Democracy Journal: The Post-Planning Pandemic

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Democracy Journal: The Post-Planning Pandemic

The Post-Planning Pandemic
The coronavirus will dismantle urban life in America—if we let it.

BY JACOB ANBINDER FROM JULY 2, 2020, 2:50 PM – 9 MIN READ

In 1966, an aspiring city planner named Robert Goodman withdrew from his graduate program with a half-finished dissertation and a laundry list of frustrations. Planning, as it was then conceived, seemed too willing to instill in its disciples the notion that they were experts who could be entrusted with effecting progress in “blighted” neighborhoods by applying their superior knowledge of how cities worked. Looking around the Boston area, where such urban renewal projects had already razed the city’s West End and parts of its North End to replace nineteenth-century buildings with new apartment blocks, office towers, and elevated highways, Goodman saw no evidence that this approach had any remaining credibility. In a provocative book titled After the Planners, he argued that ongoing tragedies of urban renewal like the indiscriminate bulldozing of neighborhoods were partly the product of planners’ inflated sense of self-importance. They were hardly the “medicine men” they believed themselves to be, Goodman wrote, but rather mere cogs in capitalism’s violent machinery of creative destruction.

Goodman wasn’t alone in making the case against centralized planning in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The era was notable for the unexpected yet mounting critiques being leveled against government overreach from across the ideological spectrum, as Americans of wildly different political beliefs united to embrace the radical potential of devolved management of public policy. On the one hand, left-wing observers concluded that mainstream planners’ cozy relationship with the private sector meant that the tools of interventionist local government would forever fail to bring about more equal cities. On the other, conservatives were alarmed by what they saw as the powerful redistributive and integrative potential of the Great Society. As the years passed and the century waned, they worked to slash spending and reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy wherever possible. Left-of-center activists applauded the passage of legislation reducing HUD’s signature Great Society programs to block grants, which Gerald Ford called a move “to return power from the banks of the Potomac to people in their own communities.” By the end of the decade, Mother Earth News was making its way across Ronald Reagan’s desk. “Note the Reagan themes,” wrote an aide of the back-to-the-land, and decidedly leftish, magazine. “Self-reliance, independence, etc.” The proportion of the labor force employed by local governments fell after 1975 as government capacity was ramped down. For many, the private sector beckoned. In 1973, one study found that just 4 percent of planners who belonged to the two major professional planning associations worked outside of government; today, the figure is 28 percent.

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A bit of pondering on the role of democracy, urban planning, and the interface between the disciplines in the wake of the pandemic.

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