that are as outmoded as they were once discredited. Today’s planning is referenced not merely to the large-scale organization but to techniques originating in such organizations that are capable of application to smaller organizations as well. The problem architectural planning faces in its present revival is to assimilate these gains without compromising its effectiveness, to insure that it is really new. The planner of this earlier generation found as his client an independent city planning commission like that in Chicago, a strong mayor like Tom Johnson of Cleveland, or a political boss like Shepherd or Tweed. The changes in his plan were frankly compromises between designer and a single strong client, not carefully measured adjustments to public opinion, social need, or capacity to pay. The free winds of creative inspiration that can be detected in the revival of city planning in Washington in 1900-1904 blew from the White House where Theodore Roosevelt, in the manner of contemporary industrialists or railroad presidents, created an art patronage that resembled the Renaissance. The clients of Charles Eliot, probably the best of the city planners of this period, tended to be railroad executives, industrialists, bankers, or strong political leaders. The briefest biographical encounter confirms the type: the portly figure, the choleric disposition, the dogmatic self-assertiveness, were characteristics alike of the planner and his client. As we look a bit further, it is the disappearance of this autocrat - this organizational Atlas - from the ranks of business and government, as well as from among the planners and architects, that will be remarkable. The new type of planning today certainly reflects a new professional orientation, fact control rather than personal control, and a different idea of who’s the boss.
If one proposes to shed some light on the kind of pragmatism that is found in city planning in the United States today, it will be necessary to go a little deeper into the past and state the urban problems that have been encountered. The area of approximately 3,000,000 square miles (7.7 million kilometers) that had been lived in by 845,000 Indians when the first white settlers came, had a population of hardly 4,000,000 when the United States became a nation in 1789. Today it has a population of about 165,000,000. Twenty central cities with populations in excess of 500,000 (and metropolitan areas of approximately double that size) have been created in a period of scarcely more than 150 years. Massive growth has taken place. Migration of vast populations from farm to city, from city to suburb still continues. Interregional migrations from east to west, from south to north, have added to urban pressures. In the last century about 35,000,000 immigrants (12 percent of them Italians) have swelled the population. The industrial civilization that has been created is today predominantly urban. Two-thirds of the population lives in 168 metropolitan areas. The strong trend is toward further concentration in a limited number of areas, and of diffusion to the periphery of these areas. To the planner attempting to deal with this dynamic growth major stress has necessarily been laid on getting the job done. Typically, to build a bridge was the thing. Just where it was located, what it did to traffic pattern, what it looked like, how much it cost, or even if it was really needed became subordinate questions, many of them never raised. There is a well-founded suspicion at home and abroad that we are often more concerned with getting things done than we are with what gets done. We have developed special skills in implementation. City planning commissions have specialized personnel, called “effectuators” to see that parts of the plan are carried out. The most scathing criticism of any city plan in the United States is not that it was wrong, but that it was not carried out. What killed “the city beautiful” was the accusation of impracticality of plans “gathering dust in municipal offices” (2). This inclination toward the practical, this fear that our plans will not be carried out, is of course irrational. All of Us know that plans are rapidly outdistanced by changing circumstances, as well as by the evolving art of planning itself, and must be revised at periodic intervals. We all know, too, that the very acceptance or rejection of a comprehensive plan, or elements of it, have consequences that are frequently greater than its realization (3). And we know, if we are honest with ourselves, of plans that were rejected by a public wiser than the planners, or cast aside by a generation that found they no longer reflected its aspirations. As utopias our plans have a value, whatever else happens to them (4). Yet despite this, pragmatism governs us: in the new planning which I am describing, we are usually motivated by the desire to make planning of practical value, to make plans that will receive political consent, fall within financial capabilities, prove technically feasible, rather than by the desire to make planning better, more democratic, or oven to use it as a liberal instrument toward a more humane urban life (5).
So we have seen the emancipation of planning from the fine arts tradition which, in the United States at least, bound it irrevocably to a reactionary and autocratic concept of society; and more recently from the engineering tradition of specialization and instrumentalism which precluded any recognition of the future as well as a requisite humanitarianism. But the new planning, with its emphasis on the comprehensive plan, the context of large-scale organization, participation in the planning process, and the planning équipe is still mired in the pragmatic tradition. It must find a way out, if we are to face the great potentialities of the second half of this century in their own terms and not in outmoded terms of the last five decades (6). The most fruitful source of experience that can be applied to the adaptation of planning to the new conditions it faces in the United States is that gained in the administrative organization and in production planning of large industries and government organizations (7). From about 1850 on the large scale organization has evolved its own type of planning. Amoral, unrelated to specific program, such planning appears in our history in such different fields as the organization of railroad construction, the development of the general staff concept in the armies of the North during the civil war of 1861-65, the management of the traveling circus, the large-scale building project, or the creation of international expositions (8). In its organizational and human relations aspects, it appears to be related more closely to the scale of the organization than to the type of work performed. In the United States, where more than half of the value of gross national product is the result of the efforts of great corporations, there are a significant number of enterprises which exhibit the full range of staff services (budget, research, programming, personnel, etc.), a degree of managerial complexity, and the problems of relating elements in a geographically distributed organization (9). In these increasingly one finds policy planning committees or programming officers whose responsibility includes long range forecasting, integration of corporate policies, studies of wage and price policies, and matters of similar breadth (10).
The corporation planning units also concern themselves with expansion policies, plant location and other matters more closely related to physical planning. The influence of their economic determinations upon the self-regulating and market aspects of the capitalist system has attracted much attention in recent years, but these cannot be explored here. The significance of planning experience in the large scale private economic organization is that it has responded to the same organizational concept as planning everywhere (11). It furthers that unity and integration which is the major preoccupation of large-scale organizations, menaced as they constantly are by localism, ideological divisions, and functional self-interests. Such planning is not an autocratic phenomena, in the hands of some “boss” but an exercise in fact-control, in the hands of specialists, who are selected because they know how to operate the technique or because of a certain representative character. As elsewhere, there is a strong conviction that plans are valid only when they consider all relevant data and interests, that those who will execute them must participate in making the plans, and that planning is a dynamic process, not a static act. The superman of planning has been replaced by the planning team, and planning serves not the strong municipal executive or the factory owner in the house on the hill but a new generation of managers and decision-makers with more sophisticated ideas of their organizational responsibilities, men capable of deflating their own egos, or of seeing that what the individual planner proposes is often but the construction of fantasy. We seem to have reached the point where the expression of planning may be a physical plan analogous to that of architects or engineers; or it may be a budget proposal; it could be a schedule or a production program; or it may be an executive order or a policy memorandum. Such planning instruments are communications embodying an agreement among many separate interests and points of view within an organization, crystallized into a decision, and designed to control activity and influence decisions over a broad organizational area. It is not an order to be signed by a single executive authority. Elements of inevitability, or prediction are its fundamental ingredients. One of the essential discoveries, of course, is that the plan is effective not because it derives from authority but because it is within itself authoritative. Its value is similar to that of a work of art.
That the people must participate in the planning process in order to assure its effectuation is not as important as to assure that what is planned meets their real needs as they see them and not their presumed needs as they are viewed by some technician. Efforts to determine public desires by means of public opinion surveys have foundered upon the inability of people to desire that which they cannot conceive, or to value that which they have not experienced. This is still a planning dilemma. As the communication scientist, Norbert Wiener, has implied: how can people consent without knowing, or act without believing? Much effort has been spent in describing the forms of such participation, and much is still to be learned. From these efforts we have a new conception of the role of the planning technician. We see how he can clarify questions, issues, decisions; we see how separate is his role from that of the public, but also how confused and formless the efforts of the public are to reach a decision without the help given by the planning technician (12). This is especially the case in the critical stage of all planning that is based on facts: the stage when we move from the analysis to the planning proposal and attempt to show how one derives from the other - and is not really as arbitrary as it often seems. At this stage the planner must formulate and offer planning hypotheses, creative propositions which the public must then evaluate in the light of the planning information given them. In this activity the ancient mystique of the architect comes into planning, the resources of persuasion, the conviction of art. This is the more so because the participation of the general public is most often in terms of a locality plan. Our planning is increasingly at the scale of the large-scale housing project, the redevelopment project, the suburban shopping center, the industrial estate, the educational complex or research establishment. These are the building blocks of the future city (13). They involve design values and public interest problems far larger than in the days when the city was being built and planned on some lot-by-lot basis. As a movement toward the re-establishment of the physical plan, as a means of allowing the general public to participate in the planning process in a meaningful way, I believe this is a step in the right direction. The kinds of planning problems we face in the United States, - the suburban flood, the rotting central cities, the middle-aged suburbs -all demand this kind of approach. Only when one tackles the broader and more technical problems of the metropolitan region does it become difficult to the point of immediate impossibility to state the problems in ways that allow such participation.
Planning cannot be indifferent to its political responsibilities in this time of world crisis. It must acknowledge the need to offer the rising masses a more dynamic program oriented to future productivity levels and full employment; it matters little whether we are thinking of the immediate prospects of a 200 percent increase in productivity, a four day work week (both immediate prospects in the United States) or of similar relative gains that are possible elsewhere in the world. Today we are meeting this problem in an outmoded context. Our plans everywhere are failing to provide for a kind of urban life that is commensurate with the opportunities that lie within our grasp. What the American family is blindly seeking today in the wasteland of metropolitan suburbs is escape from the restraints, the stratification, the limited mobility of the nineteenth century city. This massive rejection of the life early industrialism offered will not only destroy the cities that were built in the nineteenth century; if some more positive goals are not created it will destroy whatever we have left of civilization itself. Is our vision limited to making but a new middle class of the rising (and disappearing) proletariat? Do we think it is enough to offer them hand-me-down living patterns from a century ago, as we expect them to live in hand-me-down houses? Are we using the raw materials for a great civilization that our high technology provides? This is the ultimate value of planning, and the challenge to our art and intelligence: to extricate humanity from the narrow ruts of a way of life we know we have superseded, and to paint in convincing colors a new and realizable future world which our people working together will struggle to attain. If planning has a creative alternative to propose, if it can successfully oppose historical drift, it must be through appealing to these deepest instincts and aspirations.
If I may return to the picture earlier sketched of the United States as a varied panorama of different groups trying to come to agreement with each other, where do we stand? We have a technique which, supplemented by the political process, seems well adapted to the problem. Obviously there are still difficulties, notably the inverted values in much American planning: the predominance of public health and engineering factors, the exclusion of leisure, education and so forth. But the most important is certainly the difficulty we have displayed in getting together for any agreement on the kind of culture we want to build. Present differences handicap this effort. But we must consider that it is entirely possible that the great efforts now directed to material production will instead be directed toward cultural objectives which today are as undesired as they are unknown. It is inconceivable to me that this day can be far distant. In this conviction there can be little doubt that our planning objectives are too narrow, too timid and too short-sighted. Nor can there be doubt that in the new planning techniques which I have tried to describe there are inherently progressive tendencies which will reveal and overcome these limitations of our present-day plans.
As we meet, eleven Americans and eleven Italians, active participants in planning, we must consider our roles. Quite obviously neither speak for their respective professions, any more than they represent their nations. Who then do I mean when I say, “We?” Our character is sufficiently representative, I believe it can be said, that it embraces the present group of Americans, and others like them who have a similar orientation to planning problems. This functional “We” is a numerous and growing body. We are united in our special interest and discovery, and to the extent that we can develop with your help a valid point of view I am confident we can make it prevail. Perhaps the first step toward that goal is to expand the limited reference to “We” so that it includes, at least, all of the participants in this meeting.
 
 
 

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