I’ve just signed The Planner’s Pledge, a statement assembled by a team of leading US urban designers including my friend Jeff Speck, author of the Walkable City books. It’s an attempt to create a clear statement of principles, from the planning professions, about the past harms done by the profession and the things that must be done differently. It’s preamble is unsparing:
As practitioners of a discipline that has advocated for what it believed to be best practices while inevitably advancing the dominant ideology of its society, we professional planners wish to formally apologize for the significant role that our profession has played in creating the unsustainable suburban sprawl development pattern that now constitutes most of the American built environment, reinforcing race and class segregation while burdening the vast majority of citizens with the mandate of car ownership.
To put it bluntly, planners have contributed to the creation of a landscape that separates us ruthlessly both from different activities and from different people, such that we are inordinately dependent on our automobiles and less connected to one another. …
The outcomes of this pattern of growth could not be more profound. We have worsened public health, lost economic resiliency, exacerbated inequity, and undermined the social fabric of our communities as our daily driving cooks the planet.
Obviously, this is a collective and symbolic apology rather than a personal one, since I’m sure most of the signers of the pledge have been opposing car-dependency for their whole careers, as I have. The pledge goes on to describe specific things that each signatory pledges to encourage or discourage. For example, we pledge to encourage “dense development adjacent to frequent transit routes and vice versa.”
Because this pledge came out of the urban design profession, it is different, in both tone and details, from what I would have written as a transit planner. I would have focused much more on the barriers that I experience when working in car-dependent areas, which overlaps with what urban designers call “sprawl repair.” For example, I would have included a commitment to making all urban arterials safe to cross at least every 1/4 mile wherever there is continuous development (commercial or residential) that accesses the street at many points. These 1/4-mile spaced crossing should also accommodate transit stops as close as possible to the intersection. This is an example of a principle that is already mostly achieved in historic urban fabric but that sets up a productive challenge to the state Departments of Transportation that typically control these large arterials lined with destinations.
Am I ready to defend every word of the pledge? Maybe not every word. But the world is full of people who are stuck on small differences in ways that impede progress. I agree with the spirit of this and virtually every detail, so I’m happy to sign.
If there are professional planners in your life, please encourage them to have a look at the Planner’s Pledge, and to sign it if it works for them.
The biggest failure of this pledge by far is are the references to historic buildings, adaptive re-use, etc.
As a practical matter, historic preservation laws and regulations have almost universally been used to prevent infill development and other changes which the drafters of the pledge would desire. The pledge says to discourage “environmental impact studies (or similar) to stall or derail” projects, yet that is almost the only thing historic preservation is used for.
From a theoretical perspective, there is no real justification to the claim that “Historic buildings … shape an elevated public realm that invites walking.” Any appearance of that is a false impression related to the fact that older parts of cities were built when walking was more common while newer parts are generally more car oriented because cars are newer. But there is no reason a brand new neighborhood cannot be a wonderful public realm that invites walking. This is an easy proposition to test – were historic neighborhoods considered walkable today not considered walkable when they were brand new? Conversely, will unwalkable single-use neighborhoods now become walkable as they age? The answer to both questions is a resounding “No” – the walkability of an area is a function of its design and structure, not its age.
The pledge to discourage “unnecesary destruction of any significant sidewalk-facing building facade more than 100 years old.” is particularly pernicious. Should the destruction of an early brutalist facade of a one story building – single use, with a cold uninviting texture and design – be prevented, and thus stop a mid-rise mixed use development with inviting ground floor windows from being built, just because the former is old and the latter new?
I know the counter arguments are either “unnecessary, so it’s ok to destroy the bad development” or “the facade can be kept and a new building built behind it” – but that’s not how this ever plays out in practice. Good and bad are subjective and many people consider all kinds of styles valuable; there has been a movement to preserve certain gas stations recently as examples of “mid-century modern” architecture. The hundred year cutoff will invariably become a litmus test, and as many examples of sprawl pass that milestone beginning in a few decades this pledge could be used to lock into place the very development pattern it opposes. Facades can be preserved as part of a new structure, but it is very expensive, and making infill development more expensive will only make worse the nationwide housing shortage and make more difficult encouraging dense development or reducing single family only buildings, even if the zoning changes.
Good intentions. However it’s not just Planners, and they are often the least to blame. After the AASHTO, TAC and AustRoad guides guide the physical public spaces between places, finance dictates quick turn around in loans ergo simple fast sprawl, politicians abdicating their role to provide public services at reasonable cost, and just general land speculation that enriches farmers who are often sick of worrying about crops and bank repossession; there is a lot of blame to go around.
Hell, I am guilty now. My kids want a dog. We have no space for a dog. They want a place to kick a ball and not have it go over the fence to the Starter Castle across the lane. I want space. I am guilty now. I only ride a bike or take the train to work, but I have these secret compartments in my heart for s. p. a. c. e.
The only thing Planners, per se, are to be blamed for is that they all stopped drawing a few decades ago and become bullet-point arrangement artificers.
Thanks.
“Eliminating single-family-only zoning in walkable or transit-served locations”
This will only increase opposition to walkability and transit in these areas. We can have walkable single-family areas with great transit. We built many in the first half of the 20th century, then car-dependent areas became the norm in the middle of the 20th century.
I think this should be read strictly as “eliminating single family only ZONING” not “eliminating single family HOMES”. In other words you can absolutely have walkable and high transit neighborhoods with single family homes, it’s just that it would be legal to also have duplexes, triplexes, garden apartments, corner stores and mixed-use apartments over retail in those neighborhoods as well (where current SFH zoning expressly prohibits those). The SFH neighborhoods of the early 20th century, particularly streetcar suburbs, were never homogenously single family, but featured a mix of housing types. Early zoning codes often had a single “Residential” zone that prevented factories or offices but didn’t favor houses over apartments.
The reality is that many people living in these areas want to keep single-family-only ZONING. If walkability and transit would eliminate single-family-only zoning, these people will be opposed to better walkability and transit, and that would be an unfortunate thing.
The quarter-mile crossing point is the one I keep coming back to as a rider, because a crossing is only useful if the stop is actually at it. When the stop is set back a block, or on the far side where you have to cross twice to get to the other direction, people just cross where they are. That is why “as close as possible to the intersection” matters more than the spacing number on its own; a crossing every quarter mile with stops a block away still leaves a long, exposed walk at the end of the trip. The legible version is the one where the stop names match the cross street in sequence, so you can tell from the timetable where you will actually be standing when you get off.