Urban planning - the quickest route to a dead community

It is one of the oldest debates around - do we have a grand plan or do we let stuff happen. The planners tend to win this argument - sometimes to the extent of the picture above which of a model showing the "finished" version of Shanghai. This will be a planned city - the untidy, cramped neighbourhoods with winding alleys and street vendors will be replaced with great accommodation towers. The crazy shopping streets will be sanitised and tidied up - turned into tourist attractions or into a copy of the west's stale shopping experience.

Be warned this is what planners do to a place.

What planners say is that we can't allow - Jane Jacobs-like - for cities to evolve and adapt to the needs and demands of their residents. This is far too untidy. Cities need to be planned - in the past for an assortment of reasons (traffic management, zoning industry, public transport) but today the planning is need to create "sustainable cities". Here's one view from the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI)- what I call the "Shanghai View":

"Spatial planning operates at all the different possible scales of activity, from large-scale national or regional strategies to the more localised design and organisation of towns, villages and neighbourhoods. It affects everyone, making policies setting out visions for places and decisions about matters ranging from the location of major new transport or energy facilities and employment development, through to the development of new shops, schools, dwellings or parks needed by local communities. It considers the things that we value and supports our ongoing use of the environment to maintain or enhance these; from the integrity of the atmosphere to limit climate change, to the provision of habitat for individual species; from the identification of global cultural heritage to locally valued townscapes. It maintains the best of the past, whilst encouraging innovation in the design and development of future buildings and neighbourhoods to meet our future needs."

...or possibly urban planners as little gods? Without the guiding hand of the planner our urban environment would be chaotic, jumbled, unmanaged and unsustainable say the RTPI. But would it? If we did away with grand spatial planning, with national planning guidance, with splendidly pompous urban designers..with all the vast and expensive infrastructure of the planning industry, would things actually be so bad?

Should we not revisit the thinking of Jane Jacobs about the organic nature of cities and remember that:

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Planners seek to imposed a false, politically mediated order on communities. Is it any surprise therefore that the public view planning and planners with distrust. Or that the development industry so often see the planning system as an obstruction to economic development, to the provision of homes and to the ability of business to respond adequately to consumer demand.

Planning should be driven by the needs, demands and expectations of neighbourhoods and the people living in those neighbourhoods. Designs about development should be decided democratically at this level - not mediated through and impenetrable, lawyer-dominated, centralised planning system designed merely to obstruct.

Above all we must resist the geographers temptation - the drawing of marks on a map, tidying up of edges. Married to the architect's hubris this had led to cities without soul, places without character. To great squares with no animation, to the replacing of untidy flea markets with shiny malls and to dysfunctional places filled with unhappy people. Planning has done this to us. It's time to reject its ideas, to rediscover the untidy, disordered cities we love.

If we don't learn this all we will do is create our own failing planned cities - and a world of Shanghais would be a bad place.

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