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THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF PLANNING
The
pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to
imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. (Jane Jacobs) There
is a specific kind of American dimness: the cult of expertise, which, by
its very nature, blinds the person who practices it to every form of
knowledge save the one that he understands. (David Denby) One of the
distinguishing characteristic of modern planning is its fall from grace. It
is not uncommon at planning board meetings to witness the embarrassment and
frustration of the municipal planners as their considered proposals are
ignored by the elected officials they are supposedly advising. Nor is it
rare to see a private planning consultant in a state of abject pandering
towards citizens having no qualifications for an opinion beyond their
presence at the meeting. What other profession is subject to such
protracted public humiliations? This fall has occurred in the
living memory but it is not its history has been rewritten by the
professional press in positive terms as an evolution of methodology. Older planners remember ruefully
that less than thirty years ago substantial changes to an urban fabric
could be implemented with little or no public recourse. Planning proposals involving
wholesale demolition of neighborhoods were common to implement the In 1950, this trust had been well
earned. The track record of the profession was one long concatenation of
notable successes. Planners then had been, for seven decades, making cities
substantially healthier, more beautiful and more functional. The rates of
illness and mortality had been dropping for a century wherever planners had
improved sanitation, segregated polluting industries and established
healthful housing standards. They had brought order, greenery and civic art
to the brutish, instant cities of the Nineteenth Century. Planners had
devised many modern urban expansions that provide still today excellent
quality of life and stable real estate values. Planners, it seemed, could do no
wrong. Having provided the beneficial effects, they enjoyed the
correspondingly high standing of the doctor the engineer and the artist
combined. An important sidelight of this prestige was an
efficiency in implementation that would astound today's planners.
Their advice, once sought, was often implemented directly, essentially
without question or public process as we know it today. This accounts for
the astonishing number of master plans, in the hundreds, implemented by
Nolen, Olmstead Brothers and their cohort in the very few years available
to their practice before 1929, How different this is from the
current experience. Without the public trust, years pass in
"studies" to prove that even the most necessary plans will not be
harmful. Proposals are doggedly questioned, every recommendation is
suspect. The planner is essentially assumed to be guilty of incompetence or
malicious intent until proven otherwise. The time which must be thus
allocated has made planning very expensive, it is now considered a dispensable
luxury. Historians will point out that
the loss of standing was a direct result of the (confidence)plans of the fifties and sixties. They are correct. The
unprecedented failures were made possible by the unprecedented coincidence
of four factors. The unquestioned confidence acquired through six decades
of success. The unlimited means of the post-war economy. The discontinuity
of apprenticeship caused by the hiatus of practice since 1929. The prestige
of untested messianic concepts formulated by European avant-garde
architects. As the degree of failure became
apparent, the corresponding opposition arose. At first it was disorganized.
Then the planners themselves joined in, but rather than admit that it was a
problem of the model, which was squarely a professional responsibility,
they identified the "process" which shared it. They, in fact
joined the opposition by formalizing the process of public involvement.
From this abdication arose the quagmire of today. It has several
manifestations. Thus
planning became the only profession. . . . This
degradation was well deserved. One does not experiment with communities;
planning affects too many people for too long a time to warrant anything
but the emulation of proven successes. In this it must not be confused with
architecture where experimentation, if it fails, affects only a family or
an institution which can move out of the building if necessary. The failures of the sixties' the
evisceration the cities, and the swallowing of the countryside by sprawl
under the policies of the planning gods of the first generation of postwar
planers more than justifies the lack of trust. Having thrown away in one
generation the prestige that the profession had built up over a century of
unalloyed success, the degradation is now carried by the next two
generations which in fact have learned the lessons well and are again
largely competent. But now the standing has not recovered. The stance of
the planner, inculcated in schools is that of penitence. The correct
attitude is to have a lack of confidence. To ask the stakeholders
everything possible, in fact to act like the one was born yesterday and had
been brought to learn what to do by the grace of the wise citizens. All as
if the planner had been born yesterday in another plant and needed guidance
over every detail. What other profession has so little standing? The professional stance is now
that of the slightly stooped penitent as they writing down the desires of
the whatever self-selected mob happens to be in attendance and pandering to
all notions whether wise, primitive, idiotic or merely selfish as if all
were of value. Then making only the most tentative suggestions, vaguely and
diagrammatically drawn, repeating the mantras of flexibility and process.
The only person present in fact who must play at being tentative since all
else are admired for being strident in their certainty. This loss of standing, was it
experienced by all of the allied professions which are also subject to
public scrutiny? The answer amazingly is no. There are two specialties,
both newer than planning which have near unassailable standing in the
public process. One is environmentalism and the other is traffic
engineering. The anecdotal information is endless ranging from the
spectacle of a single, utterly uncharismatic engineer carrying the day on a
road widening in the teeth of public opposition both organized and
passionate. Or the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes pleading
for a subspecies of some sort, utterly check-mating a battery of highly paid
attorneys representing a development. And needles to say, when there is
disagreement between a traffic issue and environmental one and one the
prerogative of a plan, the latter is not even in the running. And let me
add: even if the plan i Is there a lesson here for
planners? Are the prerogatives of the human species as represented by a
good plan, really categorically less important that that of other species
whether biological or mechanical? Obviously not--the others are lower species, as any but a specialist would
argue. Well then, it must be the standing of the professions which
represent them which are more effective. How are they different in
presentation from planners? The single clearest difference is that they
present on a scientific basis. There are always "studies" to be
prepared which take a long time to doe (It will take six weeks o delineate
that wetland", the studies are expensive the methodology is obscure
(the black box program of the engineers) and the studies are thick, the
terminology is precise and arcane. There are scores of terms and acronyms
like A.D.T. /
L.O.S. / H.E.P. / W.E.T. / C.V.E.P., etc.--very impressive to
the lay person and adding to that, completely standardized nationally.
There is still nothing as unassailable in Now let u It is obvious that a discipline,
to be credible, needs a language held in common. It is also it seems to me,
that this language must be technocratic in its origins. This has been the
key to the success of the traffic and environmental professions, But, you
say, planning for humans is too complex, there are too many variable to be
scientifically based. That may well be so but so traffic behavior and so is
nature. After all it is these selfsame humans that with all their variables
that are driving the vehicles and let us not imagine that the ecosystem ( tug and everything is attached) of a planet can be
simplified. The fact is, as any who have been present when the data is
gathered and interpreted, there is constant call
for discretionary decisions. The data, to put it bluntly is inadvertently
or willfully cooked. This is inevitable and it is always so. Those who deny
it are liars. Those who do not like hearing this should not attend the
sessions where the objective process is deflected by economics or
politicos. As This is to say that both
Engineering and Environmentalism are Pseudoscience. This term it turns out
is the most interesting of Jane Jacobs statement as it is not one for which
a remedy i The |
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