Sustainable Urban Planning

The systemic order planning was expected to deliver to Anglo
society settlers has historically worked through as under-achieve-
ment to both the planners and those planned for. Christine
Boyer’s Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American Planning
(1983) traces group failure and incoherent identity for traditional
planning in consonance with Harvey’s reasoning.
During the 1980s planning was out on a credibility limb, only
tentatively connected into the political economy establishment,
and largely at odds with the growth-on-growth mantra. Since that
time the sustainable ethic and science-based evidence has brought
twenty-first-century planning in from the procedural wilderness,
and provided an ethic, some good science, and an economic
rationale in place of earlier ineffective idealism.

At the level of the detached average person, planning is, simply,
what planners ‘do’. It is an ‘elsewhere’ issue which is presumed
to produce worthy outcomes, characterized by failure at worst,
ineffectiveness at best. It is instructive, then, to identify what
the beneficial outcomes of pragmatic planning are, or were
intended to be. Taking a cue from John Friedmann (1987: 28)
figure 2.1 presents the Overall uses of within-nation planning as a summary
of the extent to which it, planning, can permeate individual and community
interests.
The uses detailed in figure 2.1 do not comprise a list to adopt
uncritically. Indeed in these so-named libertarian times of
deregulation and a leave-alone emphasis, validating the likes
of item 5, ‘Redistributing income’, as official reform is ques-
tionable, indeed improbable. On the other hand item 4,
‘Protecting property’, can be identified as a realistic comp-
onent of most local and regional planning practice. It is the
vertical-horizontal range, scope and potential content of the
applications to which planning can be put in the service of development with con-
servation, which is useful to establish. The density of the array in figure 2.1 dis-
courages close inspection. Yet such inspection is rewarding. Development
planning and conservancy practice can be observed as applied processes for
achieving social goals for the common good in the public domainthrough the causative
influence of community service. Contrast this with the comprehension of plan-
ning on the part of the ‘average’ individual, staying close to item 4, ‘Property pro-
tecting provisioning’, associated with territorial zoning. In these introductory
terms it can be seen that a wide gap exists between the municipal perception of
planners as ‘hold-the-line functionaries’ and the wider societal expectations of
planners as ‘enablers and achievers’. This is in line with Faludi’s depiction (1985:
30) of planning within local government as the ‘process of responsible decision-
making concerning future courses of action’.

Four illustrative cameos, two Australasian, the others from Great Britain and the
United States, reveal the philosophical self-consciousness and apparent lack of

Knowledge Power Outcomes 41

The tenuous attachment

of urban and regional

planning to development

theory may be the

reason why so much

attention is paid to

connecting those

processes to

administrative law. Even

if somewhat bereft of a

philosophical keystone,

planning has become

enshrined into the law

of most OECD nations

as legal fact. A knock-on

problem which then

arises is that planning,

according to legal dicta,

is denied a proactive

role, and is frequently

turned into a reactive

enforcer of legal

conformity.

PLANNING GOALS

Social (common social

good)

Physical (sustainable

‘indefinitely’)

Economic (wellbeing

via equitable growth)