Metropolitan Planning and Environmental Issues

Metropolitan Planning and Environmental Issues

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Metropolitan Planning and Environmental Issues

In May 2008, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman was in Berlin, and

he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times that began, “I have seen the future,

and it works.” He went on to extol “this marvelous urban environment” with its pitchperfect

public transportation servicing medium height high-rise buildings embedded

in a larger urban-scape of commercial service establishments and green areas. He then

commented: “It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot,

but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan

areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as greater Berlin—but

Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.”

The Nobel Prize winner is speaking here not as an objective scientist, but as another

tourist from America, and one who subscribes to the subjective bias against suburban

sprawl. As any other observant visitor to Berlin can attest, he leaves out other aspects of

the experience: the mixed groups of drug addicts loitering around select public places

including open-air heroin users and speed freaks; Nazi skinheads roaming the very

community transportation corridors Krugman lauds; sectors of the city that could be

called slums in the American style, except that the housing is better maintained and

the streets are cleaner; and, despite the popularity of Berlin, an increasing and denser

development of the region outside the city for the kind of single-family homes that are

most characteristic of the United States and that he seems to dislike despite the fact

that he probably lives in one back in Princeton, N.J., where he is a professor.

To be sure, Krugman has an excellent point and his comparison between Berlin

and Atlanta is well taken. However, any tourist comparing American and European

urban development patterns for public consumption, such as this Op-Ed columnist,

must be held responsible for pointing out the single most important reason for the

contrast. Simply put, European cities have fought sprawl and have a more “rational”

public mode of living that includes clustered high-rises and efficient public transportation

precisely because in Europe planners have political power and leverage over

land use built by profit seekers. America has nothing comparable because Americans

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I

dislike public housing and government planning and are generally opposed to government

regulation and intervention. The fundamental ideological divide between these

societies could not be more different. Witness the frustrating and irrational response

average U.S. citizens have made in opposition to government-sponsored health insurance

during the summer of 2009. European countries adopted universal health care,

in contrast, scores of years ago. At about the same time, in the post–World War II era,

they also sanctioned local and national planning schemes for housing and the construction

of the kind of public transportation mix of buses, trains, and bike lanes that

are so impressive to visitors from the United States like Krugman. In short, Europe’s

long past commitment to public, government control over land-use planning can

only be dreamed about as an American future.

It remains to be stated clearly that the typical U.S. citizen’s opposition to government

planning ideologically benefits the real estate profit making industry more

than it does those same citizens. Such ironies are typical of America because capitalist

pursuits of profit have long dominated public discourse and many people possess

beliefs about the putative “evils” of government intervention that are actually against

their own best interests. Active urban planning and universal health care are, perhaps,

the two best examples contrasting American and European societies.

Yet it must also be noted that Krugman and other casual tourists are wrong in

their impressions in another context. We have already provided ample evidence showing

how the emergent form of urban living and working arrangements is the multicentered

region. This is increasingly true for many European societies as well, even

with their strong public planning regulations still in place. Single-family home living,

long the norm of housing in the United States, is progressively more attractive to Europeans,

not to mention residents of other countries around the globe. Can we really

claim today that a majority of citizens in other societies prefer living in high-rises,

even if they are only modestly built to four or five stories, rather than pursuing the

dream, often referred to as an American one, of owning a single-family home? The

public versus private option is currently being debated in many places in Europe that

were once unchallenged bastions of government land-use control and planning. To be

sure, the historical commitment to the kind of clustered neighborhood development

admired by American tourists, like Krugman, continues to define most European

cities even after having abandoned the fully fledged welfare state in the twenty-first

century. But increasingly, and visibly, areas around historical central cities are being

developed for profit and for low density, multicentered metropolitan living, just as it

has been ever since the 1920s in the United States.

One excellent example of these contemporary changes is the city of Espoo, Finland,

which belongs to the greater Helsinki metropolitan area—a typical multicentered region

like those in the United States. Espoo is the second largest city in Finland and has a population

of over 240,000. It also has its real estate privatized, despite planning and unlike

the larger city of Helsinki, where the municipal government still maintains control over

land use and, by contrast, possesses the kind of immense planning powers admired by

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critics of American urbanism. Espoo itself contains the contradictions that come from

changes in welfare state capitalism characteristic of Europe. On the one hand, it envelops

the city of Tapiola, a world famous planned “garden city” that was built in the

1950s and is still thriving. Tapiola was designed according to the strict government cluster

planning once well known in the United States, during that same post–World War II

period, in places such as Garden City, New York (see below for a discussion of this

movement). On the other hand, Espoo is home to the new headquarters complex built

by the giant electronics corporation, Nokia, which is a private business and no doubt

possesses executive and other well-paid high-tech employees who prefer to live in private

single-family homes, own cars, and like to drive to work, much as their well-paid counterparts

in sprawling and “dysfunctional” Atlanta, Georgia, like to do.

There is a critical difference between Espoo and Atlanta, and one that still marks

the difference between the relatively unplanned landscape of the United States and

the once highly planned one of Europe. Any person, young, old, healthy, confined to

a wheelchair, pregnant, pushing children in a carriage, or walking a dog or bicycle

can, if they have the not inexpensive fare, take a bus or a combination bus and tram

and travel wherever they like within Espoo, between Espoo and Helsinki, or any of its

surrounding areas. And they can do so using a clean, efficient, safe transportation infrastructure

with convenient and frequent service. The same certainly cannot, by any

stretch of the imagination, be said of Atlanta and almost all other American metro regions

where, as Krugman notes, the car reigns supreme.

Critics of the U.S. approach to urban development consider the present pattern

evil because of its almost exclusive reliance on cars. This is perceived as wasteful of energy

and other resources, a contributor to global warming, and excessively expensive

to individuals. But there is another evil equal to the much maligned auto. The multicentered

metro form of urban space embodies, at its core, the phenomenon of sprawl.

Perhaps this characteristic is the single most targeted aspect of our current way of living

that is viewed in a most negative light. We have argued that the multicentered

metro region functions, on a much grander scale, just as compact central cities once

did by providing locations for jobs, leisure activities, government offices, organized

entertainments such as professional sports, which take place in stadiums, educational

facilities of all kinds, commercial and retail businesses, and millions of housing units

for local residents many of which represent the norm of single-family homes. In order

to accomplish this task, social organization that is regional in scale and relies on the

car as the main means of transport assumes the perceived pattern of sprawl. For an increasing

number of urban professionals in the United States, sprawl is a serious economic

and environmental problem that our society can no longer afford.

S P R A W L

In the earlier pages of this text we have argued that the contemporary growth pattern of

our urban areas is a new form of sociospatial organization. We call it the “multicentered

S P R AW L 323

metro region.” Sprawl can be the most serious outcome of this new form, but most critics

of it fail to connect the cause to the development of the region, just as Krugman

failed in his observations above. Instead they invariably dream of a solution that would

bring large compact cities back, and by concentrating significant numbers of people in

select spots, they also dream of a return to open, green spaces surrounding these metropolises.

We call this a dream because it is. On its most fundamental level it fails to recognize

that most Americans, when given a choice, do not want to live that way and that

there are important economic forces pushing business locations at a further remove

from the historical downtown core. In the United States, sprawl remains the serious

problem that it is, not because the centrifugal force pushing out is so much stronger

than the centripetal one pulling toward the center, but because so little power has been

given to planners and regulators of land use that they have been unable to modify its

shape throughout the larger region for more rational conservation of resources and before

it has turned into our present pattern of endless ticky-tacky homes and strip zoned

highways. To suggest that sprawl can be stopped and that we can return to a citycentered

mode of living for everyone, which virtually all critics of sprawl eventually

claim, is to ignore the other and even greater causal force operating today in our human

environment: the ability, under a capitalist system of land marketing, to supercede municipal

boundaries and to spread out. What is needed is not a return to compact city

forms, with higher density residential living, but greater power to plan for minicenters

and clustered neighborhood development in suburban regions, even if they will remain

dominated by the norm of the single-family home.

The recognition that sprawl is a major environmental problem has its own social

history. In the 1950s, it was suburbia, rather than sprawl, that drew the ire of critics.

As we have seen, a mass movement to single-family living outside the historical central

city began during that time. By 1970, only twenty-five years after World War II,

more Americans were living in suburbia than in our large cities. As this phenomenon

picked up speed and came to define the very nature of growth in the Sun Belt, with its

own massive ingestion of population from other parts of the United States, suburban

life, despite all its critics in academia and in the architectural and planning professions,

became the normative form of American living. Endless sprawl, particularly evident

in those same Sun Belt regions or in areas like Long Island, outside our largest

and oldest Northeast cities, emerged as a consequence and its critique by the very

same group of professionals eventually supplanted complaints about suburbia itself.

Results of unregulated regional growth are quite troubling now. For example,

Phoenix, Arizona, one of the fastest growing Sun Belt regions, increases its area about an

acre an hour, while Atlanta, Georgia, is now spread out more than the entire state of

Delaware. According to a report that was released in 2001, sprawling development

claims farmland at a rate of 1.2 million acres a year; an average suburban family now

makes ten car trips a day and owns at least two vehicles; and commuting in slow moving

rush hour traffic wastes an estimated $72 billion a year in fuel and productivity

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(Mitchell, 2001:58). In previous chapters we have also seen that extreme racial and income

segregation is a consequence of sprawl. And adding to all these woes is the fact

that outward development around metro cores gobbles up open space, grasslands,

forests, and farmlands at a pace that threatens the very balance of nature in our country,

thereby making it mandatory to import basic food products that were once grown locally

and in abundance. In supermarkets today we buy products that have no fertilizer

or pesticide information regarding how the garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, and other common

vegetables are grown in lands as far away as China.

Fighting Sprawl Through Smart Growth

Fighting sprawl presents society with the inevitable issue of providing planners with

more powers. However, few places in our country have been willing to give government

greater control over land use. The general term for a more aggressive approach is

called “smart growth,” and it is a combination of tax incentives, buyouts of farmland

(called land banking), and better planning of new developments so that they are more

concentrated and can be serviced by public transportation. As early as 1967, the state

of Oregon, under its governor, Tom McCall, moved to preserve farmland that was

being rapidly gobbled up by suburban development by declaring set boundaries for

cities and by land banking open areas in order to preserve green space. Portland, Oregon,

went even further in the hands of several activist mayors by establishing a metropolitan

planning agency that not only maintained its city boundary and green belt,

but also by investing heavily in new public transportation in order to make living

within the city of Portland more attractive than the surrounding suburbia. For some

time, in the 1990s, Portland was lauded as precisely the kind of pedestrian friendly,

clustered dwelling, and public transport–using city that could be found in Europe and

that has attracted the attention of American tourists like Paul Krugman. Lately, however,

the center in Portland has not held. Reports are becoming common about developer

violations beyond its growth barriers. The once admired Portland green belt has

been breached by building. In sum, aggressive planning to prevent sprawl is still the

main tool advocated by opponents, but simply put, it may be impossible in the

United States to invoke so-called smart planning without having to live with its daily

violations that inevitably lead to the further expansion of the metro area without more

rationalized cluster development in minicenters.

A second important component of smart growth is investment in light rail public

transportation that competes with automobile commutation. Once again, very few

areas in our country have been able to succeed in constructing competitive light rail

projects. Although they exist in a number of cities, not enough money has been invested

in their passenger capacity in order for them to begin to replace people’s reliance

on automobiles for commutation. Furthermore, despite some early support in

the urban renewal days of the 1960s when the federal government provided cities

S P R AW L 325

with funds for public transportation projects, limited funding has been commonplace

ever since. Put succinctly, while the federal government is the obvious actor

that could bring about the success of light rail projects throughout America, it has

provided only piecemeal hit-and-miss support for many decades while abdicating a

more aggressive role.

Portland has a successful but very modest facility called the Metropolitan Area Express,

or MAX. It services communities within the existing municipal boundary.

MAX has succeeded within this context, although it hasn’t become a solution to

sprawl because it has been combined with strong planning controls on developers

thereby pushing growth further outside the core. In contrast, Atlanta also has a light

rail facility, called MARTA. Too limited in scope and without any coordination of

clustered planning on its route, this version is a failed attempt to provide the region

with adequate public transportation. A third example is Metro Rail in the city of Buffalo,

N.Y. Under Great Society legislation during the 1960s, adequate federal funds

were provided to the region for a showcase project. Yet suburban interests and feuding

local politicians worked against this mandate, and eventually the reactionary suburban

residents triumphed and blocked the infrastructure of public transport from extending

beyond the city line. Heavy auto dependency and sprawl in the now familiar

pattern followed quickly. In short, one of the things that makes the study of sprawl

such a frustrating problem is that we have the tools to cure many of its ills; however,

residents in metro areas other than Portland have rejected the aggressive use of those

tools. What’s more, even Portland has been so subjected to the powerful centrifugal

forces producing a spreading regional pattern that it has failed to stop the hemorrhaging

of farmland and forest loss.

A S H O R T H I S T O R Y O F

M E T R O P O L I T A N P L A N N I N G

The story of sprawl testifies to the fact that land-use planning in the United States is

weak, and the responses of tourists to places in Europe where it remains strong confirms

this observation. Yet it cannot be asserted that metropolitan planning has not

been tried in this country. Just the opposite. Every town, village, municipality,

county, city, and state has its own planning authorities. Any budgeted government

function must comply with providing such an organizational entity that supervises

its assigned oversight duties. Purchasing and planning go along with this activity as

does cooperating with private developers and people investing in land for profit.

Most commonly, government presence has been felt in metro areas in order to

build and operate public housing or subsidized housing projects precisely because the

private sector has been unable to provide the same. As we have seen, the failure of our

capitalist society to solve the affordable housing crisis has led, instead, to our current

economic meltdown with its use of subprime mortgage lending. In the 1950s the

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government went into the business of segregating poor people and placing them in

high-rise public housing projects. Results of that effort were largely disastrous. In

sum, the lack of affordable housing is a central contradiction of American society and

has plagued us for centuries, even when local governments were given the authority to

plan aggressively for the construction of public housing.

Pruitt-Igoe, for example, was a massive public housing project constructed in the

early 1950s in St. Louis, Missouri. It was inspired by the work of the leading architect

of the postwar generation, Le Corbusier of France, and executed in design by several

famous architects, including Minoru Yamasaki. The project consisted of thirty-three

eleven-story buildings with a total of 2,700 apartment units on a site that encompassed

almost sixty acres (about one-tenth of a square mile). The project represented

the zenith of government-sponsored high-rise/low-income housing construction. Yet

residents experienced problems almost immediately after Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954

(Montgomery and Bristol, 1987). Elevators broke down and were not repaired. Children

were injured playing in corridors or stairwells that could not be monitored adequately

by adults. Crime began to terrorize residents due to the large scale of design

that allowed muggers to remain hidden. People complained of isolation from friends

and neighbors.

Within five short years after Pruitt-Igoe opened, occupancy rates were already on

the decline despite the subsidized rent. By 1970, vacancy rates in the buildings had

reached more than 50 percent.

The St. Louis housing authority made the fateful decision that the problems with

the project were insurmountable and ordered its complete demolition. By 1976, the

entire project was torn down. Pruitt-Igoe was a combination of architecture design

following modernist principles that pursued progress in human/spatial relations and,

simultaneously, a type of government intervention that made apartments at subsidized

rents available to poor people. Architectural critic Charles Jencks sets this date

as the time when modernist ideas about the promise of architecture as promoting social

progress gave way to the postmodern period with its abandonment of such lofty

aspirations (Holston, 1989).

With the failure of Pruitt-Igoe and other public housing projects came the realization

that modernist architecture and government intervention in public housing

required reexamination. In Chicago, the Cabrini-Green housing projects are now

being dismantled and replaced by single-family town houses (see Box 12.1).

Within the metropolitan region, we find separate agencies devoted to planning

that employ significant workforces at each level of government, including each city,

suburb, and township within the metropolitan area, plus a countywide and regional

planning department! Yet our metropolitan environments seem to be characteristically

unplanned. This “planning paradox” (see Gottdiener, 1977) exists because in the

United States planners have very little direct power to enact their schemes and for the

most part are confined instead to advisory roles. The civic culture of the United States

A S H O R T H I S T O R Y O F M E T R O P O L I T A N P L A N N I N G 327

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Redevelopment of Cabrini-Green

In 1929 Harvey Zorbaugh published his study The Gold Coast and the Slum, a

description of Chicago’s wealthy lakefront neighborhoods along Lake Michigan

(the Gold Coast) and of the slum area of tenement housing just half a mile inland.

In the 1950s, the slum area was cleared and replaced with some two dozen

high-rise public housing units called Cabrini-Green. In the early years most of

the occupants were white, but by the 1960s the area was almost entirely composed

of poor black families. The film Cooley High (1966) was shot at the local

high school of the same name. By the 1980s the projects, sometimes called the

worst in America, had become symptomatic of all that was wrong with public

housing in the United States: All of the residents had incomes below the poverty

line; most units were single-parent households; and drugs, gangs, and crime

were rampant. In 1996 Dantrell Davis, a seven-year-old boy, was shot and killed

while walking to the elementary school across the street from the project, still

holding his mother’s hand.

For years the site remained not simply a black spot in the city’s history but also a

controversial area with respect to plans for urban redevelopment. Many floors of

the buildings were boarded up and some of the buildings were vacant, while the remainder

sported large graffiti showing which gangs controlled the buildings. The

Chicago Tribune sponsored a design competition for the best redevelopment plan

for the area. Neighborhood organizers charged that the city wanted to turn the land

over to real estate developers for middle- and upper-class housing close to the

downtown area, and city planners looked for ways to relocate low-income households

that would be displaced by the removal of the buildings. Finally, in 1998 and

1999, eight of the high-rise buildings were demolished in a scene reminiscent of the

earlier destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis.

In the area adjacent to the project, new townhouses selling for $180,000 were

built by a developer, and in 2003 a Starbucks opened in a strip mall across the

street from the projects, seeming to confirm the fears of neighborhood activists.

But along with the 65 new units in the Mohawk North condominium development

are 16 units of public housing. From the outside, the public housing units are

indistinguishable from the private development, and the floor plans of each unit are

similar “railroad flats” common to both older and newer housing in this area of the

city. By dispersing low-income households and creating, in effect, a mixed-income

housing development, the city hopes to eliminate the problems of concentration

and isolation of poor families described by Massey and Denton in Urban Apartheid

(1993). In the coming decade, the high-rise public housing developments will disappear,

to be replaced by new row houses—perhaps the end of the slum described

some seventy-five years earlier in The Gold Coast and the Slum.

Box 12.1

has always resisted direct intervention in the market by government. Compounding

this restriction is the problem of the urban planning profession in our society. Most

schemes come from the private sector, but even when they emerge from public bureaucracies,

like Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini-Green, they most often reflect the ideas of architects

who believe they can create successful living and working arrangements for

people through principles of design and the control of the built environment alone.

Recall that Pruitt-Igoe appeared to be first-rate on paper and represented the highest

ideals of the modernist school of architecture but turned out to be a total failure in

practice. These limitations to urban planning invite a sociological analysis, which is

presented in the next section.

T H E S O C I O L O G Y O F L A N D  U S E P L A N N I N G

The Advisory Role of Planners

The most basic kind of planning involves zoning for land use. Based on the principles

that like activities should be located near one another and that industrial activities and

residential areas should be separated, zoning partitions metropolitan space into distinct

areas for each activity. Space is partitioned into zones reserved for residential use,

commercial activities, and industrial work, among other functions. Planners use detailed

maps to draw up land-use guides that constitute the zoning master plan. In

most cases, such a plan needs to be adopted by local residents or their elected representatives.

Thus, the ability to plan is restricted by the advisory role of planners. In

the end, the public and elected officials determine whether a plan will be accepted

and also whether it will be accepted in total or with modifications. Changes and modifications

are always a possibility with land-use schemes, and both planners and architects

may not like the final result.

Planners also work with elected officials and representatives from the business

community to develop new uses of land. They may set aside land or help design an

industrial park for factories and businesses, an office tower or city skyscraper complex,

a mall, or a large residential development. New developments require infrastructure

planning as well as the construction of the buildings themselves. Roads

have to be put in along with sewer and utility lines and the like. The impact on the

surrounding area also requires careful thought and planning. New developments,

just like zoning schemes, must be approved by local political authorities. Sometimes

citizens object to new growth, and developments can be blocked or changed according

to local resident desires. Most of the time, however, local elected representatives

approve growth, since that is the priority of city government. Local communities often

feel they must compete against one another to develop new industrial parks,

shopping malls, and office centers, adding to the pressures for growth across the metropolitan

region.

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Physical Determinism

Architects who like to plan for social effects, as well as many planners, believe that optimal

living and working arrangements for people can be achieved through the use of

construction, design, and landscaping technology. This approach assumes that

people’s behavior can be controlled or channeled into desirable forms through the

manipulation of physical design. As Herbert Gans (1968:28–33) has argued, this

commits the fallacy of assuming that physical design will determine personal behavior.

As social scientists are aware, behavior is determined by a complex relation of various

social processes interacting in and with spatial forms rather than through the

influence of the physical environment alone. In practice, planners and architects seem

to ignore the social basis of behavior and falsely believe that construction design by itself

can bring about desired change, such as increasing the frequency of neighborly interaction.

Physical determinism, which privileges the abstract space of the planning

professional over social space, has been responsible for some spectacular failures of

planning, including the Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green housing projects, where it was

thought that new architectural designs would somehow alleviate the social problems

brought about by social exclusion. Perhaps the newest and most important example

of the fallacy of physical determinism is the ideology of the “New Urbanism.”

The New Urbanism

This contemporary movement of architects and planners includes among its members

Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jaime Correa, Steven Peterson, Barbara Littenberg,

and Daniel Solomon. More so than any other single factor, New Urbanists are

opposed to the present-day pattern of metropolitan sprawl and see it as both an immense

waste of resources and a blow to the well-being of central cities. Cal thorpe and

Fulton (2001), for example, critique the existing form of urban planning, which designs

zoning areas that separate residential from commercial and industrial use. They

see such restrictions as old-fashioned and more relevant to a time when industry was

messy and polluting. Now our economy is based on information processing, and most

of its economic activities are environmentally clean. For this reason, Calthorpe and

Fulton, as New Urbanists, advocate planning for cities that has a mix of residential,

commercial, and manufacturing or global economic functions. In their view, plans respecting

these new realities would, among other things, do away with regional sprawl.

A major criticism of their approach is that they take as given the activities of both

planning agencies and local governments. Their argument centers around the belief

that metropolitan regions would look better “if only” planning were better. This belief

fails to respect the way private interests in pursuit of profit circumvent and even subvert

plans. Real estate interests have a habit of taking what in their view is best about

urban planning and disregarding the other recommendations in order to make money.

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In short, it is not an outdated form of planning, as Calthorpe and Fulton contend,

that is the culprit behind sprawl and inefficient land-use schemes but the relentless

pursuit of profit through real estate. The latter is often followed by subverting government

regulations and by having planning schemes modified or even discarded.

Another aspect of the New Urbanism is the belief that the behavior of people can

be altered for the better through more enlightened architectural design. As the enemy

of the present-day sprawl pattern of development, New Urbanists seek, through architectural

design, to create residential communities with a high degree of both neighboring

and street life. According to their charter, “We are committed to re-establishing

the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through

citizen-based participatory planning and design” (Fichman and Fowler, 2003:18).

New Urbanists seek to build up cities by first constructing neighborhoods and

communities with active citizen participation that are then connected to larger districts

and areas within the metropolitan region. At the most local level, architects like

Duany and Plater-Zyberk believe that residential communities can be physically designed

to promote neighboring, even though many metropolitan residents prefer networking

and possess communities without locality. For this reason, their designs

feature houses with porches and emphasize pedestrian pathways rather than streets for

automobiles. An excellent example of their ideas put into practice is the new residential

development Seaside, a community of 300 homes and 200 apartments on 80

acres located one hundred miles west of Tallahassee, Florida. Its human scale is accentuated

by residential housing that is consciously based on the forms of a century ago.

All houses have front porches, and most are located on pedestrian paths rather than

roads. Lots are small and narrow to facilitate social interaction among neighbors.

Communities such as Seaside also incorporate many construction features dictated by

architects that play an uncertain role in promoting a new sense of community, such as

the mandated use of tin roofs or tall, narrow house windows. The elitism of architectural

choice may not appeal to everyone.

New Urbanists, like many architects, believe that social goals such as encouraging

neighboring and stemming sprawl can be achieved through the physical means of design

and construction. This is a fallacy. Residents of communities do not behave in

certain ways simply because well-known architects direct them to do so. Neighboring,

in particular, may be facilitated by the presence of porches, but it is not the determining

factor. Rather, people create neighborhoods by establishing primary relations with

neighbors. They have to want to do so. Many do not because their local reference

groups are spread out across the metropolitan region and elsewhere, and yet they can

keep in constant communication with these significant others through cell phone and

Internet technology. This pattern is known as “community without locality,” as we

have already discussed. Studies of Seaside and Celebration, another New Urbanist

development in Florida, confirm that because the housing is quite expensive, the residents

are almost exclusively affluent middle-class Americans. These people prefer their

T H E S O C I O L O G Y O F L A N D  U S E P L A N N I N G 331

far-flung “communities without locality” to relying on neighbors alone. Furthermore,

communities cannot be created merely by facilitating pedestrian traffic. Many people

are so dependent on their automobiles that they ignore the role of sidewalks in their

daily life. While commercial shopping facilities may be located in New Urbanist developments,

residents are more likely to use their cars in order to shop where they

please throughout the metropolitan region, as exemplified by the failure of the “Uptown

District,” a project in San Diego, California.

Some of the most influential planned projects today have come not from contemporary

architects and theorists of community development but from utopian thinkers

who created coherent plans for growth involving theories of design that are still considered

important today. The final section of this chapter addresses these ideas.

U T O P I A N S C H E M E S :

H O W A R D, L E C O R B U S I E R , A N D W R I G H T

Idealistic thinkers in centuries past lamented the evils of civilization and created a

genre of literature known as utopian writing. Plato’s Republic might be the earliest example,

but the consummate vision belongs to Thomas More’s Utopia. These accounts

of some fictional paradise provide us with a means of measuring the prospects of human

endeavor by showing how we can perfect ourselves and our society even while

exploring our all too frail shortcomings as a species. Over the centuries, utopian literature

has provided important inspiration to socially concerned individuals, as has the

equally fascinating genre of dystopian writing, especially science fiction’s dystopian

accounts of life in future cities (such as William Gibson’s 1984 book, Neuromancer).

Utopia, from the Greek word meaning “no place,” and dystopia, a more recently

coined expression that means an imaginary place of dread, are examples of places that

exist elsewhere in time and space. While the former usually signals the modernist

theme of progress, the latter represents our fears about the myth of progress. This

yearning for the perfection of settlement space and the realization that it may never be

attained due to the limitations of our civilization constitute an important strain in

Western literature and cinema. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) calls all such

spaces that exist in our minds as imaginary places heterotopias. As mental conceptions,

heterotopias have the ability to influence our behavior and to define prospective

schemes for architects and planners.

In nineteenth-century Europe, when the evils of industrialization and urbanization

became a major social concern, individuals exercised the utopian spirit by conceiving

of alternative urban environments. Some of these modernist visions were

highly influential in the planning and architectural professions, and indeed by the

twentieth century, architects no longer confined themselves to the design of individual

buildings but composed manifestos and schemes that addressed the living and

working arrangements of the entire city space itself. Among the important conceptu-

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alizers of new urban environments are Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank

Lloyd Wright. The modernist vision of each was expressed, respectively, as the Garden

City, the Radiant City, and Broadacre City.

The Garden City

Ebenezer Howard, who lived during the turn of the last century, was a social reformer

in England. Like others of his time, including Friedrich Engels, he was appalled at the

social costs of British industrialization. Some thinkers, such as Robert Owen, responded

by founding a utopian movement that advocated the construction of communities

(such as New Harmony, Indiana) that would counteract the evils of the

industrial city but required a fundamental break with acceptable ways of family or social

life. Howard’s response was to propose an alternative way of living that everyone

could follow, even those uninterested in the utopian movement’s social change.

To Howard, the city represented the future of economic growth, but it was, to express

it directly, a lousy place to live. In contrast, the rural areas remained in organic

harmony with their surroundings, but they were afflicted with limited economic opportunity.

Howard’s vision combined the two. He proposed that all new industrial

growth be channeled to new locations in outlying areas that would combine industrial

employment with country living on a moderate, human scale. These “garden

cities” would represent the very best of city and country living.

The concept of the garden city proved to be very powerful (see our discussion

above of Espoo and Tapiola, Finland). Capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth

century knew no bounds. The older cities were crowded and polluted, and large cities

gobbled up their adjacent countrysides in a relentless process of accretion. Because

planners understood that growth was inevitable, they were attracted to Howard’s idea

of breaking urban expansion off and aspiring to locate new industry and housing in

moderate-size communities.

Howard’s ideas influenced the “new town” movement in England, which was responsible

for building hundreds of such places, as well as the measured establishment

of medium-size cities in Russia, although the latter case does not embody the ideal of

the “garden,” or suburbanized urban environment. In the United States, a group of architects,

notably Clarence Stein, popularized Howard’s approach. Working with local

authorities and developers, they constructed several places across the country, including

Garden City, New York, outside of Manhattan, and Baldwin Hills, California, located

in Los Angeles. Ebenezer Howard lived to see the opening of the New York

community in 1928. In practice, most of the American garden cities lack their own industry

and hence are little more than middle-class suburban housing developments

with some interesting features, such as shared public spaces. These ideas, all derivative

of Ebenezer Howard’s vision, are still put in practice by developers of large suburban

residential projects such as planned unit developments, or PUDs.

U T O P I A N S C H E M E S : H O WA R D , L E C O R B U S I E R , A N D W R I G H T 333

The Radiant City

Le Corbusier was the professional name of the Swiss-born French architect Charles-

Edouard Jeanneret (1887–1965). Along with several German architects, such as Walter

Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier is considered the founder of the

international style of design and one of the leaders of the modernist movement in architecture.

The type of building associated with this movement is familiar to anyone who

has seen the skyline of a large city, because the design concepts took over the world of architecture

following World War II. International-style buildings are clean, straightforward,

rectangular shapes with flat roofs. They are framed in steel and feature large glass

windows that are sealed shut. Not until the postmodern architectural revolt of the

1980s were downtown office buildings liberated from the dictates of this concept.

Le Corbusier was influential because he propagated certain ideas about city living

instead of confining his practice to building design. He believed in the triumph of

technology over social conditions of industrialization. Buildings themselves were to be

“machines for living,” that is, the most efficient designs for the sustenance of everyday

activities. The urban environment would itself have to be changed to conform to the

dictates of more enlightened architectural design. Because Le Corbusier lamented the

terrible social costs of industrialization, he proclaimed the modernist rallying cry, “Architecture

or Revolution,” sincerely believing that capitalist countries had little choice

but to follow his ideas or confront the revolt of the urban masses.

Le Corbusier’s ideas and those of his contemporaries constituted the ideology of

modernism, which legitimated the notion of progress and the improvement of human

conditions year after year through the intervention of technology. Modernist

ideology asserted that the lot of individuals could be improved by the acquisition and

application of knowledge—scientific, technological, architectural, social, and psychological.

Part of modernist culture was the celebration of architecture and “modern”

ideas about city planning.

Le Corbusier’s plan for an entire metropolis, the “radiant city,” reordered social

space across a large, industrial aggregation. Instead of the relatively low density of

housing and chaotic land use that was characteristic of the cities at that time, Le Corbusier

proposed that buildings should be high-rises. By condensing the living space

using building height, open spaces would be liberated, and Le Corbusier envisioned

these spaces as parks that would surround residential clusters, thereby transforming

the congested, sprawling industrial city into an open, airy, and efficient place of mobility

and light.

A second important feature of the new design followed from Le Corbusier’s and

the modernist belief in the virtues of technology. Le Corbusier believed that the widespread

use of public transportation and auto modes of transport would vastly improve

the efficiency of urban scale. He proclaimed the “death of the street,” that is, the

pedestrian thoroughfare characteristic of all cities in the past. He envisioned instead

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rapid movement facilitated by autos, trains, highways, and feeder roads of people and

commodities between the various nodes of urban space, residences, factories, shops,

and government buildings.

The lesson of Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green (see discussion above) illustrates the

deeply ingrained physicalist fallacy of Le Corbusier. Construction design, which disregards

social process, cannot alone change everyday life. Unfortunately, the modernist

ideas of the international style, and especially the concepts of Le Corbusier, were highly

influential in urban planning through the 1960s. Along with Pruitt-Igoe, another major

tragedy of planning in this vein is exemplified by the case of Brasilia, the capital city of

Brazil, which was constructed following Le Corbusier’s idea of the radiant city. Designed

by the architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in 1960 and located in the interior

600 miles from the Rio de Janeiro coast, Brasilia looks like a giant bird from an

aerial view. But on the ground, its limitations have become legendary. The “death of the

street” produced an austere, alienating environment in which urban life is shrouded in

anonymity. Neighboring and community interaction have all but disappeared because

of the inability to overcome the automobile-based lifestyle and the imposing super –

human social scale, which has led to feelings of isolation and anonymity among residents

(Holston, 1989).

The city was built to be the country’s new capital, and so government administrators

and their support staffs find employment there. However, Brasilia has failed

to attract the diverse kinds of industry and everyday life that would convert it to a

major city. Brasilia, among other austere creations of modernist city planning, reminds

us of the perils of physical determinism and the need for architects to work in

conjunction with social science to bring about an improvement of urban conditions.

Broadacre City

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) was the premier American architect for most of the

past century. His ideas, unlike Le Corbusier’s, are still appreciated today, even if some

of his designs have become outdated. Wright was no modernist. In fact, he was much

influenced by the crafts movement in the United States and by Asian architecture,

particularly the Japanese use of interior space. Wright believed that structures should

be organic extensions of natural environments. Houses, for example, should emerge

from the crown of the hill rather than being built at the top, since the latter should be

reserved for nature. They should embody a fluid connection with the world outside,

and their construction should celebrate natural materials and settings, as exemplified

by the Kaufmann home, Falling Water House (built in 1936), outside Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania. This summer home is made of concrete that is stacked like pancakes on

three levels (called cantilevering) so that it sits on a rock above a forest stream. The

water flows under the lower level and out over a falls. Sitting in the living room, one

can watch the water flow and hear the stream as it runs over the rock below.

U T O P I A N S C H E M E S : H O WA R D , L E C O R B U S I E R , A N D W R I G H T 335

Frank Lloyd Wright was not enamored with the American city that he saw developing

after World War II and wrote that with each new skyscraper he saw only the

death of the city. Wright’s vision of the new city possessed some similarities with that

of Ebenezer Howard, especially the desire to merge the city and the country, except

Wright thought in modular terms. Instead of a single, human-scale community,

Wright envisioned an immense metropolis whose internal structure reduces space to

a human scale through modular design. Each family would be assigned a singlefamily

home on an acre of land! The space would enable families to grow their own

food and modify their surroundings according to their own personal tastes. Houses

would be arrayed on an expansive grid. Wright also liked the possibilities of the auto,

and his Broadacre City assumed that the car would be the basic means of transportation.

Each place would be accessible by interconnected roads and highways feeding

into and out of grids. Commercial shopping would take place in regularly spaced

shopping centers, and industry would be isolated in specifically designed factory areas

that were zoned exclusively for business.

Wright’s scheme seems almost like the massive suburban environments of

today—and indeed Wright saw little need for the city. He was one of the earliest architects

to envision the concept of the shopping center, and his factory-zoned area is

recognizable as the industrial park of the present, a common feature of metropolitan

environments. The key element of Wright’s vision, however, seems elusive, namely,

the one-acre allotment of land that resolved the city/country dilemma at the smallest

scale of each individual family. While suburban residences often have ample backyards,

these are reserved for leisure activities, including, perhaps, a swimming pool.

But Wright’s vision of every family providing for its sustenance through backyard

farming seems far removed from the realities of metropolitan life.

Our review of architectural visionaries provides us with some alternative ways to

think about massive metropolitan environments and reminds us that urbanized land –

scapes do not necessarily have to assume the form they now possess. The present-day

approach to metropolitan development seems oblivious to other ways of building except

unending sprawl. But alternatives are possible; only the continuing belief in

physical determinism, which wrongly suggests that architecture and urban planning

can alter social processes, needs to be abandoned. Developers combining proper design

with environmentally aware social science that draws on the legacy of utopian

ideas have had some successes, such as the towns of Columbia, Maryland, and Garden

City, New York.

P L A N N I N G C R I T I C S : J A C O B S A N D K R I E R

Ideas about planning have benefited from the work of critics who have taken both

architects and the planning profession to task for neglecting the human values embodied

within social space (Mayo, 1988). Two of the most influential critics are Jane

Jacobs and Leon Krier.

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Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs (1961) is concerned that we preserve the city as a viable place to live. She

believes that the best cities have a vital and active street life. Her critique of urban

planning claims that too many projects have ignored the role of human interaction

as providing the lifeblood of city culture when most city inhabitants live in apartments

with restricted space. For Jacobs, active urban life can never be planned because

people invent uses for space. They accommodate the pursuit of their needs to

the streets, parks, and playgrounds that they find around them. City planning that

discourages this social interaction through the limiting of public or social space results

in the destruction of the city itself.

For example, adolescents who live in the city spend a good deal of time out on

the streets. Over the years, an incredible variety of street games has arisen using this

space, and many of these have been handed down through the generations, such as

“Ring-a-Levio,” “Johnny on the Pony,” hopscotch, rope-jumping games, and stickball.

Skateboarders and others make use of urban spaces in ways never envisioned by

architects and planners (Bordain, 1999). Projects planned only in terms of efficient

automobile traffic (such as Le Corbusier’s radiant city or Brasilia) arrange for wide

thoroughfares that are heavily traveled. But such efficiency in the name of transportation

destroys the ability of children to use the streets for play. Can you imagine

active street games in the immense auto corridors of Los Angeles or on the welltraveled

two-way streets in your community? In contrast, Jacobs celebrates the streets

and advocates blocking them off on a periodic and temporary basis to allow for

neighborhood interaction. This is precisely what many cities do when they sponsor

neighborhood festivals during the summer months.

According to Jacobs, human-scale public spaces in the city, such as sidewalks,

parks, and playgrounds, provide people with a number of resources: (1) They constitute

learning environments for children; (2) they allow for parents’ surveillance of

the neighborhood and their children’s activities; and (3) they facilitate intimate, primary

relations among neighbors, thereby providing a strong sense of community.

Jacobs’s ideas have had a strong impact on the way urbanists and planners think

about city life. Local governments encourage park use, street festivals, temporary

blocking of community roads, and toleration of sidewalk vendors. But not all of Jacobs’s

ideas have been accepted. Some of her followers advocated the elimination of

elevators in apartment buildings to facilitate neighborly interaction, but the results

were disastrous for the residents of these buildings. Planners who emphasize revitalizing

streets and city parks must take the high crime rate into account; in many

cities, downtown revitalization efforts using Jacobs’s ideas have failed due to the fear

of urban crime on the part of suburban residents. Jacobs’s ideas about community

may also be passé. Many city residents socialize with networks of friends and relatives

who do not live nearby, as we saw in Chapter 8. Teenagers may prefer to travel

to their own friendship networks rather than socialize on the street. On the whole,

P L A N N I N G C R I T I C S : J A C O B S A N D K R I E R 337

however, Jane Jacobs’s ideas have influenced urbanists because she captured the heart

and soul of urban culture. Her importance lies in convincing us that urban culture

depends on the relationship between personal interaction and public space. The fact

that this culture is in danger of dying today is certainly not the fault of her conception.

As we direct our attention to metropolitan regions, it is important to ask

whether her ideas are equally relevant for suburban settlement spaces.

Leon Krier

Although Leon Krier is a contemporary architect practicing in Germany, his ideas

have been highly influential in the United States in recent years. Like Jacobs, his

main concern is revitalizing urban culture. He views this as principally a problem of

scale: The contemporary city has grown too large to shelter a livable environment,

and it is necessary to return urban building to a human scale. Krier’s model of the

city is the preindustrial town, and he advocates a return to the type of building characteristic

of societies hundreds of years ago. In this sense, Krier is a critic of modernist

ideology and one of the inspirations for postmodern architecture.

According to Krier, settlement space should be divided into districts with no

more than 15,000 people in each subdivision. Ample use is made of squares, monuments,

and public spaces, which should have the proportions of the classical pre –

industrial towns. These changes, inspired by “retro” thinking, would return urban

space to a human scale. Krier also has his critics (see Dutton, 1989). More so than

Jacobs, he commits the fallacy of physical determinism. He ignores social process

and the larger societal forces that make up the modern city, and the kind of transition

in scale that he envisions would be difficult for all but the most affluent residents.

Krier’s proposal, like those of most architects, also commits the elitist/populist

fallacy. He never asks what people want; he only dictates design prescriptions

through abstract space.

Despite these drawbacks, Leon Krier’s work has had an enormous influence on

architects designing new communities in the United States who seek to overcome

modernist ideology, especially the New Urbanist movement (see above). Among his

most significant disciples is the team of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Krier’s ideas have been influential because there is a growing sense that typical suburban

communities have isolated people unnecessarily. At the same time, these ideas

seem destined to be realized by the most affluent but remain unavailable to the average

family interested in a suburban home.

O T H E R T R E N D S I N P L A N N I N G T O D A Y

In contrast to the New Urbanism and its projects, which dictate a design of human

scale, other recent developments in both urban and suburban settlement spaces have

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embraced projects that are notably large in scale. Projects such as the building of the

garden city Columbia, Maryland, and the construction of Battery Park City at the

tip of Manhattan are large in scope and encompass many acres. Large tracts of land

have been converted from agricultural use in the suburbs or cleared of slums in the

city core. These mega-projects usually incorporate mixed-use developments of housing

and commercial shops. Due to the influence of planning critics, however, many

of these designs incorporate human scaling despite their large size.

Among the most successful developers of large but human-scale projects is James

Rouse, whose company built the Baltimore Inner Harbor, Faneuil Hall in Boston, the

South Street Seaport in Manhattan, and the Santa Monica Mall. The Baltimore,

Boston, and New York projects in particular were constructed on deteriorating, unused

land that was revitalized. Rouse’s success involved a blending of open spaces, reasonably

priced and varied eating places, and upscale shops. Such redevelopment

transformed spaces of bleak prospect into vital urban centers with an active public

life. The Baltimore Harbor project, for example, consists of a large horseshoe of open

space that surrounds the shore of the harbor inlet. Concrete steps lead to benches and

play areas. One section is devoted to an array of alternative and moderately priced

eateries. Two attractions, the Baltimore Aquarium and the Revolutionary War battleship

Constellation, also draw visitors.

Another of Rouse’s successful developments is Columbia, Maryland, a new town

that mixes apartment and single-family home construction with accessible and usable

open space and shopping areas. The entire project has been planned to conform

to human scale and includes pathways totally dedicated to pedestrian use that link

the various sections of the town. As one observer notes:

In Columbia the size of residential areas was determined primarily by the number

of households needed to support an elementary school. The Rouse Company, as

developer, insisted that within a block of the school there be a swimming pool, a

community building, and a convenience store, and that people be able to walk or

bike to these facilities without crossing any major streets. Three to five neighborhoods

made up a village, which offered more facilities, including a supermarket, a

bank branch, and other businesses, also accessible by the community’s fortyseven

miles of walking and biking paths, as well as by car. (Langdon, 1988:52)

The success of the Rouse Company has influenced the way other mega-projects

have been designed. In New York City, for example, a ninety-two-acre section of the

dilapidated downtown with few residential units was demolished to build Battery

Park City. The project consists of high-rise apartments, offices, and shopping facilities.

Located at the southern tip of Manhattan, the development makes ample use of

its view of the Hudson River. Residential blocks are integrated with an esplanade

that includes spaces to sit and socialize with neighbors. Many other projects across

O T H E R T R E N D S I N P L A N N I N G T O D A Y 339

the country, such as RiverPlace along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon,

have adopted the successful approach of human-scale residential blocks, mixed commercial

and housing land use, and pedestrian amenities to provide a more attractive

environment for residents.

S U M M A R Y O F P L A N N I N G I S S U E S

People in the United States regard planning with suspicion. They prefer to defend individual

property rights and the home rule prerogative of local government control

over land use. Although every jurisdiction, no matter how small, seems to have its

own planning department, professional experts are relegated to an advisory role. Planners

must maneuver within this politically constrained milieu by exercising their influence

on developers, speculators, homeowners, renters, local community activists,

and public officials (Weiss, 1987). It is not an easy task. In the main, the professional

planners employed by business and government devote their time to working out the

ordinary details of mandated land use and construction requirements. They pursue

the unglamorous job of drafting site usage plans for developers, reviewing and updating

zoning maps for local governments, and assessing traffic studies. They also collect

and review demographic information on the present and future growth patterns of individual

towns. But this bureaucratic domain of activity remains removed from the

active task of fashioning environments in which other people will live.

As we have seen, the limitations placed on professional planners have not prevented

individuals from dreaming their dreams of the perfect city. Visionaries and utopian

thinkers have tried their best to lead citizens of modern society toward some Eden that

actualizes the promise of industrial progress. Some ideas, such as Howard’s garden city,

have been influential enough to affect future generations. Colossal failures, such as the

superhuman building blocks of Le Corbusier’s radiant city (actualized in every highrise

public housing project, not to mention the ashes of Pruitt-Igoe), have also been

helpful because they have shown what we cannot or should not do. Happily, visionary

plans are tried sometimes, and even more happily, most of the time on a small enough

scale so that the human cost of failure is not dear. We learn from mistakes and successes

as our knowledge of planning human environments accumulates.

One important lesson that has recently been learned concerns the yearning for

human-scale places in the face of unending metropolitan sprawl and the experience

of immense, impersonal city space. Developments today feature an informed use of

space. Macro-environments, such as the Santa Monica enclosed mall, are composed

of many mini-environments that nurture sociability. The huge Battery Park City project

opens itself out to the surrounding urban fabric and natural setting, providing for

social interaction through human-scale public spaces and the extended esplanade on

the Hudson River. Finally, as we have seen, new towns developed in their entirety

(such as Columbia, Maryland) succeed by devoting space to pedestrians and thereby

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providing alternatives to automobile transportation to perform everyday tasks such as

shopping, leisure activities, and commuting to work and school.

A return to human scale alone, however, even through the best efforts of planners,

will not save the declining quality of life in either our central cities or our massive,

sprawling suburbs. As discussed in Chapter 9, the high level of crime has taken an immense

toll on the free use of urban space, not to mention its cost in lives. We can

rightly wonder what will happen to the Hudson River esplanade and its pedestrian

traffic if it becomes a haven for muggers. How enjoyable would the miles of pedestrian

paths of Columbia, Maryland, be if the community were not isolated from the

realities of homelessness and destitution characteristic of inner-city districts? The

growing problems of land use, congestion, traffic jams, housing blight, environmental

pollution, and suburban sprawl spur the public to search for planned solutions to urban

growth. These and other problems may yet encourage local citizens to give up

their traditional and narrow concern with protecting their property rights in favor of

a more coordinated approach to development. Yet the problems of the metropolitan

region have societal roots that are not easily addressed by technical recommendations

without massive social change.

These contradictions are clearest when we study the impact of environmental

pollutants on communities. As we shall discuss, the burden of costs for society’s

progress seems to fall on poor and minority neighborhoods. Government at all levels

participates in producing this pattern of discrimination. In many communities, air

pollution affects and endangers the lives of everyone, rich and poor. Environmental

problems are found in all metropolitan regions and require economic, political, and

social responses in addition to better-quality spatial design.

As sociologists have noted, professional planners, government officials, and architects

would probably remain limited by their own outlook even if they were given

more power. They preach the fallacy of physical determinism, which holds a blind

faith in the power of construction technology and design to alter social relationships.

Rarely do they profess what Frank Lloyd Wright saw as the organic, holistic needs of

families and households. They are more comfortable with limited prescriptions that

conform to the dictates of their professions’ focus: building design and construction

for architects, landscaping or land-use schemes for planners, or political expediency

for politicians. Much more is needed to control the forces of development in the

United States, but little public debate seems to be devoted to the issue of planning or

the search for alternatives to our deteriorating environment.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S S U E S

On October 1, 1980, the Love Canal section of the small town of Niagara, New York,

located near the Canadian border, was declared an environmental disaster by President

Carter. He ordered the permanent evacuation of all families from their homes. This

E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S S U E S 341

action followed after two previous evacuations beginning in 1978 (Gibbs, 1981:5). Between

1920 and 1953, the area, an uncompleted canal, was used as a dump site for

toxic chemicals from both the private sector and the federal government, particularly

the U.S. Army. Homes had been built on top of landfill after the site was no longer

used for dumping. Residents who lived along the canal had been exposed for many

years to carcinogens from the toxic wastes that leaked into groundwater and oozed to

the surface. In the 1970s, some of the 1,000 families that lived near the canal site began

to complain about the high incidence of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and

central nervous system diseases (Gibbs, 1981:3). Once the full extent of the poisoning

became known, evacuations proceeded, but this action came too late to save many

people from contracting cancer and other environmentally caused health problems.

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear power plant located in Chernobyl, near the Ukrainian

capital city of Kiev, exploded. The blast ignited the graphite moderating core of

the reactor and resulted in the unleashing of intense radiation across a wide area of the

former Soviet Union and Western Europe. Fallout from the disaster was measured as

far away as the United States and showed up in the dairy production of countries such

as Norway, but the most severe effects were felt by hundreds of thousands of people

living in the small towns in the area (Marples, 1988). Had the winds been blowing

northward at the time, the Ukrainian people’s historic city of Kiev (population 2.4

million) would have been destroyed along with countless lives. Official figures from

the Soviet Union listed thirty-one people killed by the accident, but other estimates

are as high as 500 (Marples, 1988:42). It was also estimated that as many as 50,000

people may have been directly exposed to excessive radiation, with nearly 500,000

premature deaths predicted over subsequent decades. The disaster forced the permanent

evacuation of persons and homes from a thirty-kilometer zone, but over

100,000 children outside this area were also taken from their families to avoid exposure.

Thousands of people were treated for radiation sickness. To this day, the region

contains “hot spots” that are a threat to life.

Unfortunately, the above examples are not isolated cases. The United States, for

instance, had its own potential nuclear catastrophe when the Three Mile Island reactor

near Middletown, Pennsylvania, began emitting radioactive steam on March 28,

1979. That emergency was controlled without immediate loss of life or property.

Many countries around the world have toxic pollution sites and unsafe radioactive

facilities within their borders that compromise the health of citizens every day.

In this chapter, we will use the sociospatial perspective to study environmental issues

that result from, and create problems for, the expansion of urban and suburban

settlement space. Because the living and working arrangements in modern societies

impact the health and well-being of all residents, questions raised about environmental

quality have as much to do with spatial issues as they do with economic development.

The environmental question and its relation to sociospatial development raise

a variety of issues. One set deals with the nature of constructed space, or “second na-

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ture,” as Henri Lefebvre (1991) calls it. These issues involve the activity of planning,

which seeks to obtain the best living and working arrangements in developing cities.

The built environment, any built environment, such as a city or a mall, possesses

attributes that may enhance or hinder the functioning of its use. Elements of the en –

vironmental fabric such as streets, pedestrian pathways, automobile corridors, and

housing complexes can be placed in harmony with one another to facilitate the movement

of people and vehicular traffic throughout the constructed space. Planning and

architectural design address these kinds of issues. In addition, urban and metropolitan

governments have sought to incorporate sound environmental principles into future

plans. This type of planning is called “sustainable growth,” and it has emerged as a

very important perspective today.

A separate set of questions involves the inherent quality of the environment. What

are the outcomes and by-products of social activities? What effects do the different

types of activities, such as manufacturing, have on population groups within their

vicinity? Who pays the environmental costs for development? What is the environmental

impact of growth on the health and well-being of citizens? These and other

questions frame the discussion of urban and suburban settlement spaces as a built environment.

Let us explore this topic first and relate it to metropolitan considerations.

Environmental Quality

All societies seek to improve their quality of life through industrial development. Some

countries, such as the United States, already possess a heritage of more than one hundred

years of industrialization. Although all human activities produce waste products

that may adversely affect others, such as the effluent problem in an ancient city like

Beijing, the scale and intensity of the environmental costs of industrialization are unprecedented.

Manufacturing results in by-products that are toxic to animal and plant

life; energy generation affects the temperature and quality of water and air with consequent

effects on living things; and the extraction of natural resources, such as gold, results

in environmental damage, such as the releasing of toxic metals into forest streams.

Societies around the globe have always put developmental desires above environmental

concerns. In places such as China, Brazil, and sections of Europe, the healthrelated

impacts of industrialization weren’t even publicly recognized until quite

re cently, as we saw in Chapter 11’s discussion of Shanghai’s pollution problem. For

many centuries, all societies have held an unwavering belief in the idea of progress.

Technology, science, and industrial growth, it is commonly understood, hold the

promise of making our lives better and better. At present this assumption has been

called into question by some environmentally conscious individuals. According to

Murray Bookchin (1990:20), the certainty that technology and science will improve

the human condition is mocked by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, massive

hunger in the developing world, and poverty in the first world.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S S U E S 343

Most Americans appreciate the quality of life made available to them by the accomplishments

of industrialization, but environmental activists suggest that this comfort

for the relative few, globally speaking, has been acquired at a phenomenal cost to

the many around the world. Furthermore, the unprecedented scale of human development

today has resulted in global effects such as the widening hole in the ozone

layer, global warming, acid rain, the eradication of plant and animal species, and the

increasing threats to fresh drinking water. In response, environmentalists have called

for a new ordering of global priorities that would seek out environmentally enhancing

methods of industrial production and safe technologies (Naess, 1989; Gore, 1992).

This means redefining the relationship between humans and settlement space on this

planet. As the level of awareness about these environmental issues increases across the

globe, perhaps the issues of growth and development will be reexamined. New, environmentally

sound methods of production and safe technologies such as rechargeable

electric cars may usher in a transformed relation between people and the Earth that

preserves the well-being of both. Environmental concerns translate into new jobs and

industries so that ecologically conscious development can be compatible with saving

the planet (Kazis and Grossman, 1982).

The above concerns have been part of the environmental movement in the United

States for some time. In the classical phase of activism, which began in the 1800s,

Americans sought to protect large areas of the country from development and endangered

species from destruction. Naturalists such as John Muir (1838–1914), who won

protection for places like Yosemite and led the fight to establish the national parks system,

and organizations such as the Audubon Society, which has been at the forefront

of the fight to save native birds and other wildlife, are examples of the classical phase

of environmentalism (Bullard, 1990). In the twentieth century, the mature phase of

activism attacked the unbridled nature of industrialization in the United States. Concerned

citizens fought for regulatory agencies, the passage of environmental statutes,

and the establishment of industrial standards for control of pollutants. Over the years,

regulations and legally binding statutes have been passed by both the federal and state

levels of government. In 1970 the mature phase efforts culminated in the establishment

of a separate federal agency under the executive branch, the Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA), which serves as the public’s advocate and coordinates research

on environmental issues. In the 1970s, the EPA was granted powers to regulate

mileage standards for automobiles, thereby leading to the production of fuel-efficient

engines. Although there is still much work to be done and an imminent need for residents

of the United States to rethink their relationship with the settlement space of

advanced industrial society, the classical and mature phases of environmental activism

have accomplished a great deal. This is especially the case when we consider the sensitivity

many Americans have acquired in the past several decades to the need for fuel

economy, recycling of waste products, and the search for safe technologies.

A third type of activism is grassroots or community efforts. Advocates of grassroots

mobilization point out that while social concern about environmental quality

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is quite high in the United States, there is little appreciation for the social equity and

social justice aspects of environmental impacts (Gale, 1983). These impacts are distributed

inequitably across settlement space, creating a particular sociospatial dimension

to the differential impact of costs. As one observer puts it, “An abundance of

documentation shows blacks, lower-income groups, and working-class persons are

subjected to a disproportionately large amount of pollution and other environmental

stressors in their neighborhoods as well as in their workplaces” (Bullard, 1990:1).

The classical and mature phases of environmental activism have drawn in thousands

of people, but the overwhelming majority of them and the concerns they express

are those of the middle class. The environmental costs paid by poor and minority

people have largely been ignored. This sociospatial pattern of environmental costs is

most revealing. Love Canal in New York State was situated within a white, workingclass

community, and it was these people who paid the price of toxic pollution. In Alabama,

the town of Triana was judged to be the unhealthiest in America (Reynolds,

1980:38). The residents of Triana are black, and they have been poisoned by the pesticide

DDT and the chemical PCB from a creek whose quality is the responsibility of

the federal government. Time and again research shows that society continues to produce

toxic pollution and that poor and minority communities are its victims (Bullard,

1990; Berry, 1977; Blum, 1978).

Many of the hazards that differentially affect minorities and the poor are the consequence

of industrial location patterns. Factories, chemical plants, mills, and the like are

located in areas isolated from middle-class residential space. Because housing costs are

lower in settlement spaces constructed around manufacturing areas, this is where poor

people are more likely to live. Chemical emissions, spillovers of toxic by-products, unpleasant

smells, and loud noises are just some of the hazards that affect these relatively

powerless communities. These areas are often selected for unwanted land uses (or

LULUs) such as landfills, toxic waste dumps, and effluent treatment plants. Hence, even

though regulations have increased for safeguarding environmental quality, they have

also led to injustices in the disposal of environmental threats, especially because of the

inequitable siting of toxic dumps and landfills. For example: Four landfills in minority

zip code areas represented 63 percent of the South’s total hazardous-waste disposal capacity.

Moreover, the landfills located in the mostly black zip code areas of Emelle (Alabama),

Alsen (Louisiana), and Pinewood (South Carolina) in 1987 accounted for 58.6

percent of the region’s hazardous-waste landfill capacity (Bullard, 1990:40).

The differential locational impacts of environmental costs and the issues of social

equity that they raise have yet to be addressed. Most communities seek to avoid becoming

hosts to activities that represent social problems, such as outpatient mental

clinics, halfway houses for criminals, and drug treatment centers. They advocate not in

my backyard, or NIMBY, politics, which makes location a struggle that the least powerful

community loses. The same is true for LULUs such as hazardous waste dumps or

landfills. But allowing the stronger to make the weaker pay for all of society’s costs violates

principles of social justice.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S S U E S 345

In recent years, grassroots activists have organized poor and minority communities

to fight for their rights. They are forcing the larger society to rethink environmental

issues. If toxic dumps are unfair to any community, why not design production

operations to minimize environmental damage? If landfills are becoming a problem,

can’t recycling and other, even more imaginative schemes be considered for the everincreasing

volume of garbage we all produce? How can we reorder our priorities to

avoid having people pay unfairly for pollution? These and other questions frame the

agenda for grassroots organizing and environmental activism in the years to come.

This agenda has also become central to the “environmental sustainability” movement.

Sustainable Growth

The concept of “sustainable growth” derives from the environmental movement but

it has also had an immense impact on urban planning. For this reason it ties together

the two concerns of this chapter.

Local governments deploying this concept frame future growth in terms that also

relate to environmental goals. They pursue planning for development that, at the same

time, asks the following question: How can we sustain and improve the environmental

quality of life defined as a series of concrete planning targets? Another term for this approach

is the “livable cities” movement. As noted above in the discussion of planning,

while these concepts are all sound, they require strong government controls in order to

be put into effect. Now, in the twenty-first century, with environmental concerns increasing

and becoming more commonly placed on the public’s political agenda, there

is some hope that if people do not wish to provide planners with power to control

sprawl and suburban development, they may opt to do so for ecological reasons to prevent

further decline in the quality of life due to our global environmental issues.

Sustainable development uses concepts from the ecological movement to guide

this form of “smart growth.” Environmentalists define the impact of any activity as its

“ecological footprint.” Taken together, the way in which a metro region uses resources

and the effects of its activities on the environment define its unique “footprint.” The

stated goal of sustainable growth is to reduce that footprint to as small an impact as

possible. The use of recycling, mass transit, electric or hybrid vehicles, use of solar energy

and other renewable energy resources, and citizen activities aimed at cleaning up

vacant lots, streets, and highways are but a few of the tools applied in the pursuit of

sustainable growth. Sustainable growth has meant a renewed role for local government;

in this case, it becomes the manager of environmentally aware development.

Activist positions by administrators instigate change and mandate that environmental

concerns be addressed. This approach also means that local communities and neighborhoods

must be transformed into activist organizations that pursue improvements

in environmental quality. In fact, the local community component of sustainable

growth is quite critical to its success. One problem emerging in recent years with this

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movement is that more cities and metropolitan areas claim to be pursuing sustainability

than are actually doing so. Consequently, there is a danger that the term may just

be used as an election slogan rather than a concrete goal of local administrations. A

study by Portney (2003) found that of twenty-five cities in the United States that proclaim

they are pursuing sustainability, only eight had actually taken the goal seriously.

Furthermore, there is a more serious problem when no apparent linkage is made between

ecological measures and planning for smart development. Thus, people might

be very enthusiastic about recycling, and most places in America have public sanitation

services that support this activity, but there is absolutely no connection made between

this activity and reducing the waste of natural resources immediately adjacent

to the built environment by greedy developers and indifferent public authorities who

both ignore the need for better regional planning to avoid sprawl.

Portney also uncovered a third problem with the putative push to “sustainability.”

Cities and metropolitan regions vary considerably with regard to what they understand

to be sustainable environmental issues. Some places emphasized environmental quality

most directly. Others included adequate health care, proper schools, and an acceptable

standard of living as goals. According to Portney’s study, then, there is no guarantee

that pursuit of sustainability necessarily means pursuit of environmental quality. When

the term is found as part of a governing agenda, there is also no guarantee that measures

deployed will be pursued actively until they are successful. Finally, as we have

seen, there is also no direct linkage in virtually all places with environmental programs

to stronger land-use planning controls aimed at managing sprawl. Despite these drawbacks,

the sustainable development movement is becoming increasingly popular in the

United States as public awareness grows regarding serious environmental problems and

the costs of growth. As mentioned above, while little sympathy is given to advocates

wanting to abandon the so-called American way of life that emphasizes auto use and

single-family homes as the norm, increasing environmental issues resulting from that

way of living may push us in the direction of significant changes towards more sustainable

patterns.

Increased public involvement in the planning process is needed to refocus attention

on those issues that affect our daily lives rather than on the profits to be reaped

from development and the increased tax revenues that accompany urban growth. It is

up to America’s leaders and citizens to become more involved in a protracted dialogue

regarding the kind of environments they prefer to live in. One last source of reform

remains unexamined so far: the activities surrounding the drafting and execution of

public policy and state intervention. We will consider this topic in the next chapter.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S S U E S 347

K E Y C O N C E P T S

sprawl

smart growth

planning paradox

physical determinism

New Urbanism

sustainable development

I M P O R T A N T N A M E S

Ebenezer Howard

Le Corbusier

Frank Lloyd Wright

Jane Jacobs

Leon Krier

Andrés Duany

D I S C U S S I O N Q U E S T I O N S

1. Environmental problems must be considered as a sociospatial issue. What are

some examples of sociospatial inequalities and environmental problems that you are

aware of in your community?

2. The textbook suggests that physical determinism and the elitist-populist

dilemma are major shortcomings with urban planning. What do these terms mean?

What can be done to overcome these limitations?

3. We have discussed three utopian planners—Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright.

How did these planners differ in their ideas for improving urban life? Which has had

the most influence on urban development in the United States?

4. What is meant by New Urbanism? Why are some observers critical of this movement?

Do you think that New Urbanism can solve the social problems confronting

metropolitan regions discussed in Chapter 9?

5. Are there gated communities in the area where you grew up? Do these communities

match the description of those in this chapter? In what ways?

Metropolitan Planning and Environmental Issues

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