Planning for Community [1 ed.] 139417571X, 9781394175710

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Planning for Community

Planning for Community

Phil Heywood

Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-­copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-­8400, fax (978) 750-­4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-­6011, fax (201) 748-­6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/ permission. Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/ or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-­2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-­3993 or fax (317) 572-­4002. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data: Names: Heywood, Phil, author. Title: Planning for community / Phil Heywood. Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032339 (print) | LCCN 2023032340 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394175710 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394175727 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394175734 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Community life. | Communities—Planning. | Community organization. | Community development—Planning. Classification: LCC HM761 .H493 2023 (print) | LCC HM761 (ebook) | DDC 307—dc23/eng/20230802 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032339 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032340 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © qwertfak/Adobe Stock Photos

Contents

Prefacevii Acknowledgementsix 1 Promises and Problems of Community Life 1 Introduction: the organisation of the chapter 1 Part One, Current Cascades of Change 1 Part Two, Community Life and Change  6 Contemporary challenges to  community life 7 Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Community Structure and Change 12 The roles of communication and collaboration17 Applications of communication in community planning 19 Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration 20 Collaboration in practice 21 Conclusions25 Endnotes26 References28 2 The Lives of Local Communities 33 Scope and scales of community 33 Social, economic and organisational characteristics of local communities 33 The strategies of social justice 40 Planning places 43 Community participation and governance 47 Conclusion: the durability of local communities of place and contact 50 Endnotes50 References50 3 Communities of Interest and Interaction Introduction: scales of community organisation and issues Cities as communities Regional communities National communities Supranational political communities Global communities

54 54 54 57 59 62 63

Integrating the many levels of community planning 65 Conclusions: mixed scanning for integrated community planning 68 Endnotes69 References70 4 Human Values and Community Goals 72 The place of values in planning72 Value formation 72 The value of prosperity 73 The value of liberty 75 The values of social justice 77 Values for sustainable communities and environments 81 Relations among community values 87 The impacts of prosperity 87 The impacts of liberty 89 Social justice impacts 90 The demands for sustainability 90 Conclusions: how values can combine to solve problems and shape creative plans 91 Endnotes92 References95 5 Ways and Means Introduction: the roles of art, science and craft in community planning Art and creativity in planning The creative roles of the written word Creating wholeness within new and existing communities The contributions of Christopher Alexander (1936–2022) Planning as a craft The four phases of planning The logic of scientific discovery Mistakes, problem-­solving and human and social progress Critical rationalist approach to planning Common ground between scientific and planning method

98 98 98 100 101 101 103 104 105 107 107 108

vi Contents

Planning as craft and applied science 109 Political control and community participation117 Conclusions: values-­based methods for value fulfilment 120 Endnotes120 References121 6 Activities and Actions 124 Introduction: the organisation of the chapter124 The relations among values, activities and land uses 124 The contributions of systems thinking in managing activities 132 Activity systems analysis in practice 132 Conclusions: defining needs and exploring options for activity systems 137 Endnotes137 References138 7 Homes and Communities 140 Introduction: the contributions of shelter to family and community life 140 Challenges of population change in meeting global and local needs for shelter140 Impacts and contributions of changing technology 143 Funding shelter 145 Balancing demands with supply for shelter153 Conclusions: future directions for shelter 156 Endnotes156 References159 8 Facets of Community 162 Introduction and organisation of the chapter162 Levels and justifications for community intervention 162 The planning and organisation of work 164 Education: the place of learning in community life and development 171 The planning and delivery of health services176 Conclusion: the many facets of community181 Endnotes181 References183

9 Places, Spaces and Community Design 185 Introduction: organisation of the chapter 185 Places and their properties 185 Communal, collective and private places and spaces 190 The language of design and the vocabulary of space and place 196 Place-­making: designing to make life 200 City shapes 204 Conclusion: bringing places to life 211 Endnotes211 References212 10 Community Governance and Participation Introduction: intentions and organisation of the chapter214 Governance, government and community participation 214 Roles and responsibilities in governance and participation 215 Issues of freedom and order 222 The roles of negotiation and partnership in resolving conflicts 227 The development and evaluation of policies, proposals and community initiatives 227 Service activities of local government 230 Scales of community and their roles in governance and control 235 Conclusion: the contributions of participation and governance to community life 238 Endnotes240 References243 11 Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 246 Introduction: organisation and intentions of the chapter 246 Themes, roles and future directions: inclusion, negotiation, adaptation and invention 246 The future of community planning 250 Endnotes254 References255 Index257

 

Preface In the decade since the publication of the first edition of this book as Community Planning: Integrating Social and Physical Environments, reasons to plan for the social, economic and physical wellbeing of communities have multiplied at a remarkable rate. These changes include the rapid growth of urban populations, the increased levels and urgency of global migration, the threats posed to established environments by disasters of flood and fire triggered by climate change, the problems of health, work and travel resulting from mutating pandemics and the collapse of consensus and confidence in democratically elected governments in many societies throughout the world. All of these demand better and more effective ways to plan and manage community life, and the scales of these needs range from the local to the supranational. Community planning has never been more challenging nor more needed. This second edition is therefore designed to meet the needs not only of students of urban and regional planning, but also of practitioners and activists in the wide range of activities making up community life, including housing, health, education, transport, design and governance. In the contemporary world of increasing interaction, none of these activities can be satisfactorily planned in isolation. Running through the whole book are the twin themes of planning to fulfil human values and to advance personal and community inclusion. The role of human values is essential to provide secure and stable foundations for reaching valid decisions in a world where rapid changes in ideas, technology, politics and policies are dominating the fields of health, productivity, well-­being and prosperity and powerfully impacting contemporary community life. Values-­ based community planning can offer reliable methods to shape the necessary well-­informed choices, while involving both long established and recently arrived members and fellow citizens in developing these shared futures. Planning approaches explored throughout this book therefore link widely acknowledged values, goals and objectives to appropriate activities to shape desired future outcomes and environments. In times when rising standards of education are increasing the levels and intensity of public debates, widespread social inclusion, which has

always been politically and morally desirable, is also becoming practically essential. A further theme running throughout the book is the need for mixed scanning to understand and integrate the mix of scales of both place and time to promote realistic and responsible community life. In times when instantaneous global communications and unprecedented rates of untested innovations demand systematic evaluation, mixed scanning, comparing impacts at local and wider scales and over immediate and long-­ term time horizons, has become esssential for good planning and decision making. Successive chapters consider these themes. Chapter 1, Problems and Promises of Community Life, reviews the promises, problems, trends and influences shaping contemporary community life. In Chapter 2, The Life of Local Communities, their evolution, characteristics and current challenges are considered both in the developed nations of North America, Europe and Australia, and throughout the world. Chapter  3, Communities of Interest and Interaction, extends these discussions to include the increasingly significant communities of interest emerging at urban, regional, national, supranational and even global scales. The central issues of the driving values of community life, transcending time and place, and including prosperity, justice, liberty and sustainability are explored in Chapter 4, Human Values and Community Goals. This leads on to the discussions, in Chapter 5, Ways and Means, of the contributions of values of art, craft and science to developing creative, inclusive and practical planning methods. The application of these methods to the key activities of housing, health, work, education and movement follows in Chapters 6–8. The overarching fields of both design and politics are critical to the effective delivery of sound and imaginative plans for all of these activities. Chapter 9, Places, Spaces, and Community Design, reviews and explains the challenges and methods of placemaking at scales from the neighbourhood to the metropolitan region, illustrated by examples drawn from classical, historical and contemporary contexts. The crucial issues of social inclusion, devolution, accountability and governance are examined in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation. Finally, Chapter  11, Conclusions, Community Planning Today

viii Preface

and Tomorrow, summarises the book’s themes and identifies the major contributions that community planning can make at scales ranging from the daily experience of the neighbourhood to the increasing impacts of the global community. The overall intention of the book is to encourage and empower readers to play ever more effective roles in shaping

beneficial lives for individuals and communities at many scales. Phil Heywood Brisbane April 2023

Acknowledgements Of all stages of writing, acknowledgements are among the most satisfying. There are major psychological rewards in recollecting and recording the contributions of family, friends and associates whose assistance has shaped much of the life and form of the work, recalling the many moments of illumination, intellectual companionship, good advice and thoughtful encouragement which have been shared over the years. First thanks are due to the friends and colleagues whose ideas and insights have made major contributions to my thinking. To John Taylor and Jon Allison, organisers and companions of numerous explorations through towns, cities, countryside and the worlds of ideas go my deep appreciation of their enquiring minds and reflective and creative spirits. To the late Ian Crowther, accomplished regional planner, I am grateful for a lifetime of friendship and examples of practical goodwill and idealism. Chris Buckley, most enlightened of planning practitioners and a good companion on planning delegations to Timor Loro S’ae and on urban rambles and explorations around South east Queensland, has provided a heartening example over many decades of how a clear mind and a good heart can combine to make a better world. I am equally grateful for the examples set by Fiona Caniglia and Vanessa Bennett, whose insight, flair and skills of community development and policy formation continue to advance social inclusion throughout these times of rapid change. Appreciation and thanks are also due to generations of students and community activists in England, Nigeria and Australia for their energy and imagination. They have not only enriched my teaching and work in community development but also contributed greatly to the ideas to be found in this book. The overall scope, logic and writing of both editions have benefitted from the generous time and commentary of a number of family members, friends and colleagues, who have reviewed numerous drafts of chapters and sections. Between them, my wife Sheila and daughters Lucy and Eileen have read every word of both original and revised texts and have applied their knowledge of the fields of community health and policy, social development, problem solving and appreciative inquiry to improve its relevance. Lucy has read numerous drafts and provided invaluable insights

on all chapters, particularly concerning the strong bonds that should link community planning and her own field of community development. Eileen’s keen insights have kept me alerted to the crucial questions of what matters now. The advice of my old colleague, Peter Roberts, Founding Director of the United Kingdom’s Homes and Communities Academy, combining empathy and insight, proved invaluable in clarifying intentions and structure. Anna Hassett, Anne and Brian Hudson and Laurel Johnson have provided valuable commentary at different times and on many aspects. Several others have made particular contributions of knowledge and research. My lifelong friend, John Leatherdale, has kept me up to date with recent developments in English Neighbourhood Planning. David Cant, founding CEO of the Brisbane Housing Company, has not only assisted with commentary, information and photographs for the chapter on Homes and Communities, but also provided an inspiring example through his energetic leadership of that organization from 2003 to 2018. Landscape Architect John Mongard’s trail-­ blazing work on place making throughout Australia has helped inform much of the content and many of the illustrations of Chapters 4, Human Values and Community Goals, and 9, Place, Space and Community Design. Thanks also go to my son-­in-­ law Dean Saffron for his photographic skills. The talented contributions made by Jessica Chatwin, Justine Lacey, Mark Conlan, and Sherry She to research, analysis and presentation of information for the 1st edition, remain invaluable, transforming sketchy ideas and information into clear diagrams and figures. In addition, Wiley and I are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: John Mongard Landscape Architects (JMLA) for   Figure  4.2 Planting Day at Bingara’s Living Classroom. Figure 4.3. The Living Classroom in its rural setting. Figure 9.14, Tolga Village Enhancement: new street signage and historic fig tree; Figure  9.15, Tinaroo Community Plan, showing village centre, lake front access and conservation and revegetation areas; Figure  9.16 Community planning workshop with local residents;

x Acknowledgements

Figure  9.17, Creating a culture of appreciation: Atherton community sculptures, plan and vistas; to the Brisbane Housing Company for Figure 7.1 Conversion of former Richlands High School teaching block for 26 affordable rental dwellings, with small front garden spaces, nearing completion, 2009. Figure  7.2 Rear view with patio garden spaces, conversion of former Richlands High School teaching block for 26 affordable rental dwellings, nearing completion, 2009 Figure  7.3 Earnshaw Haven, single-­ storey, medium-­density affordable rental dwellings, with small back garden spaces Figure  7.4 Tony and Judy, affordable housing residents at one of BHC’s inner-­ Brisbane high-­ density, mixed-­tenure rental complexes Figure  7.5  Hartopp Street apartment block, communal landscaped interior garden space high-­ density medium-­rise affordable rental dwellings Figure  7.6  Hartopp Street interior of two-­ bedroom apartment block, high-­density, medium-­ rise, affordable rental dwellings Figure  7.7  Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, 12 storey, affordable rental apartment block,

interior of one-­ bedroom apartment, with view towards city centre. Figure  7.8  Masters Street, Newstead inner city apartment block under construction with city centre in background Figure 7.9, Fitzgibbon outer suburban green field site previously owned by Queensland Housing being developed for mixed rental and purchase medium-­ priced and affordable dwellings, using 2008 Commonwealth Fiscal Stimulus funding; John Hill and Creative Commons for Figure 9.7, The Acropolis, and 9.10, The Jewish Memorial Museum in Berlin. and to Catherine Oakley for Figures 9.8, Alhambra Palace and 9.9, Court of the Lions. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to Todd Green, Executive Editor, and his colleagues Amy Odum, Kelly Gomez, Monica Chandra Sekar and Jeevaghan Devapal in the editorial and production staff at Wiley, whose insight and guidance have made the revision and writing of this extensively updated 2nd edition both constructive and rewarding. Phil Heywood, Brisbane, April 2023

1

Promises and Problems of Community Life

Introduction: the organisation of the chapter Part One, Current Cascades of Change, examines the ways that a number of accelerating social and economic factors are creating insistent needs for more imaginative and effective community planning. These pressures include:

• accelerating

innovations in information and communications; • economic fluctuations; • expanding transport technologies; • radical administrative reorganisation; • major political change; • destabilised international relations; • changing mindsets: increasing relativism and loss of intellectual self-­confidence. Part Two, Community Life and Change, relates these challenges to contemporary community life and outlines potential planning responses. Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Community Structure and Change, delves into differing interpretations of the nature of communities based on the competing priorities of order, productivity, control and cooperation. Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration, reviews how these themes illuminate the ways that people and organisations can cooperate in planning their communities and leads to Conclusions applying these roles to the practices of collaborative planning.

Part One, Current Cascades of Change The justification for planning today extends beyond the age-­old desire to create a better world. New urgency is being injected by threats to our continued security as a successful and sociable species posed by increasingly volatile conditions Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

in the physical, economic and political environments. Because the best solutions to many of these challenges are themselves contested, finding solutions will demand inclusive discussions to shape new agreements concerning values, actions and distribution of costs and benefits. Coordinated responses will have to match and manage impacts resulting from a wide range of powerful drivers, including climate change triggering spiralling environmental instability; increased personal and social mobility; economic uncertainty; impacts of technological change; globalisation of production and information exchange; and most recently, the spiralling impacts of mutating global pandemics. Coherent and responsive planning is also needed to ensure that the solution to one problem does not come at the cost of creating unmanageable impacts on others.i Because sustainable solutions in free societies must ultimately be built upon communication and collaboration, planning to meet these challenges should involve bringing together not only various technical experts, service providers and business interests but also community members and leaders. This is true across the world  – as much, for instance, in the flood-­ prone villages of the Sundarbans of the Ganges delta, as in the socially and ethnically divided communities of inner c­ ities throughout the ‘rust belt’ areas of the United States and England’s industrial north (Ghosh 2004; Leeds University School of Sociology and Social Policy 2019; Haldane 2021). components of  change

The last four decades can be viewed as a period of widespread accelerated change, or ‘punctuated equilibrium’ during which a number of very rapid transformations have coincided and interacted to create revolutionary situations across numerous systems (Gould  1988). These global trends have exerted potent impacts on the everyday lives of local communities. In the physical environment, climate change is producing threatening rises in sea levels, exerting far-­ reaching and mounting effects on coastal systems in low-­lying areas and

2

Planning for Community

affecting ecosystems, crop production, human health, freshwater resources and settlement safety and planning (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  2014; Flannery  2020; National Aero Space Administration (NASA) 2021). Economically, the cumulative over consumption and production that resulted in the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis are producing continuing instability. In politics, the massive global shifts in the balance of power triggered by the end of the cold war are creating continuing instability and mass flights of refugees from places such as Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan, seeking refuge throughout the world. In human health, the Covid-­19 pandemic has resulted worldwide in nearly 15  million deaths (World Health Organisation  2022), restricted social interaction and discouraged previous trends towards high-­ density concentrations of living and work spaces. These converging crises in our physical, social and economic environments pose challenging questions for community life and planning worldwide. Earlier fears concerning border wars between Western and Communist power blocks in Europe, America and Africa have been re-­ ignited by new crises of invasions of bordering countries by continental powers, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and constantly repeated claims by mainland China over the territory of Taiwan. Escalating local riots, reprisals and killings in communities throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas add to the sense that new, more inclusive approaches are needed to enable communities to live together in harmony with each other and with their neighbours. Earlier fears of a new ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) have been renewed by rising tides of international terrorism and global competition between the USA and China, and the European Union and Russia. As a result, in times of unprecedented physical mastery and invention, humanity is stalked by escalating threats of disasters resulting from failures to collaborate in the face of external changes or even to coexist in cooperative communities, locally, regionally, nationally or globally. Solutions will require not only continued innovation but also improved collaboration at all scales of community, which often involves challenging mutual adjustment. Where widespread frustration, anger and social resentments flare among people having to face disruptions to their accustomed patterns of life, policy making and leadership will be required to recognise, manage and assuage these reactions. People will need help and tools to adjust their traditional lifestyles to accommodate

the ‘shock of the new’. Prominent among the roles required of sensitive and sustainable community planning will be assistance to individuals and communities to identify and manage changes that may seem to arrive without adequate warning or fully understood causes. In each of a number of arenas, discussed below, the forces of entropy, pulling things apart, will have to be matched by conscious integration to hold them together.ii In such situations, communities of all scales will need to develop their capacities to interpret rapidly changing conditions; to agree collaborative responses to radically changing circumstances; and to evaluate options for unintended consequences  –  in short, to plan. accelerating innovation in  information and communications

Remarkable recent advances in information and communications technology (ICT) have made the contemporary world a place of instant and universal communication and greatly expanded the potential scale of communities of association. Consequences, both benign and damaging, have been widespread and far reaching. On the positive side, ‘Glocal’ awareness, transcending communities of place, is stimulating widely occurring and loosely linked initiatives. These include carbon reduction schemes adopted by many individuals, local communities and governments throughout developed countries (see, for example, ­Australian Government Department of Energy, Science, Industry and Resources  2021; lcarb  2022; Transition Towns 2022). Such networks of environmental and social activism are also making good use of instantaneous internet and email links to assemble powerful coalitions of public, political and media opinion formers to champion or oppose actions on global issues. One such campaign in the early years of this century successfully contested the proposed extension by the World Trade Organization of the global financial market into critical fields such as local land ownership (Monbiot 2004).iii Both local and larger-­ scale initiatives can be influential. Where contact is daily and direct, communities remain more intensively linked, but where they are widespread and open-­ edged to draw in newcomers, they frequently become even more influential and may transcend boundaries to help bolster actions in remote local societies. For instance, in the United Kingdom, these have given rise to the development and advocacy of new strategies to help cope with the impacts of global environmental change on food, water and



energy systems and security worldwide and in advancing the role of science and research networks in a wide range of issues (Environmental Change Institute 2022). However, potentially negative impacts of instant global communications are at least as significant. They include manipulation of social media platforms to interfere in the elections and political lives of targeted countries and regimes; the rampant spread of worldwide movements promoting hate speech and misinformation and the ultimately even more serious threat of the use of mass surveillance techniques by repressive governments to destroy the civil rights and personal freedom of their own citizens. Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, which gave rise to a Congressional investigation, made use of the global reach and proneness to manipulation of social media, using the latest developments in global communications (Wikipedia 2022). Equally damaging on a more general, less targeted basis is the use of these same media to promote conspiracy theories and hate speech, associated with the worldwide ‘Alt Right’ movement (Grinnell College 2022). Ultimately, most serious of all is the rapidly expanding capacity of mass surveillance to subject every moment of individuals’ lives to the scrutiny of potentially repressive governments. The People’s Republic of China, for instance, is currently introducing a system of social rewards and punishments based on the evidence of compliance with state policies as indicated by the results of this kind of surveillance (Human Rights Watch  2022; CBN News  2019). Active community advocacy and empowerment at all scales are needed to ensure that prudent regulations prevent the latest developments in communications technology from being used to fuel such abuses. Now, more than ever, the price of individual freedom will be eternal vigilance over abuses of centralised power. economic fluctuations

Economics has become one of the most contested fields of knowledge and interpretation in the lives of local communities. The prevailing view of the mid-­twentieth century that mixed and managed economies could and should balance demand and supply to produce full employment and avoid inflation (Galbraith  1972) was challenged by the militant ideas of supply-­ side economics associated with monetarist theorists like Milton Friedman (1968,  2008). Arguing that ‘a rising tide will float all boats’ the monetarists advocated prioritising aggregate economic growth over working

Promises and Problems of Community Life

3

to promote individual wellbeing and just distributions of wealth. That orthodoxy has now itself been challenged by the effects of prolonged world economic recessions and bouts of massive localised unemployment, triggered by financial crises and global pandemics. In mixed economies where recurrent government funds and credibility are required to bolster private sector financial institutions and transactions, opportunities may also arise for well-­organised communities to play larger roles in shaping their own destinies. In the wake of pandemics and spasms of the global economic system, support from central government funding can be channelled to tackle local problems like shortage of affordable housing and to stimulate local economies to combat future challenges. Another example of the potential to use economic levers to achieve beneficial results – in this case, at the scale of the global community – comes from the 2021 Rome Summit of the G20 group of the world’s most economically developed nations, which committed all members to ambitious programmes to combat climate change, apply taxation incentives, increase development aid and promote anti-­pandemic vaccination – all requiring concerted action by or with communities at a variety of scales from the local to the global (Guardian 2021a). expanding transport technologies of  sea and air

Movement of goods and people is also undergoing dramatic change. The container revolution of the last 40 years both revolutionised the spatial patterns of port cities throughout the world and advanced the international division of labour by promoting routine long-­distance exchange of manufactured products. From Baltimore and San Francisco to London and Rotterdam, dock locations moved downstream to new deep-­water locations, freeing large swathes of old central area docklands for new commercial and residential development, and often triggering gentrification in their neighbouring communities. International airports have also recently gone through dramatic phases of development, rationalised by concepts such as the Aviopolis and the Aerotropolis (Kasarda 2009). These developments have seen very large and often privatised airport expansions in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and London. They have become major elements of the regional settlement pattern and increasingly significant centres of employment. Many have also generated new regional shopping centres and large direct factory outlets (DFOs), which compete with established

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Planning for Community

metropolitan shopping centres, resulting in disruption of regional transport systems and daily spasms of major traffic congestion. At the same time, their noise and traffic impacts have caused often bitter conflicts over proposals for new runways, flight paths and night-­time curfews. Prior to restrictions imposed by the spread of Covid-­19, international trade and travel were binding together global networks ever more securely by stamping out such giant footprints in key locations across metropolitan regions, often on the fringes of long-­established urban and rural communities. As the prospect of recurrent and constantly mutating global pandemics restricts the attractions and ease of international movement that had reached their peak in the first two decades of this century, the continued growth of these related developments appears increasingly uncertain. Careful community consultation and planning will be required to negotiate sustainable outcomes. These will have to balance the needs and concerns of existing local and regional communities with the uncertain future of spaces originally dedicated to unlimited expansion of supersonic communications. Community planning can make important contributions to the management of these impacts and spaces, and these are discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation. major political change

In many places, the established order has been splintering and re-­forming. Centralised and polit­ ically regulated command economies, such as the Communist regimes of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, have failed, due as much to internal rigidities and inefficiencies as to external competition. Meanwhile, in the market and mixed economies of the West, Monetarist attempts to maximise profits by replacing political decision by market mechanisms have often resulted in severe disparities of wealth, social injustices and macro-­ economic spasms, making market capacities for self-­regulation and social efficiency look increasingly questionable (Monbiot  2004; Pinketty  2019). Throughout democracies, mixed economy mechanisms developed in the last century by Keynes are again being widely advocated and adopted in current times of economic uncertainty and are increasingly re-­emerging as the most satisfactory way to combine economic efficiency with social justice. However, even within such balanced regimes, sectionalism, fragmentation and populism have disrupted the established mid-­twentieth-­century order of a fraternal Left in constructive dialogue

and debate with a freedom-­ seeking Right. The cause of representative democracy itself has ebbed and flowed, advancing in Europe and Latin America, scarcely holding its own in the face of the repeated challenges of populism in much of North America and throughout Asia, and collapsing in many parts of Africa. Meanwhile, in the rapidly growing number of new ‘millionaire’ cities (with populations of more than one million) that now accommodate a third of the world’s population (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018), local and regional systems of governance have struggled to meet the demands and manage the impacts of rapid urbanisation or to produce effective systems of urban management. They have been constantly haunted by the spectre of militant and self-­entitled populism that poses threats of degeneration into autocracy, whether in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, the ­Philippines, or the USA. impacts of  destabilised international relations

International relations have also exerted powerful impacts on the lives of local communities. The collapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes ended the cold war’s icy deadlock between communism and capitalism, which had dominated international relations for much of the twentieth century. However, a brief ‘new world order’ of economic and military dominance by the USA was scarcely proclaimed before it was violently challenged by a potent combination of international terrorism, resurgent Russian nationalism and Chinese global ambitions. In Africa, the tragic conflicts of the early 1990s between Hutus and Tutsis in Ruanda and Burundi unleashed waves of ethnic violence that continued more than two decades later to challenge community life across central Africa, extending into the Congo Basin. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU has worked hard to minimise or contain long-­standing inter-­communal hostilities in the Balkans and build new continental solidarity but is now having to face serious challenges from resurgent Russian militarism. Outbreaks of bitter inter-­communal violence have occurred in all parts of the world  –  among Serbs and Bosnians in Europe; Russians and Chechnyans in the Caucasus region; Han Chinese and the local Uiger and Tibetan peoples in Xian Jiang and Tibet; left-­and right-­wing groups in Latin America; militarists, democrats and ethnic minorities in Myanmar; Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, the Caucuses, Sulawesi and Timor Loro Sae; and most recently between Russia and its western neighbours in the Ukraine. Meanwhile, in this fracturing and



conflict-­ridden situation of an unstable and multipolar world, the United Nations has found itself challenged to maintain its global roles of reconciliation, negotiation and leadership. The inescapable bonds between global and local communities, daily demonstrated by the mounting instability that results from political and military repression and the effects of climate change, are beyond the current capacities of any single national government to control or resolve. As a result, waves of refugees are being driven across borders, continents and oceans, to compound the challenges facing community planning in neighbouring and host regions throughout the world (Dantas et al. 2021). The evidence that, for good or ill, we are all, individually and communally ‘members one of another’, presents the most vivid challenges and opportunities for community planning at all scales. Local and regional communities have essential and creative roles to play in planning and shaping solutions. changing mindsets

The scope and effectiveness of our actions are much influenced by the mindsets and philosophical assumptions of our times. For three millennia, in the western world, there have been well-­differentiated philosophical arguments among the great traditions of idealism, rationalism and empiricism. Meanwhile, in the East, Buddhist and Daoist contemplation have provided alternatives to Confucian pragmatism. Both sets of ideas have recently been radically challenged by a welter of assertive new ideas of the late twentieth century, conveniently labelled ‘Post Structuralism’. ‘Deconstruction’ has become a favourite debating technique and ‘Meta narratives’ a potent challenge.iv Nevertheless, as the air clears, it becomes apparent that the long-­standing Western traditions of empiricism (of knowledge through experience), idealism (the power of original thought and communication), and rationalism (the checking out of ideas against observations) are all alive and vigorous. They are of great, often decisive, importance for the way that societies choose to shape the lives and forms of their communities. Empiricism thrives in the arguments of the American Pragmatists who continue to assert the experience that ‘handsome is as handsome does’ and that ‘mental knives are what won’t cut real bread’ (James, in Passmore 1980). In development planning, this often results in policies that focus on immediate, tangible and available rewards and outcomes rather than pursuing underlying values or considering long term consequences. Immediate

Promises and Problems of Community Life

5

material solutions like urban freeways and airport shopping complexes are often favoured, not delving deeper to weigh the underlying values or interests that are being served. Elsewhere, the contrasting contributions of values and ideas have been maintained in the neo-­ idealism of European thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who employ paradox and contradiction to question conventional empiri­ cal interpretations and power relations (Foucault 1963,  1972,  1980,  1981) and ‘deconstruct’ received truths (Derrida  1976,  1993,  1995) in order to pursue such values as social justice, equity and diversity. In this, they find common ground with critical rationalist theorists like Karl Popper (1972) in justifying values-­based problem-­solving and questioning approaches to activities such  as community planning, though their style is often very different, relying on paradox rather than deductive logic. Socially engaged Critical Rationalists span contrasting streams of the logics of scientific discovery and social progress. They provide a powerful and persuasive explanation of both scientific method and social engineering to justify the technological optimism of the mid-­twentieth century, postulating an upward spiral of individual problem recognition, conjecture, refutation and re-­ hypothesising, that is very relevant to community planning  –  see ­Chapter  5, Ways and Means (Popper 1972; Magee 1973). On the other hand, the more idealist Frankfurt School of Critical Method emphasises the importance, not only of individual values, interests and hypotheses but also of interaction amongst individuals to create communicative action (Habermas 1987) also involving recognition of the rights of others (Honneth 2022). As a result, they advocate the crucial roles of discussion, recognition and exchange among equally privileged participants around a notional ‘policy table’, whereby both knowledge and proposals for action can be resolved in open exchange among interested parties. They term this process Communicative Action (Habermas 1971, 1987, Habermas et al. 1996). This leads them to advocate both general and specific approaches to community planning, which range from participatory processes involving recurrent discussions around actual tables to the conservation and creation of new physical public open spaces to promote opportunities for continuing community debate to enable the reality of community participation. Together, these two wings of Critical Rationalism – the individual and the communicative – provide an effective basis for problem-­ solving and inclusive community planning.

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Planning for Community

These ideas can be related to concepts, programmes and choices of action in everyday life. American Pragmatism (Passmore  1980) emerges as the champion of material mastery and physical evidence, advancing and celebrating both mass production and individual consumption. One variant of this view has served to generate such widespread material and individualist outcomes as high-­ capacity freeway systems, low-­ density suburbs, walled estates and patrolled shopping centres, favoured and justified on the basis that they promote material progress and serve individual preferences. There are other, more theoretical contributions that Pragmatism has to offer:

• recognising the importance of improving material living conditions; and justifying evidence-­ based policy; and • respect for the evidence of people’s recorded choices and commitment to confirming popular support for programmes and proposals in regular democratic elections.

• developing

Critical Rationalism, associated with Karl Popper (1947, 1972, 1989), places such ideas within a social context and emphasises progressive problem-­ solving to keep pace with the inevitable effects of social and physical changes and challenges. Potential contributions to community planning include:

• practical

and purposeful approaches to social change; • encouraging people to question existing situations, voice individual opinions and test ideas in open challenge; • encouragement of all members of pluralist societies to be part of continuing social debates. This approach, discussed further in Chapter  5, Ways and Means, generates inclusive, cyclical and open-­ended methods that allow communities to contribute to planning to meet the continually emerging new challenges of current times. Communicative Action places methods of individual problem-­solving within their social context. A number of distinctive characteristics of life in the twenty-­ first century favour this ‘communicative turn in planning theory’ (Healey  2007). These include:

• the global reach of universal and instantaneous

communications; worldwide spread of education and know­ledge; and • the insistent demands of previously excluded groups to have their interests taken into account in allocating opportunities and resources.

• the

Communicative Action is therefore particularly relevant to contemporary community planning and has a number of important contributions to make, including:

• a

coherent and convincing rationale for community engagement; • a powerful and fertile source of objectives  – through participation and discussion – to guide the process; • inclusion of community members in information collection and review; • insights into key aspects  –  such as the importance and role of specific public spaces and structures; • diminishing mounting dangers of excluded dissidents and unrecognised groups developing resentments against those seen as parts of an oppressive establishment or a ‘deep state’. Contemporary philosophical thought, encompassing contending views of meaning, method and purpose can be harnessed to make valid contributions to the similarly wide field of community planning. Insights can be obtained into the wide range of values and beliefs prevalent in our diverse communities. Unexpected situations can be matched and understood by recognising their underlying values and concepts to help shape acceptable and appropriate solutions. Innovative problem-­ solving, employing the active involvement of energetic individuals, can be encouraged and integrated. People’s innate capacities for communication can be harnessed in festivals, discussion groups, speakers’ corners and the potentially democratic and inclusive conversations of the internet. Rather than a confusing babble of personal insights, contemporary philosophy can be interpreted as an enriching symphonic performance, combining many different themes and instruments, each with its own distinctive contribution.

Part Two, Community Life and Change administrative reorganisation

Community administration, too, has experienced great changes. While new technologies of transport and production have been increasing the scale of business, tax revolts and commercially dominated mass media have been advocating the advantages of smaller government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). The appropriate balance between public interest and market-­driven development is increasingly contested, and community governance is experiencing



great pressures and undergoing significant challenges (Pinketty  2013). These uncertainties are now being compounded by the mounting impacts of climate change and the needs for government and voluntary sector leadership in managing the spreading difficulties posed by recurrent mutations of ­Covid-­19. Fresh attention is being focussed on planned and decentralised forms of settlement and governance. A parallel revival of interest in the distributive capacities of regional planning and support for the growth of secondary centres has resulted from the difficulties of congestion and liveability associated with the growing scale of urban settlement in recent times (Roberts  2014). In the European Community, this has taken the form of support for decentralisation, infusing new life into existing communities by injecting funds from above (Balchin et al. 1999). Even the awkward departure of Britain from the European Community can be seen as a much-­ improved alternative to the resort to violence and war formerly practiced by ­European powers for over a millennium whenever they have failed to resolve such misunderstandings and differences peacefully. Elsewhere, in the USA’s Oregon and Canada’s British Columbia, top-­ down principles have been combined with bottom-­up participation to create regional governments with strong planning and implementation powers (Heywood 1997). The many challenges and collapses faced by the ‘economy of risk’ of recent decades may well prompt more collaborative attitudes of the private sector towards public participation in economic management, resulting in resumed and reinforced roles for governments and communities in public administration. Such alliances between communities and government, as those being promoted by the UK’s Homes and Communities Agency, for instance, could become far more significant in the next few years. One example is Manchester Place, a partnership between Manchester City Council and the government’s Homes and Communities Agency that aims to speed up the supply of new homes across the city, by combining Manchester City Corporation’s planning programme with national government support and commercial investment and development (Place North West  2015). More recently, in Australia, City Deals are a partnership between the three levels of national, state and local government and communities to work towards shared visions for productive and liveable cities. The aim is to align planning, investment and governance to accelerate growth and job creation, stimulate urban renewal and promote economic

Promises and Problems of Community Life

7

reform. The 2021 City Deal for Brisbane, for instance, included a sum of $A3  million for a new indigenous art centre (Australian Government, Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development  2022). In housing, too, the private sector is generally demonstrating active interest in providing affordable housing across Australia in return for Commonwealth government support (AHURI 2022).

Contemporary challenges to community life Communities consist of groups of people who experience and acknowledge significant links, expec­ tations and responsibilities towards each other. They do not need to be neighbours, but they do need to share neighbourly feelings that may be based on shared spaces, interests or realms of interaction. Nevertheless, ‘community’ may mean different things at different scales and to different people. ‘Friendly association’ is the most all-­ embracing of its many meanings, encompassing such alternatives as ‘all the people in a particular district’, ‘a group of people living together as a smaller social unit within a larger one’ and ‘ownership and participation in common’. Friendly association both promotes and is in turn promoted by community life. Through the self-­ expression that links people and groups, personal energies can be combined to create communities and cities and maintain their infrastructure of roads, aqueducts and ultimately global communications systems. Through collaboration in production, art, science and technology, settlements that benefit from friendly association and shared values can gain the strength and capacity to transform their environments into places of lasting achievement and beauty. Though there are different views as to whether cities originated through enforced association within containing walls or through cooperation based on mutual aid (Kropotkin  1939), it is clear that at different times, both may have been involved and that their recent rapid growth to accommodate more than half of all humanity (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs  2018) has depended in part on networks of association, exchange and collaboration. These are most sustainable where they are voluntary, mutually advantageous and pleasurable. Depictions by their artists of the life of very early cities of more than 3000 years ago, like Heraklion and Akhetaton, are full of scenes of people singing and dancing together (Desroche-­Noblecourt 1976), just as paintings of medieval cities like Lorenzetti’s

8

Planning for Community

Figure 1.1  Lorinzetti’s allegory of good government. Source: Ambrogio Lorenzetti / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

‘Vision of Good Government’ and ‘Vision of Bad Government’ in the thirteenth-­century Siena show repeated acts of quiet neighbourliness and mutual appreciation (see Figure 1.1). Nevertheless, even the most successful cities and communities inevitably bring people into enforced and sometimes unwanted contact with others who do not share their original culture, interests, religion or even language. City life also creates situations where fear, hostility or exploitation can create conflict or the subjugation of whole groups as servants, serfs or slaves. Communities where friendly association has been lost may become dangerous places where vulnerable individuals and groups suffer random assault or systematic exploitation. As a result, the fostering of community life to support and sustain healthy societies requires careful planning and management that will involve choices and decisions about which values and interests will be pursued. These may vary from decisions, for instance, to adopt the elaborate caste systems of traditional Hindu society (Naipaul 1979) or to develop more voluntary networks like those advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and practiced by the craftsmen and artisans of medieval and Renaissance Tuscany (Heywood 1904; Putnam 1993; Hibbert 1979). The early decades of the current millennium present particularly acute challenges to the invaluable role of communities as places where change can be assimilated and the shock of the new absorbed into a continually re-­adjusted balance. Challenging conflicts of communal beliefs and interests have been fostered by the increased individual mobility and personal power of the modern era. These influences have, in turn, been amplified by the global reach of mass media, publicising the attractions of the

world’s prosperous regions to the most remote corners of all continents. Flights from war, persecution, famine and the increasing likelihood of enforced mass migrations resulting from sea level rises caused by global warming may involve many hundreds of thousands – and even millions – of people worldwide, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the creation of vibrant and inclusive new communities (Dantas et al. 2021). We are thus facing a future where the capacity of communities to integrate newcomers will become even more essential. current trends

Tools and capacities to build such inclusive new communities have been much assisted by developments of mass education and technological reach throughout the twentieth century, climaxing, as we have seen, in the digital revolution of the cell phone with its instantaneous access to the global internet. Most societies now aim to provide some sort of formal primary education for their children. The universal reach of global communications has brought informal education to every village, however poor or remote. Individuals in all parts of the world now have the confidence and the capacity to communicate their ideas, needs and aims with each other and with power holders. As a result, we are experiencing the potential for education to become a major focus and growth point for community life at all scales. An encouraging special case of this is the re-­shaping of the two-­millennia-­ old role of public libraries to become welcoming hubs for community inclusion in local and global information systems, dedicated to providing access for otherwise isolated individuals to a universe of information and knowledge.

failing and thriving communities

By contrast, vivid failures to manage or accept cultural diversity peacefully and positively are all too common. Cases like the Los Angeles’ 1992 riots, Serbian extermination camps during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, Ruandan massacres of 1994–1996, those in Mumbai in 1993 and 2008, Russia’s First and Second Chechen Wars of 1994–1996 and 2004–2006 and the Sydney anti-­migrant riots in 2007  have become recurrent themes of contemporary life (Robertson 1999; Wikipedia 2014). More recently, police shootings and deaths in custody of African Americans in the USA, black citizens in England and indigenous people in Australia, contributing to the world-­wide Black Lives Matter movement, are a daily reminder of the need for more inclusive community planning (Black Lives Matter 2021). The plight of the Myanmar Rohingya, Karen and other ethnic communities in that country is a further daily reminder of the toxic and often fatal consequences of situations where community understanding and tolerance have been allowed to break down or be overthrown by military regimes. Thousands of individuals and families suffer, and no one benefits (Concern Worldwide US  2021). In such situations, the global stakes for community building are very high. Less dramatic but more widespread achievements of cooperation and mutual aid help to balance such failures of community life. Examples such as the Mondragon Workers Cooperatives, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank (see Boxes  1.2 and 1.3) and the international community development schemes of organisations like Oxfam, World Vision and World Bicycle Relief have brought increased personal autonomy and essential physical and social resources such as clean water, education and personal mobility to countless small communities throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. Because human societies depend upon harnessing skill, ingenuity and creative talent in networks of exchange and development, the long-­ term imperatives of cooperation and voluntary collaboration have always reasserted themselves, overcoming and outlasting explosions of violence and conflict. Individual prosperity and fulfilment ultimately rely on these networks of trust, which in their turn rest upon the friendly associations of community life. These collaborative realities have great significance for community planning. Interpersonal and ‘bottom-­up’ methods of developing policies and plans are equally effective and more durable and resilient than ‘top-­down’ and imposed ones.

Promises and Problems of Community Life

9

Model societies in the spirit of such social ‘Guardians’ as Plato (1980), More (1516/1965), Marx and Engels (1846, 1990), and Skinner (1974) have all failed or never even achieved introduction. In his seminal book The Open Society and its Enemies (1947, 1998), Karl Popper has related the repressive failings of closed communities to their unwillingness to acknowledge and integrate the knowledge and experience of their members into discussions of consensual future directions. They thus become caught in a vicious cycle of repression, resentment, resistance and rejection. If, on the other hand, people are motivated and enabled to negotiate with each other, policies will become more widely and securely based and better informed. These psychological bases of community life have been explored by the celebrated twentieth-­ century planning theorist, Jane Jacobs (1961,  1969, 1985, 1992, 2004), in a series of books spanning five decades from the 1960s to the 1990s of the new century. In her 1992 book Systems of Survival, she argues that humans have evolved as ‘dealers’ far more apt to develop robust systems of mutual advantage than are the ‘guardians’ who see it as their prerogative to lay down rules to regulate the behaviour of their fellow citizens. Jacobs’ ideas powerfully support the methods of ‘Collaborative Planning’ (Healey 2006) that are currently emerging to replace the now superseded ‘Systems Thinking’ of the mid-­twentieth century (Chadwick 1969; McLoughlin 1971). Such systems planners often created descriptive models of great scope and explanatory power, but then slid over into the error of assuming that ‘is’ implies ‘ought’. As a result, they saw themselves as appointed experts with responsibilities to project current trends into the future. This frequently led them to advocate such consequential and often devastating innovations as land-­use transportation systems designed around massive urban freeways capable of accommodating the traffic flows indicated by their surveys and projections, relying on current private car use for journeys to and from work. Such Trend Planning took no note of community interests and concerns about housing demolition, environmental pollution, economic distributional effects or alternative more responsive ways of managing projected journeys to work flows (Heywood 1974). contributions of  collaborative planning

By contrast, there are many positive examples of the contributions that collaborative community planning can make to promote the life of flourishing

10

Planning for Community

cities and regions. These include, for example, schemes of local community development, microcredit to assist economic development in previously struggling communities; and worker participation in management. One deceptively modest example of local community development can be found in the City Farm and Community Gardens movement by which environmental activists in cities across the world are reintroducing the restorative effects of contact with nature to often underprivileged inner-­city communities ranging from metropolitan London to the suburbs of Dili in Timor Loro S’ae.

Box 1.1 presents one such example in the heart of London, one of the world’s most intensively developed cities. Box  1.2 illustrates how community energy and mutual trust can offer the social collateral to provide microcredit to relieve the isolation of the ‘poorest of the poor’ originating in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most impoverished countries. Box  1.3 describes how the collaborative management of the Mondragon Workers Cooperative has assisted a previously marginalised minority community to achieve prosperity since its establishment in 1956, continuing to the present day.

Box 1.1  Surrey Docks City Farm The aim of city farms like Surrey Docks, in the heart of inner London, is to involve local people and environmental activists in land care, food production and animal husbandry. City farms are areas of repose, centres for conservation of natural life and places for reconnecting with nature to balance the intensity of modern city life. They depend upon support from their local communities, often providing out-­of-­curriculum activities for local schools and youth clubs and, in turn, relying upon the services of local volunteers. In 2008, there were no fewer than 15 of them in London, all members of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, a national scale network (Mayor of London 2008). Surrey Docks City Farm is one of the smallest and most central, occupying two acres of an old docks site at the northern tip of the Rotherhithe peninsula, immediately across the Thames from the towering bulk of the 75-­storey Canary Wharf and the spreading mass of London’s new international office precinct of Docklands. The farm was originally founded in 1975 by Hilary Peters, who recalls that The dreadful alienation of people in the abandoned docks wasn’t just the result of unemployment. They were alienated from themselves, each other and their surroundings. When I started to dig the silt and graze my goats and poultry in Surrey Docks, I was surprised by the urgency with which everyone wanted to join in . . . People who had never related to anyone or anything started to relate to animals. The farm grew due to people who recognized that it met some buried need in them (McConnachie/Peters 2009) Now the farm is run by Surrey Docks Farm Provident Association, involving schools, businesses, youth organisations and volunteers of all ages including a blacksmith/artist, who work on site every day, providing farm equipment, art objects and continuing interest. It is a focus for local community life, the site of recurrent fairs and festivals, and its café is a regular stopping-­off point for walkers and cyclists travelling along the Thameside Path. The small site is densely used and includes in the words of Hilary Peters: ‘fields for grazing, a vegetable patch along the river, a herb garden, a compost area, a duck pond, a wild life patch, at least one yurt, a willow walk housing the bee hives, . . . an orchard full of geese and sculpture. The blacksmith does extremely inventive work with local children collecting the grot off the river beach and making recycled portraits of the farm’s animals’ (McConnachie/Peters 2009). Although frequently small and very local in their organisation and links, these city farms contribute significantly to making inner cities physically attractive, interesting, socially inclusive and open hearted. Many readers will immediately associate this story with similar community organisations and spaces in their own or nearby cities. Such places and groups express well how community life and organisations can help people take possession of their own living areas and lives in ways that welcome all others who also want, in whatever ways, to contribute.



Promises and Problems of Community Life

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Box 1.2  Microcredit from Bangladesh to the world At the end of its bloody war of independence in 1972, when Bangladesh emerged as independent but one of the world’s poorest nations, Mohamed Yunus returned from the USA, where he had been teaching as a professor of economics. Depressed by the inability of academic theories to explain or redress the cycle of poverty in which chronic debt trapped most of the country’s population of more than 100 million people, he experimented, by making 42 small loans totalling US$ 27 in a nearby village (Bornstein 1997). Based on the success of this initiative in enabling the recipients to work and trade their way out of debt and poverty, he developed a general approach to micro-­credit, in which the traditional financial collateral demanded by banks, which the poor do not have, was replaced by social collateral, which their daily lives and mutual knowledge provide in abundance (Yunus 1998). Over a period of four years, he and his colleagues organised the Grameen or ‘Seed’ Bank of small local groups linked to form centres of about 30 members, in turn joined district branches each serving 60 centres (Fuglesang and Chandler 1993). The bank’s success depends upon hard work, small sums of money, accountability and respect for human dignity. Because it lends to ‘the poorest of the poor’ who are used to tight budgeting and relies on weekly meetings to decide on loans and collect repayments, the bank has always enjoyed an excellent repayment rate, which is currently running at 98%. Its workers must spend two-­thirds of their time travelling to villages and participating in weekly branch meetings of local members. Its lending has grown in 50 years to over US$ 7.59 billion to over 7 million members (over 97% of them formerly impoverished women) organised in 1.2 million groups (Grameen Bank 2022). By the end of the century, the movement had spread to include partner organisations in 20 different countries on all six continents and is still growing with recent branches being opened in S­ henzhen, China (Grameen Trust  2022). The achievements of the Grameen Bank are widely celebrated. Mahomed Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Bank has gained an international architecture award for its contribution to improved rural housing, and the construction of over six hundred thousand homes has also been financed. Grameen Phone, Grameen Knitwear (a weaver’s cooperative) and Grameen Health Care Services have been formed to use the excess funds contributed by members after they have finished repaying their loans. ­Grameen Phone has transformed the former rural isolation of the country by having one or more ‘telephone ladies’ with a mobile phone, able to reach any resident in any of the 83,000 villages where there are groups (Grameen Communications 2022). By the turn of the century, the Grameen Bank started to look worldwide, aiming to reach a hundred million of the world’s poorest families, especially women, by providing credit for self-­ employment and other financial and business services, in pursuit of the basic aims of:

• reaching the poorest; • reaching women; • building financially self-­sufficient institutions; • ensuring impact on the lives of clients and their families. The bank continues to expand in many directions: upwards to influence the policies of the World Bank to support Micro-­ credit; downwards to make its members more self-­ sufficient, in enterprises like Grameen Knitwear and Healthcare Service; and sideways to establish over 2600 branches with nine million borrowers throughout Bangladesh, and with no fewer than 150 national branches spreading throughout all six continents (Grameen Bank 2022).

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Planning for Community

Box 1.3  Worker and community self-­management in Spain The Mondragon Workers Cooperative (now the Mondragon Corporation) is a notable example of the power of creative ideas and cooperation to transform unsatisfactory and unjust economic and physical conditions. In the early 1940s, Father Jose Arizmendi, emerging from one of Franco’s prisons, founded a democratically managed polytechnic school and began to explore cooperative ideas as an alternative to avoid each of the repressive excesses of the dictatorship then ruling Spain, the rigid and unproductive standardisation of Stalin’s Soviet Russia and the social inequities of contemporary capitalism, which had produced the mass unemployment of the 1930s. In 1956, five unemployed graduates of the Polytechnic pooled their savings and joined with him to establish the basis for a workers cooperative. ULGOR became the first in the network of cooperatives, producing white goods and domestic appliances, which happened to be the items with which they had industrial experience (Whyte and Whyte 1988). ULGOR was an immediate success and by the early 1960s had grown into a network of enterprises comprising over 3000 worker partners. All members have a financial stake in their work places, which is bought out if they leave, so that only the workers can own the enterprises. Control of the factories and appointments of senior management are made by means of works councils with all workers as voting members, appointing and sharing power with plant managers. By 2022, the original network had grown to include 95 enterprises with over 80,000 member owners and become Spain’s largest producer of white goods, with the highest worker productivity of any Spanish enterprise (Mondragon Corporation 2022). The Contract of Association stipulates that not less than 10% of the profits must go to community and social services of schools, colleges, health insurance, clinics and research institutes. These ‘second degree’ co-­operatives are governed by representatives of the factory co-­ops. Wage differentials, originally fixed at a ratio 1 : 3, have since been expanded to 1 : 6 – a small fraction of that obtaining in most market economies – in order to ensure that the co-­op network retains its pool of highly talented and energetic young managers and technical experts, to keep it competitive in times of very rapid technological and economic change, as Spain successfully adjusts to membership of the mainstream European Community. Because membership confers the automatic right to a job, the global re-­structuring of employment due to the automation of the 1980s and 1990s posed particularly sharp challenges to the co-­ops. Employment growth slowed, and remuneration fell for the first time to about the average elsewhere in Spanish industry. Employment levels, however, remained at 100%. This achievement of consensual decision-­taking in the Workers Councils, involved creative innovation by management and rational choices by members to accept reduced wages to stay competitive. The Co-­op starts new enterprises with groups of people who are friends, and sees the natural bonds of friendship as a building block for successful ventures, echoing the definition of community as ‘friendly association’ with which we started this section. Its successful application of radical social and economic ideas is assisting traditional communities to thrive in their home settings and to maintain deeply valued heritages of language, culture and economic autonomy, which elsewhere in the Basque region have been expressed in acts of sometimes violent social dissent.

Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Community Structure and Change In both developed and developing countries, current challenges of rapid change and conflict are testing to breaking point long-­established assumptions about the purposes and processes of community life (Diamond 2005; Ridley 1997; Pilger 1992). Increasingly bitter inter-­communal and inter-­caste

clashes over conflicting religious beliefs and economic interests raise insistent questions about the effectiveness and directions of prevailing social policy. More inclusive, better-­informed and more responsive community planning can provide valid solutions. Such practical applications require a sound and widely accepted theoretical basis to help understand and interpret the character, development and working methods of community organisation. To what extent, then, should the primary aims of such communities be establishing



and maintaining order; promoting productivity; ensuring class control; or establishing a framework for communication and mutual learning? This section briefly explores these four competing accounts of the nature of community life, based on contrasting and competing major aims:

• Order: genetically derived dominance. • Productivity and exchange: prosperity through market competition. through conflict: equality imposed through struggle. • Collaboration: through negotiation, adjustment and mutual aid.

• Control

order: genetically derived dominance

In exploring the purposes and organisation of human communities, one prime consideration may be the essential nature of their members. No ideas have influenced thinking on these matters more than the evolutionary ones of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley (Desmond and Moore  1991; Darwin  2008) who argued that evolution and ­ indeed all life was regulated by a natural order imposed by the survival of the fittest, as driven by randomly produced new mutations.v This theory was rapidly applied by the influential school of ‘Social Darwinists’ to champion the promotion of unregulated competition in the political and economic lives of communities, suggesting that communities would advance best by promoting ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Ridley 1997; Constitutional Rights Foundation 2021). Darwin’s friend Thomas Carlyle, for instance propounded a ‘Great Man’ view in which history was shaped by dominant leaders. He condemned the democratic Chartist movement of the 1840s as ‘this bitter discontent grown fierce and mad’ and argued instead for Machiavellian motivation of natural leaders to maximise the worth of their territories and therefore the wellbeing of the communities which constituted them (Desmond and Moore 1991). These ideas were further advanced by later doctrines of ‘Man and Superman’ proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Twentieth-­ century experience has cast dark shadows across the capacity of such unconstrained dominance to achieve lasting social progress. The German cultural tradition stalled under Hitler; Spain and Portugal suffered socially and stagnated economically under Franco and Salazar; and Mussolini’s regime proved disastrous for Italy, climaxing in his corpse being torn limb from limb by a vengeful crowd in Milan in 1944. Currently, the military regime in Myanmar has perpetrated social

Promises and Problems of Community Life

13

injustice, political autocracy, economic penury and multiple ethnic conflicts. As a result of these many excesses and failures, Social Darwinism has lost appeal as a basis for community life in free societies (Ridley  1997). Sociologists and ethnologists have tended to turn more to the mutual aid theories of thinkers like Kropotkin (1939, p.  60), who argued that admitting that swiftness, strength, cunning and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, making the individual or the species, the fittest under certain conditions, we maintain that under any . . . circumstances, sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Nevertheless, lasting subconscious effects of Social Darwinism have influenced many of the explanatory ideas of twentieth-­century urban sociology and economics. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, for instance, Park et al. (1925) and their colleagues in the Chicago School of Urban Sociology developed ideas of urban processes resulting from endless struggles for space and resources. The new urban communities were seen as being continually reshaped by the dynamic of externally driven economic investment and technological change, giving rise to waves of renewal rippling outwards through concentric zones of uniform development. As the city grew, the high-­ intensity commercial core expanded to redevelop the surrounding environmentally blighted ‘zone in transition’, sending further ripples of redevelopment through the successive rings of inner-­ residential suburbs, zones of working men’s housing and outer fringes of low-­ cost accommodation. The language adopted to describe this process, ‘invasion and succession’, reflected ­Darwinian ideas of competitive evolution: one group was invading the territory of another and succeeding to its ownership. Later, Martin Anderson (1964) and Jane Jacobs (1961) described how these forces were able to annex the powers of city and federal governments, using instruments of ‘eminent domain’ to acquire land compulsorily and speed the process of economic appropriation. The dominant elites of the ‘property machine’ (Ambrose and Colenutt  1975) and the ‘growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch  1987) claimed to be acting in the best interests of the whole urban community. It is not surprising that opposing schools of Marxist urbanists discussed later, developed the counter-­ interpretation of class conflict. Twentieth-­ century developments in genetics both reinforced and modified these ideas of the sociobiology of communities (Wilson  1992). Richard Dawkins argued that human evolution ­ was driven by the struggle of the ‘selfish gene’ to dominate over the competing genes of others of its

14

Planning for Community

own species (Dawkins 1976, 1988, 2009). Although he discounted the ability of human beings to rationally control these drives in the interests of cooperative success and survival, he argued that in the drive to promote our own genes we will support siblings and others within our own communities having some common genetic material. These interpretations may seem to explain some of the collapses of community life and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the end of the twentieth century, where groups of individuals of shared ancestry seemed to have combined to attack and exterminate neighbours alongside whom they had been living more or less peacefully for decades in Bosnia, Rwanda and northern Nigeria. However, closer examination often identifies other economic and environmental factors, which more satisfactorily explain the patterns of violence and social disintegration. Diamond (2005) argues that the economic scarcity had stretched these communities’ capacities for cooperation to breaking point so that in Rwanda, a survivor explained, ‘the people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs’ irrespective of whether they were Hutu or Tutsi (Diamond 2005). However, it is not only in such marginalised and stressed communities that evolutionary biology has offered explanations or influenced social organisation. The cult of the outstanding business leader and the unique gladiatorial sportsperson (both rewarded with annual salaries of many tens of millions of dollars a year) has reached new heights in the current century with figures such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg exploring pathways to unconstrained global dominance. At the national political scale, it may take the form of the personalised cult of the initially charismatic or populist political figure, such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the United States, the Duterte family in the Philippines and Putin in Russia. Dire consequences always result for countless local and regional communities and individuals. It is a model not to be welcomed at any scale of community. impacts on  community planning and management

Community planning doctrines of urban order through the imposition of such dominant power relations have influenced development throughout many metropolitan communities, often making use of physical planning controls that introduce segregated and walled residential estates and tourist facilities, recreational and shopping centres and theme parks, frequently patrolled by private security staff and closed to local access or use. In the

twentieth century, in Los Angeles County and elsewhere in the USA ‘cities by contract’ were incorporated as local governments where the wealthy gathered to isolate themselves, making no contribution to the upkeep of the social needs of the wider metropolis (Miller 1981), were incorporated as local governments where the wealthy gathered to isolate themselves, making no contribution to the upkeep of the social needs of the wider metropolis. Such communities suffered from being both provocative and vulnerable to attacks from the excluded workers on whom they depended, and Miller accurately forecast Los Angeles’ 1992 urban riots a decade before they occurred. In the twenty-­first century, the United States continues to be ravaged by such conflicts, which have occurred in many cities in recent years, including Washington, Portland and Minneapolis. In 2021, violent support for the superficially anti-­ establishment rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump, by a group of armed militants believing themselves to be disadvantaged, took the USA to the brink of an armed coup. Community Planning adopts the altogether different position that people’s views of what is right and ought to be done can and should shape what will become the future reality of their lives in communities created by intention and maintained by participation. Nevertheless, there are some positive and important contributions that the scientific core of genetic science can make to community planning. By establishing the role of the deeply inscribed structures of genomes and individual DNA in deciding individuals’ innate characteristics and competences, genetic science reinforces the arguments of thinkers as diverse as Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky that human beings are not infinitely malleable and therefore able to adapt to any conditions which planners or the market might think fit to provide (Popper  1972; Chomsky  1972,  1992; Lyons 1970, 1991). Their deep-­seated competences and values should be respected as valid guides to objectives in planning for communities and settlements, rather than being subjected to attempts at moulding by behavioural conditioning. It is not the science, but the selective interpretation of genetic theory that makes its determinism so faulty. productivity and exchange: neoliberal freedom and minimally constrained competition

A different model of individualism more appropriate to a productive society than the social dominance of a caste ‘born to rule’ emerged from the combination of the humanism of the Enlightenment



and the physical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. More open meritocracies replaced closed aristocracies. Thinkers as different as John Locke, Adam Smith Jeremy Bentham and Ralph Emerson sought to expand the scope of individual freedom, and the rapidly growing manufacturing communities proved a fertile soil for these ideas, where people of talent could work and trade their way into success or even pre-­eminence, and therefore, it was argued, confer advantages on the whole community. Competition was seen as the road to progress and choice. However, in many pioneer industrial nations, this domination by market economics and the unprecedented social and physical mobility of the twentieth century combined to create rapidly assembled communities afflicted by alienation, insecurity and great disparities of wealth and living conditions (Williams  1973). There were few controls over technological innovations, which often introduced potent new developments appropriated by affluent investors but exerting powerful, unhealthy and destructive environmental impacts of disruption and pollution on vulnerable workers and their families. By the mid-­ twentieth century, urban motorways, a potent symbol of a society always on the move, rapidly replaced long-­established systems of public transport of trams and trains. Well-­established existing inner-­city communities were often obliterated by broad swathes of such new roads and associated cloverleaf connectors. Mass-­ produced high-­ rise public housing, sometimes fuelled by corrupt contracts, ignored people’s needs for human contact, convenience and family life (Jephcott  1971; ­Heywood 1974; Booker 1980). In the United States, the ‘Federal Bulldozer’ flattened inner city ghettos without opening up the new suburbs to Blacks or Latinos (Davidoff and Gold 1970). The assumption that, given choice, people would create the communities that they wanted through market preference foundered on grossly unequal incomes and the reality of self-­maintaining class systems and institutionalised racism. By the second half of the twentieth century, the cumulative and often unregulated impacts of neoliberal permissive planning were afflicting community life in cities throughout the Western world, generating massive pollution, destroying settled neighbourhoods and their green spaces and often failing to achieve well-­distributed social benefits from new-­found material affluence. Then, in the opening years of the new millennium, environmental, economic and political effects began to create internal contradictions and encounter global limits

Promises and Problems of Community Life

15

in the form of the triple disasters of climate change, financial collapse and mounting urban terrorism. Another of the potent impacts of neoliberal doctrines on community planning has been the extrapolation of its inherent materialism to justify the belief that human behaviour is largely shaped by material conditions and that values can very rapidly be moulded by physical stimuli.vi This view has major community planning implications, including providing the rationale for standardised and mechanistic living environments, shopping centres arranged to suspend people’s critical faculties and manipulative abuses of public consultation. In their pursuit of perfect competition, productivity-­ driven policies have often created places for consumption without community and residential communities afflicted by almost intolerable sameness. It is a strange paradox that a view of society originally grounded in the desire to maximise personal choice should reach a stage where its proponents are using mass-­conditioning techniques to replace genuine human choosing. Another result has been pervasive privatisation. The view of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1991, that ‘There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and their families’ briefly became a self-­fulfilling prophecy (Works and Days  2021). The results in Britain were a retreat from community planning and the acceptance of polarisation between prosperous but repetitious, badly serviced and poorly coordinated suburbs in southern growth areas and devastated and alienated ones of contraction in declining parts of the north of the country, including South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Clydeside and Durham. The individualist competition of neoliberalism did nothing to provide the inclusion, direction and lively social dialogue that are needed to create healthy community life. progress through conflict

Given the failings of the imposed order and productivity-­driven views of community life, it is not surprising that an opposing school of Marxist urban theorists developed the alternative interpretation of class conflict, leading on to the imposition of a more just order. In this view, community life becomes the battleground in which Carlyle’s ‘great leaders’ and the system planners of the mid-­ twentieth century are alike reduced to mere puppets of underlying class struggles for control of the land, capital and labour that will actually decide who commands the means of production, who will pay and who will benefit.

16

Planning for Community

Community problems and controversies are likewise seen as local expressions of national and international scale contradictions resulting from the exploitation of labour by capital, through the instruments of rentier landlords. Continuing into the mid-­1990s, the Marxist geographer and former Professor of Geography at Oxford University, David Harvey (1996) was arguing that resorting to the idea of community was a veil to disguise the potent and naked economic exploitation of labour by capital, and that ‘urban-­regional planners’ were the bailiffs and apologists of this process of adaptation and co-­option. Harvey illustrates his interpretation with an example of a notional situation where housing stress in an impoverished community is being tackled by advocates challenging planning designations and regulations. We can see this sort of coalition in action when large corporate interests in suburban locations join with civil rights groups in trying to break suburban zoning restrictions that exclude low wage populations from the suburbs (Harvey 1996, p. 181) Harvey’s Marxian interpretation leads him to re-­ interpret a victory for decent housing opportunities and social justice as part of a ‘coalition’ between civil rights groups and corporate interests that neither would recognise. It is highly possible that Harvey is making a direct reference (the circumstances are certainly very similar) to the celebrated and influential community action work of Paul and Linda Davidoff and their associate Newton Gold in the previous decades in establishing Suburban Action Inc in 1969 to fight, often successfully, against discrimination in housing throughout the more desirable outer suburbs of the USA. As both lawyers and planners, they arraigned zoning restrictions which effectively kept Blacks and Latinos out of these jurisdictions at the edges of the spreading new metropolitan areas, enjoying good job prospects and community facilities, as breaches of the second amendment to the USA’s Constitution, which guaranteed equality of opportunity (Davidoff and Gold 1970). While the Davidoffs’ struggles in the communities and courts and Harvey’s in the fields of theory-­ building are equally valid, the evidence is that activist commitment to pluralist evolution has proved more effective and relevant in bringing about beneficial social change. American society has integrated quite substantially in the last 40 years, and neighbourhoods are continuing to desegregate their housing; dozens of cities have Black and Latino

mayors and senior officers, and in 2008 and 2012, the country elected an African American President, who had come into politics by way of community development work in Chicago, one of the USA’s most stressed cities (Obama 2004, 2008, 2020). Meanwhile, in Russia and a number of East ­European countries, overtly Marxist–Leninist regimes that discounted community organisation and life in favour of wider class conflict and solidarity have been overthrown by their own people, to widespread relief (Bater 1984; Ascherson 1996).vii Of course, deeply humanitarian theorists like David Harvey would be the first to criticise and oppose such cruel and repressive regimes, but they could not point to other examples where dialectical materialism or conflict models of social development have produced better results. If we follow Popper’s argument (1989), that every theory deserves credence until it is falsified in practice, when it should be abandoned or modified, there is a clear conclusion. The criticism that community planning is, in reality, a veil worn by social apologists for continuing class exploitation is based on inadequate evidence and over-­ generalised interpretation which makes them, in Popper’s terms, ‘non-­ sense’ neither certainly true nor certainly false, but merely personal speculations, and these seem to be falsified by the accumulating evidence becoming available. One distinguished example of this revaluation is the early work of Manuel Castells (1977, 1983) and Gemma Vila (2014). Examining the actual evolution of urban and community life in Madrid in the closing years of Franco’s Fascist regime in Spain up to 1975, Castells observed the important role of community groups in shaping regime change from below (rather than by seizing the central organs of power from above as had been advocated by Lenin). Castells was himself involved in the Madrid Citizen’s Movement and it is this direct experience which allowed him to transform the abstract Marxist model into a practical understanding of how different groups negotiate with each other and evolve to match external changes and improve living conditions. What emerges is not so much a class conflict model of community life and social change as a group interaction version. It is significant that reviewing the situation 30 years later with the benefit of hindsight, Gemma Vila, Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, reaches a similar conclusion that in regional centres such as Barcelona, as well as Madrid, it was grassroots community movements which provided the impetus to install the current



democratic regime to replace the crumbling dictatorship bequeathed by Franco (Vila 2014). By denying the cooperative capacities of community life, the conflict theorists have justified regimes based on the crudest use of naked coercion and justified this by selective historical analysis. Dialectical materialists have found themselves caught in an iron cage of regressive causality of action and reaction of their own making, from which most of them cannot escape. If, for Margaret Thatcher, ‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’ (Works and Days 2021), for the conflict theorists, there is no such thing as community: only classes fighting to control the State. Well-­argued alternatives are available in the form of the roles played within the lives of communities by cooperation (Kropotkin 1939, 1974); by insightful deal-­doing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); and by celebration, play and trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000). In a similar way, the Australian State Governments’ Covid legislation of 2020 assisted people experiencing housing stress by protecting tenants from being evicted for rental arrears and making emergency housing available in newly empty motels and hotels in ways that had not been adopted before. As an example, the Western Australian Government rapidly adopted a Hotels with Heart pilot in which about 20 people sleeping rough were moved into Perth's Pan Pacific hotel to reduce the health risks for people experiencing homelessness. This was quickly expanded and widely emulated in other states and resulted in actually improving security of shelter for vulnerable people at a time that could have seen massive problems of increased homelessness and resultant increased possibilities of conditions favouring spread of the pandemic (Centre for Social Impact 2020). Progressive problem-­solving rather than top-­down structural change was bringing improvement. Pandemics afford good examples of the principle that in many situations, ‘No one is safe till everyone is safe’. Mixed economies are better placed to combine the dynamism of individual enterprise with the responsiveness of local empowerment than are centrally managed command economies. In summary, consigning responsibility for beneficial and effective community planning to national concentrations of power and control by centralised planning authorities is destined to produce solutions which are demonstrably worse than the local problems they were originally intended to resolve. Whether one looks to the well-­documented accounts of the terrible outcomes of this approach in Soviet era Russia (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1971, 2022)

Promises and Problems of Community Life

17

or the contemporary abuse of minority groups in Communist China (Leung 2010), Marxist centralisation and class domination emerge as a failed option for shaping humane, just and responsive community planning. In comparing conflict and collaborative models we should therefore look to their practical applications. Conflict models have proved far from libertarian; many have resulted in authoritarian, top-­ down and generally repressive urban and community regulation, failing to acknowledge the human determinants of community life. Under the general justification that it is ‘necessary to break many eggs to make a good omelette’, the pursuit of order and uniformity has often devastated the natural creativity of community life. In Stalin’s Russia, for instance, acquisition of the basic necessities of life became a daily challenge, and community life was driven underground and into the deprived outposts of the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ of prison camps (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1974) before the centralised authoritarian system was overthrown by internal rejection. Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution is now widely excoriated. The devastating effects of the imposed emptying of Cambodia’s towns into the ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge have caused lasting social damage (Bater  1984; ­Ridley  1997; Solzhenitsyn  1974; Pilger  1992). Currently, Muslim Uiger communities in Xian Jiang are being forcibly herded into retraining centres bearing unhappy resemblances to concentration camps to undergo re-­ education ordained by the dominantly Han Chinese Communist Government. Socially such communities create deprivation and alienation and physically the resulting places are regimented and marked by the standardised repetition of concentration camps (Guardian 2021b). Well-­ developed alternatives to such totalistic ‘solutions’ are available in the form of cooperative arrangements and roles within the lives of communities. These may take the form of collaborative activities (Kropotkin  1939,  1974); insightful deal-­ doing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); or celebration, play and trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000), all of which are discussed in the following section on Collaboration: through negotiation, adjustment and mutual aid.

The roles of communication and collaboration Recent developments in alternative dispute resolution aim to combine communication with collaboration. Once people find themselves talking with

18

Planning for Community

someone, there is always the tendency for them to be drawn into a dialogue that may modify and diminish the sharp edges of pure conflict. New creative solutions may emerge. These strong links between communication and collaboration are explored by Margerum (1999, 2002): mutual understanding provides both the motive and the capacity for people to work together. Conflict protagonists tend to dismiss communicative approaches as social therapy or diversionary tactics, while communicative activists tend to point to the wasteful character of social conflicts and the tendency for them to polarise complex situations into hostile camps that accentuate the worst characteristics of both sides. Communication involves not only expressive speakers but also active listeners and mutual recognition (Honneth  2022). Most communication contains an element of intended persuasion, where development and discussion can pave the way towards collaboration. Reciprocally, collaboration demands prior or simultaneous communication: people cannot work well together until they have discussed and agreed on purposes, activities, roles and rewards. However, it is clear that the two approaches are not identical: communication is about meaning and collaboration about action. It is worthwhile examining the role of each before combining them to consider collaborative planning as an integrated process. communication and community

The recent communicative turn in planning theory (Healey  1996,  2006) was anticipated by such earlier collaborations as those involved in actual and ideal communities ranging  from Plato’s Academy, and Anglo-­Saxon Folk Moots to More’s Utopia (Mumford 1961; More 1516/1965). The major twentieth-­ century theorist of Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas, points out (1990) that discussion plays an essential role in reaching valid interpretations and good policies, which emerge not so much from isolated individual thinkers but from the vigorous debate and winnowing of arguments that occur in free and critical discussion in open societies, preferably face to face. This basic role of communication in the evolution of settled societies is also supported by findings from archaeology, biology, linguistics and ethnology. The archaeologist and ethologist Richard Leakey argues that hunting and food gathering necessitated the use of vocal language, as did social organisation and the economy of food sharing. His conclusion is significant for community organisation and planning:

In a small hunter gatherer community, social rules, elaborated through language, produce a cohesion that would be impossible to produce in any other way (Leakey 1981) In making the link between communication, collaboration and social organisation so explicit, Leakey is leading us very far from abstract conflict and selfish gene theories. It appears that communication creates the conditions for the collaborative success of communities which may subsequently be modified by competition. Developing communication was thus basic to the evolution of the first human communities around half a million years ago. The earliest yet found, at Terra Amata on the slopes of Mount Boron overlooking the Mediterranean above Nice, and the Choukoutien caves, an hour’s drive south-­ west of Beijing, both offer evidence of highly organised community life, which must have depended on the transmission of experience and skills and their application in cooperative social activities (Leakey  1981). On the Terra Amata site, footings have been unearthed of a series of 11 large wicker work huts, each 12 by 6 m, constructed in successive years. Inside, there are the remains of domestic fires, animal prey and pigments for body painting. Excavations of the large cave site in Choukoutien have likewise unearthed many years of ceremonial burials, signifying highly organised and stable societies. Both these societies must have possessed communication skills to support patterned and productive community life. Fossil remains of skulls from these sites support this conclusion, containing much-­enlarged brain spaces for Broca’s area, which controls and coordinates the muscles of the tongue, mouth and lips and Wernicke’s area, which is responsible for the structure and sense of language, than those of earlier sites (Leakey 1981). This correlation suggests an upward spiral of improved language skills helping the development of elaborated social organisation. Leakey comments: Communicating with others, not just about practical affairs, but about feelings and fears  .  .  .  and the elaboration of a shared mythology produces a shared consciousness on the scale of the community. Language is without doubt an enormously powerful force holding together the intense social network that characterizes human existence (Leakey 1981) An equally significant role of communication is to alert society to impending threats. This



Promises and Problems of Community Life

provides the theme of Jared Diamond’s closely argued book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Diamond  2005). Diamond reviews a wide range of failed and successful societies in all six contents, spanning a time range reaching from several thousand years ago to the present. Many of his societies, like those of Easter Island and Norse Greenland, collapsed because they could not modify destructive practices or adapt to threatening environmental conditions. They were unscientific and conservative and generally excessively pious or narrow-­ minded. They were not thinking enough about their changing situations, and if they were, they were not discussing their ideas enough. Others, like Tokugawa Japan of the seventeenth century, though socially conservative, were energetically reviewing their situations and promoting policies to correct threatening problems like deforestation and overpopulation. Diamond specifically asks what lessons his many case studies have for modern societies. His conclusions focus around three principles:

• Investigate conditions and face the facts. • Recognise and review unintended consequences of current actions.

• Collaborate in social problem-­solving. Insofar as Diamond discusses competition, he regrets the role it played in amplifying unwise behaviour, like the erection of ever-­larger statues on Easter Island, the aim to rear more cattle in the declining climatic conditions of thirteenth-­century Greenland and the killing frenzies of Rwanda. His conclusions are that awareness, investigation and open communication are the keys to survival in times of external or internal threats or rapid change. These views on avoiding disasters are paralleled by those of Richard Florida on achieving economic success, when he argues (2005) that the ‘Creative Class’, on whose inventions and skills modern society increasingly depends, can only develop and thrive in mixed, diverse and experimental communities like those of inner-­city San Francisco, Greenwich Village in New  York, inner Austin, central Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Melbourne. These models, where communicative action supports collaboration, have great significance for community planning. community planning and communicative action

Progress towards valid social policy, according to Habermas (1990), should emerge from open and purposeful discussion, among people speaking from the knowledge and experience of their daily lives. These discussions can work across a

19

wide variety of scales and types of community. He favours such face-­to-­face debates and criticises the distanced and abstracted virtual discourses of the ‘system world’ of centralised administration and supply-­side economics. He argues that everyone, not only policy-­ makers but also local residents, have equal rights to be heard at the policy table, thus justifying public participation in community planning. He deprecates the traditional self-­ allocated role of the philosopher as commentator, as simultaneously servile and arrogant, preferring the more explicit and open advocacy of one’s own convictions. Though he accepts that action is the most important basis for knowledge, he relates this to the importance of ‘speech acts’, which are necessary to shape and coordinate much subsequent physical action. This argument both supports citizen participation and suggests how it might be implemented. These views have led Habermas to conduct repeated campaigns for abundant, lively and accessible public open spaces to promote the easy contact between people on which good social communication depends.

Applications of communication in community planning There are a number of more specific planning expressions and outcomes of this commitment to communication for community planning:

• Community

festivals, art and cultural events in public spaces to initiate, promote and communicate different community values, needs and strengths  –  helping communities to share and shape ideas and aims in events such as community forums, peer group discussions and workshops, public art, TV, radio and online discussion groups and talk-­back opportunities (Heywood 2018). • Neighbourhood Committees and Councils that take responsibility for neighbourhood communication, comment on development proposals and undertake specified communal functions, such as public parks, street closure, neighbourhood watch, and young people’s vacation activities (Ward  1973; Heywood  1989,  1997,  2018; Local Government New Zealand  2021; City of Portland, Office of Civic and Community Life 2021). • Focus and mixed interest groups  –  groups of volunteers and invitees with particular interest in specific topics who work together to produce aims, problems and solutions, in specific topics or for a particular planning area (Heywood 2018).

20

Planning for Community

• Advisory and reference groups, selected, elec­

ted or self-­ nominated to provide ongoing advice on matters referred to them, which may be based either on specific topics such as the needs of young people or historic buildings or on physical areas; these bodies can become ‘learning groups’, provided with resources to gain further information on the topics of concern to them, so that good policy can emerge from a combination of values and facts (see Norman Creek Case Study in Brisbane in Chapter 3, Communities of Interest). • Consultation kits: summaries of accessible and interestingly presented information, which can be provided to a large number of local organisations to promote discussions and responses that can make useful contributions to policy development (Queensland Human Rights Commission 2021). • Community Visioning, to promote reflection and speculation among a group about values, goals, fears and hopes to drive future strategic plans (Granicus 2021). • Design workshops and charettes: occasions at which local residents and other participants work together with planners, designers and others to produce draft schemes to fulfil their shared or negotiated aims (Heywood 2018). • Public meetings: publicised occasions open to all attendants but featuring specified speakers addressing identified topics, with opportunities provided for open questioning • Attitude Surveys, Community Preference Lists, Focus Groups and semi-­structured interviews –  statistically valid sample surveys to identify attitudes to specific issues to provide reliable guides to people’s felt problems and preferences (Mackay 2018; Voxco 2021). • Collaborative planning, involving local people and stakeholders with councils and other implementation agents (responsible, for example, for land use, social, transport and economic planning) in cycles of proposal, review and negotiation to produce schemes that command the required mixed ingredients (Forester  1999; Healey 2006). Another interesting aspect of the communicative turn in planning is the shift in consultation techniques from exclusive reliance on problem-­solving towards more positive approaches that involve individuals and groups thinking about past successful experiences and their intended visions for the future. Whereas problem-­solving Critical Rationalists tend to rely on extracting objectives

from people’s frustrated wants, the emphasis of Appreciative Inquiry is on searching for recognition of good experiences and positive values in people’s previous experiences (Hammond and Royal  1998). Not only does this enhance recognition and help to build participants’ self-­esteem and enlist their energies in the process of shaping beneficial change; it also identifies successful models and mechanisms that can be developed to help implement plans. Good cases can be made for both approaches. While problem-­solving is more radical and potentially comprehensive, bringing to light frustrated wants, appreciative inquiry can be more engaging, less threatening and is well suited to form part of ongoing community development and capacity building.

Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration The history of human collaboration is closely linked to the evolution of communication discussed in the earlier section on Communication and Community. Each has assisted the other. At the dawn of the species, more than three million years ago, one of the earliest archaeological findings shows the steps of a young hominim child preserved in the volcanic ash at Laetoli, south of the Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania, skipping her way around the heavier and more purposive paths of her parents, implying both cooperative family life and some level of communication to establish guidance and confidence (Leakey  1981, p.  57). Much later, when the first cities were being established around 4000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Tablets of Hammurabi both depict worlds where the strands of communication, cooperation and order were closely woven together to create societies capable of sustaining themselves across many centuries (Sandars 2006; Helle 2022). The Epic of Gilgamesh, in particular, affords a fascinating insight into the roles of collaboration between urban dwellers and mountain nomads and pastoralists in the building of the first Mesopotamian empires. lessons from  the mediterranean

Peter Kropotkin extends his belief in the basic role of cooperation throughout all evolution to apply specifically to human societies. Greatest progress, he argues, is made in phases when cooperation predominates, as in the development of the self-­ governing communes of the Central Italian city



states, which by 1300  ce had grown to number more than 80 (Toynbee, quoted in Mumford 1938, p. 69). Kropotkin’s view that the collaborative guild and civic arrangements of twelfth-­ century Italy promoted the later evolution of modern city life provides powerful support for Robert Putnam’s influential book Making Democracy Work (1993), on the roles of social capital in contemporary society. Putnam shows how the thriving continuation of these traditions of medieval and renaissance collaboration drew their strength from such celebrations and festivities as the Palio of Siena and the Ponte of Pisa, which continue to the present day. He argues that these, in turn, created the bases for the associational economies of the Central Italian towns and cities of Tuscany and Emilio Romagna with their networks and clusters of small, mutually supportive enterprises. These successful economies of the ‘Third Italy’ as well as the Mondragon Workers’ Management network of the Basque Region of Northern Spain provide significant examples of community cooperation (Cooke and Morgan 1998; Center for Popular Economics 2021). Through all of the vicissitudes of Italian and Spanish politics of the last century, their associational and collaborative economies have continued to foster significant innovation and productivity to achieve remarkably durable economic resilience and to sustain community life that is among the most celebrated models of contemporary social organisation (Cooke and Morgan 1998). These examples of the resilience of communities leveraging social cooperation to create widespread personal prosperity are particularly significant for ideas of collaborative planning (Healey 2006). Such associational economies have proven the Central Italian towns and cities of Tuscany and Emilio Romagna robust enough to survive in recurring periods of fractured control, spasmodic contractions and prevailing threats of foreign domination through such threats as the direct foreign investment (DFI) of the postmodern world. The paradox of splintering centres and coherent localities poses questions about why such regional economies succeeded within national regimes afflicted by ineffective and rigid central administrations. What are the social forces (the ‘social capital’) that hold such regional communities together? Robert Putnam (1993) argues that the social and economic successes of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia Romagna are due to their capacity to cooperate, fostered by the singing, dancing and civic performances that characterise their many festivals and social activities, which in turn build more social capital. This collaboration draws its energy from

Promises and Problems of Community Life

21

mutual understanding, reliance and exchange, which is expressed in art play and performance. It is then reinforced in the resulting cooperative production and employment.viii Later, in his 1997 book Bowling Alone Putnam goes on to lament the loss of these socially bonding activities in the USA of that decade. The problem has only grown more acute in the last 25 years, resulting in mass alienation and damaging intergroup hostilities. Clearly, community collaboration is itself a social product that in turn shapes economic and physical environments. This kind of guild and civic life also developed in northern Europe, particularly in the Baltic, Germany, Britain and the low countries, playing a significant role in the development of the ‘polder model’ of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Holland. Communal work established and maintained the canals and dykes and established the basis of trust that supported the development of the highly dynamic form of capitalism that continues to make Amsterdam and Rotterdam major centres of today’s global economy. In England, collaborative management of village commons and of the three-­field fallowing system that persisted until the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped build the democratic awareness that re-­emerged in a number of trailblazing British political reform movements in the course of the nineteenth century. Chartism, demanding annual parliaments and universal suffrage, was a major political issue from 1837 to 1848. The Cooperative Movement continued to grow in membership and scope from its foundation in 1844 until the present. Universal suffrage was achieved by stages with landmark legislation in 1867, 1918 and 1928 (Hamilton 1946; Hammond and ­Hammond 1978; Thompson 1980). Elsewhere, in the monsoon lands of southeast Asia, communal water and land management in Bali and New Guinea built strong cooperative institutions that have survived to the present (Ridley 1997; Suarja and Thyssen 2003; Diamond 2005). Many collaborative ideas underlying similar worker, housing and urban farm cooperatives can be traced back to roots in medieval and pre-­colonial notions of mutual aid.ix

Collaboration in practice In order to explore whether collaboration can still achieve practical outcomes in contemporary times, this section examines cases drawn from shelter, natural environment, place, access and production.

22

Planning for Community

shelter

Housing, which is one of the most basic pre-­ requisites of life in settled communities, combines the three critical elements of:

• grounding in the basic values of shelter, nur-

ture, procreation, play and learning; connections to many other social activities; • expense and complexity often beyond the scope of the unaided average individual.

• strong

As both an individual human need and a collective product, shelter is a promising candidate for collaborative planning and provision. There is anecdotal evidence that a number of early agricultural societies did indeed practice cooperative house building and planning with sites being approved by village elders for young newlyweds, and construction being assisted by working parties of friends and relations, rewarded by the staging of a subsequent feast.x Although the industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries replaced this by a dominant market in cheap mass housing, cooperative responses rapidly re-­ emerged. In the 1770s, in Britain’s industrialising West Midlands and West Yorkshire regions, groups of working men collaborated to form Terminating Building Societies whereby each agreed to contribute a fixed sum every month so that houses could be built, one by one, until every member had been accommodated in a home of their own (Garrett Holden  1970). When all land and houses had been paid for, the society terminated, but out of this successful social invention grew the ‘Permanent Building Society’ which has done so much to extend the ‘trust’ principle to bring home ownership within the reach of large proportions of the total population of many such advanced nations as the USA, Britain, Australia and Canada, who either own or are buying their own homes. This process has done much to transform classical capitalism into the ‘Welfare Capitalism’ that has managed to evolve and survive for over two centuries. A particular interest of this example is the illustration it provides of the ways in which cooperation in planning  and  roducing desired goods can coexist with market mechanisms in deciding their allocation and consumption. However, during the financial crash of 2007–2008, the cooperative machinery linking genuine borrowers to willing lenders temporarily broke down due to the competitive excesses of hedge funds and remote subprime portfolio operators. This resulted in ill-­ judged and unreflective lending policies leading to

a downward spiral of repayment failure, foreclosure, dispossession and competitive divestment. Much that could have been learnt from the ‘social collateral’ model of the microcredit movement had been ignored. Many leading commercial bankers had refused to support and even mocked microcredit when it was proposed to them as a means of providing grassroots security to the commercial banking system (Yunus 1998). By contrast, a number of highly successful and collaborative housing supply systems, discussed in Chapter 7, Homes and Communities, have been steadily developing and expanding for over a century in different countries throughout the world, including Community, Social, Public and Emergency Housing and Co-­ housing and Housing Cooperatives. natural environment

Nowhere is the injunction to ‘Think Global, Act Local!’ more imperative than in the sphere of the natural environment. There is a widespread recognition that the excesses of both competitive capitalism and command economy communism produce unsustainable degradation of the natural environment, which can best be redressed by programmes of action combining the principles of symbiosis and mutual aid with community organisation, cooperation and academic research (Suzuki and McConnell  2008; Kropotkin  1939). Collaborative interest groups have become very important environmental actors. In Britain, Foresters and Commoners Associations have historically enjoyed rights to the benefits, control and upkeep of the common land and forests that once constituted much of the total land area. In Britain, this spirit of local and personal stewardship has spread through organisations like the Ramblers Association (with over 100,000 members), the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and the Yorkshire Wildlife Preservation Trust to influence not only ideas and access but also land tenure and management. Such organisations influenced the designation, as early as 1949, of the country’s admirable system of national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, public rights of way, long-­distance footpaths and nature conservation areas, covering no less than 17% of the small and densely populated nation (Cullingworth  1976, p.  178). In the United States, a similar history has produced a remarkable system of even more spectacular National and State Parks, dating back to the trailblazing advocacy of the Audubon Society and Theodore Roosevelt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ranging from the Shenandoah National Park in



Alleghanies through the Yellowstone in the Rockies to the Yosemite and Crater Lake Parks in California and Oregon. Elsewhere, similar bodies work individually and in cooperation to promote environmental awareness and conservation, contesting habitat loss and promoting reforestation and wetland protection, in areas as remote as Russia’s Lake Baikal (Moscow Times  2020). In Australia, they also include local and regional ecological preservation societies and National Parks Associations and Landcare, Bushcare, Watercare, Dunecare and associated groups. Worldwide countless environmental action groups are involved, often combining community and academic bases. Increasing numbers of local associations, loosely organised into regional and international coalitions, are also taking action on matters such as carbon reduction to help safeguard global environmental health (for an English example, see, for instance, lcarb  2022). Making excellent use of modern ICT, these organisations aim to combine local action with wider-­scale advocacy to produce consciousness change that , in turn, will maintain the momentum of conservation. This international scale has now been greatly enhanced by the influential work and publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which have done much to drive the current worldwide campaigns to restrict global warming to 1.5 °C or less, by reducing carbon emissions resulting from continued reliance on fossil fuels. However, this target now looks less likely to be achieved following the limited success of the Glasgow Cop 26 meeting of governments in December 2021 to secure general agreement from developed nations either to restrict their own emissions by adopting more ambitious targets; or to agree to contribute to the costs that would be incurred by developing nations in adopting such specific targets by mid-­century; or to persuade very large ‘Second World’ emitters like India and China to set themselves significant reduction targets by this date (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2021). It is clear that the momentum of the global movement for environmental sustainability will have to continue to come from community-­ based groups at each of the local, national and global scales. Nowhere is the preference of governments to put immediate and short-­ term economic advantages ahead of long-­ term sustainability more dramatically illustrated than in the decade-­long refusal of the 2013–2022 Australian government to set specific 2030 carbon emission reduction targets. The now superseded decision that government made to postpone the

Promises and Problems of Community Life

23

target of achieving net zero carbon emissions by three decades to 2050  gave fresh currency to J.M. Keynes dictum that ‘In the long run, we are all dead’. This position has now been modified by the incoming 2022  Labor administration, which has set a target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030, following an election in which the successes of Greens and community-­ based Independent candidates (categorised as ‘Teals’ because of their combination of Green commitments with traditional ‘blue’ establishment backgrounds) resulted in a working majority for a new, more environmentally friendly Labor government (Rimmer 2022). place management

Collaboration is essential to the healthy life and effective creation and management of whole and satisfying places. This recognition inspired Ebenezer Howard’s ‘invention’ of the Garden City (Howard 1899, 1965; Moss Eckhardt 1973). Entitling his book Tomorrow: The Peaceful Path to Real Reform, he insisted that cooperative principles should be infused into every aspect of life and government in his proposed new ‘Garden Cities’. These were proposed to be the largest cooperatives ever developed up to that time, with memberships including all 32,000 people in their intended populations. Both Letchworth and Welwyn were launched and originally run by Garden City Companies, and it was Howard’s stated intention that all residents (who would be automatically members of the cooperative companies) would own all the land in perpetuity, pay modest rents for their dwellings, and spend the profits from the accumulating rental payments on job creation and environmental conservation. Peter Hall (2002, p.  95) quotes from previously unpublished writing of Howard’s The Vanishing Point of Landlord’s Rent, explaining that land values would flow back to the community, in order to: found pensions with liberty for our aged poor, now imprisoned in work houses, to banish despair and awaken hope in the breasts of those that have fallen; to silence the harsh voice of anger; and waken the soft notes of brotherhood and goodwill (quoted in Hall 2002, p. 95) Later, Howard came to propose that dwellings could be built by a variety of means, including people constructing their own homes with funds provided through Building, Friendly or Cooperative Societies or Trade Unions. The collaborative

24

Planning for Community

Garden City idea in its various expressions of new towns, garden suburbs, and cluster settlements within metropolitan regions has spread throughout the world and remains a powerful force to help humanity manage urban change in an era of unprecedented population growth and technological change. Parallel collaborative approaches to place-­ making as well as planning have followed apace. In the United States, Kevin Lynch’s wide-­ranging A Theory of Good City Form (1984), Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building (1979), the New Urbanism of Peter Calthorpe and Associates (1993,  2001) and Randolph Hester’s Designs for Ecological Democracy (2010) have laid out a wealth of paths to good place making based on community consultation and participation. In Britain, the highly influential Responsive Environments of Bentley (1985) based their design methods entirely on how users of existing and future spaces might respond to present and proposed features. Flying in the face of recent commercial pressures for privatised and socially segregated housing layouts, such ideas support a place-­making movement that aims to create interacting, sociable and cooperative communities. Their methods are also based on inclusion and cooperative social inquiry, like Enquiry by Design and Community Charettes. Later, in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design, another such method is explored in which the Australian Landscape Architect, John Mongard, makes use of the outcomes of series of community engagement Set up Shops to create highly successful place-­making strategies for country towns in a wide range of locations, ranging from Queensland’s Atherton Tableland through New South Wales New England Plateau to coastal communities in the island state of Tasmania (John Mongard Landscape Architects 2022). individual and collaborative forms of  movement and transport

Freedom of movement can be seen as both a deeply enshrined human value – going back to our origins as hunter–gatherers in the Eocene epoch of 20,000 years ago – and a continuing guarantee of personal liberty. Over the centuries, this has allowed serfs and their families to walk off their feudal master’s demesnes and seek work in the growing towns, factory workers to move between different towns in search of better jobs or skills and contemporary political, economic and disaster-­driven refugees to seek new lives in safer and more promising homes.

Such migrations extend to include internal migrations in contemporary industrialised societies, such as China and India (Hessler 2010).xi At the regional and metropolitan scales, public funding is required to maintain more recurrent forms of movement. Public transport systems are being extended to sustain social life in cities throughout the world, with notable examples in Bogota, Curitiba, Kolkata, London, Portland (Oregon), Toronto and Vancouver. These examples form part of a heartening and increasingly widespread pattern that may well be enhanced as the introduction of driverless cars makes more likely the formation of convoys of small movement capsules to replace the current recurring gridlock on dual 3 and 4-­lane motorways. No less important are the daily movements enlivening local communities. Small networks of parents throughout the world combine to organise ‘walking buses’ to take children to and from school safely, healthily and sociably. Local groups often organise community transport and car-­ pooling arrangements, and urban coalitions are campaigning for better public transport based on collaborative principles (Cervero  1998,  2009; 1000 Friends of Oregon 2022). collaboration in  production, exchange and economy

There are contending views on the conditions necessary for the creation of prosperity through surplus production. Marx saw wealth production as dependent on class control. Adam Smith discerned and advocated the ‘hidden hand’ of the laws of supply and demand, making possible the division of labour and specialisation of function. Kropotkin, Marshall, Keynes and Galbraith (1972) interpreted economics rather differently as the study of ways to achieve and maintain effective and rewarding community life and communal activity. In all these models, practical collaboration is crucial to maintain production and prosperity, though there is no agreement on the best ways to achieve that cooperation, whether through the discipline of competition, the imperative of control or the inducements of collaboration. Earlier in this chapter, we discussed the successful cooperative approach developed by the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (Mondragon Corporation 2022). It is this that most clearly distinguishes them from the more competitive, conflict and imposed order models of social organisation underlying both neoliberal capitalism and command economy communism (Whyte and Whyte  1988). While highly significant, this



model still remains a challenging exception in a world dominated by competitive venture capitalism, particularly ascendent in each of the world’s five most populous countries of China, India, the USA, Russia and Indonesia. The intention of the Mondragon Workers Cooperative and the ideas of its originator, Father Arizmendi, that such workers’ cooperatives should grow up inside capitalism and supersede it, are singularly compatible with the inclusive philosophy and upward spiralling approaches of community planning and development, distinguishing them from more competitive, conflict-­based and imposed order based models of social change of Neoliberalism and contemporary Chinese capitalism (Whyte and Whyte  1988; ­Friedman 2008; Hessler 2010). In such collaborative models, ownership, investment and credit arrangements can be introduced through transitional arrangements. A number of solutions are made possible by cooperative investment, incorporating the micro-­ credit principles of social collateral and personal responsibility of the Grameen Bank, discussed earlier. These are well suited to stimulate grassroots development and control. Now that many governments have acquired an increased degree of control over banks, following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, moves towards cooperative credit unions and societies can be further assisted and become increasingly important levers to increase the range of activities and tools available to empower grassroots community planning and development. These can build on existing organisations as diverse as the cooperatives established in the USA by the Office of Economic Opportunity within Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme of the 1960s; Spain’s Mondragon Corporation; Britain’s large and successful Cooperative Wholesale Society (160 years old in 2018); the worker-­owned British retail chain, the John Lewis Partnership; and the rapid growth of farmers’ markets and local bulk buying co-­ops which are springing up in communities throughout the world. There is every reason to promote such alliances between government, banks and communities to achieve productive local employment and control.

Conclusions attributes and definitions

In these early decades of the twenty-­ first century, both ‘community’ and ‘planning’ are words

Promises and Problems of Community Life

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saturated with significance, controversy and conflicting expectations. Ideas of community have graduated from being regarded as too nebulous for serious use, to being recognised as a valuable summary for many of the most important attributes of social life. Concepts of community have been extended to include both the links that people acknowledge with each other and the reciprocity that sustains healthy social life. Competing rationales are less convincing than ever before. Imposition of Law and Order is not enough because that can no longer be sustained without consent, as is demonstrated by the global impacts of both the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the ‘Me Too!’ movements for racial and gender equality and respect. Uncontrolled market competition has been shown to result in a race to the bottom levels of maldistribution and exploitation far more often than an ascent to new pinnacles of productivity. Unwelcome outcomes of repeated subordination of long-­ term sustainability to short-­ term profit-­ taking include poisoned environments and self-­ voted bonus payments to CEOs and senior managers of firms relying on government handouts after collapses caused by rash business decisions. The remaining major rationale for organising social relations  –  imposed order  –  arouses often heroic opposition from inside regimented and often militaristic regimes and widespread condemnation from societies practicing free speech. They continue to provide vivid examples of ‘how not to do it’ in the fields of politics and administration, none more so than in the military dictatorships of Myanmar and North Korea (Wikipedia  2021a,b). The collaborative basis of community life is thus supported not only by its own arguments of shared objectives and activities but also by the painful failures of alternative rationales of imposed order. ‘Planning’ is also a term that is emerging from the shadows of bureaucratic regimentation to enter the sunnier fields of human choice and intention. Spectacular new extensions of our capacities to control and shape physical environments and identify and develop renewable resources have reinforced recognition of inescapable needs to accept responsibility for the outcomes of our own actions. Rapid increases in human impacts on climate, water circulation, species habitats and fossil fuel extraction and use have further focussed attention on our growing abilities to anticipate and manage changing situations and the associated need to ‘think globally and act locally’ while weighing unintended consequences.

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Planning for Community

For all these reasons, planning is becoming a more widely accepted and welcomed means to involve whole communities in thinking about their futures and developing and adjusting feasible means to achieve desirable ends. Planning Charettes have evolved into Community Forums and Enquiries by Design. Planning courses in universities are now oversubscribed with talented young people seeking the tools to shape future societies to reflect their own worthwhile values and those of their fellow community members. Government departments compete to recruit planners to help develop purposive policies, implement community consultation and collaborate with others in community building and governance. The voluntary sector is also increasingly able and willing to play leading roles in developing collaborative community plans for whole sectors and communities. Most important of all, community groups and activists insist on making their voices heard, both to oppose schemes that threaten their values and interests and also to propose often comprehensive alternative approaches for their communities. In societies’ social dramas, planning has emerged from backstage roles of the prompter and makeup artist to a place on centre stage where events are enacted among players who must listen to each other and collaborate or face altogether losing control of roles and events.

and adapting to changed external conditions. In doing so, the activities of communication, consultation, participation and negotiation can play invaluable roles in identifying and achieving beneficial and sustainable outcomes. Humanity’s needs for contact and communication have been vividly demonstrated amidst the Covid-­ 19 global pandemic, both by the rapid adoption and development of distance-­conquering innovations like Zoom and Teams conferences and discussions and also by people’s very evident yearning to resume more direct face-­to-­face connections for work and play, with families, friends and colleagues. Contrasting the imaginative outcomes that can be achieved from inclusive methods of community planning with those that emerge from more conformist and exclusionary ones clearly indicates the advantages of collaborative planning. Because human beings are both independently motivated and sociable, good communication is needed to enhance agreement on values, activities and priorities that can then underpin the creation and renewal of healthy, vibrant and resilient communities. Such methods, developed and explained in Chapter  5, Ways and Means, offer clear pathways to more harmonious and resilient futures.

cascades of  change and choice

i Examples of this are such familiar cases as a new sewage outlet being located upstream of an important marine habitat or a neighbourhood engagement programme requiring its participants to sign an undertaking of confidentiality. ii Although these changes may be the most acute experienced by humanity since the ending of the ice ages of about 10,000 years ago, they are by no means unprecedented in the longer geological history. Geologists have long recognised that their record of the rocks points not to steady deposition of sediments in generally constant or slowly evolving conditions but to the separation of a series of relatively stable epochs by horizons of very rapid and sometimes cataclysmic change. These may result from a number of external causes, including volcanic activity, meteor impacts, changes in the Earth’s axis and orbit and solar activity (Gould 1988). Gould speculates that this ‘punctuated equilibrium’ may also explain the successive epochs of human history better than the prevalent assumption of steady evolution to increased knowledge, wisdom and power, which still retains a strong hold as the conventional wisdom of contemporary intellectual life. Such an interpretation invites the speculation that human society may have passed through a number of similar transformations. These may have been triggered by external events, such as the ice ages (which may

These capacities to undertake effective shared action are essential if we are to successfully navigate the tides of environmental, economic and social change that are flowing increasingly strongly through our daily lives in this period of rapid change. To avoid self-­ destructive conflicts, it is clear that we must make choices about intended futures, which will be most secure if they take careful account of each other’s needs and hopes. Illustrations of the disastrous effects of perceived exclusion range from voter abstention and refusals to support funding for medical reforms that would involve people contributing to the health maintenance of others to bomb attacks by politically motivated terrorists and attempts in the USA to storm Congress. By contrast, collaborative planning is well suited to promote effective management of change within and among such essential activities as housing, work, play, movement, communication, culture and governance, in ways that engage individuals and sustain and enrich both their lives and those of their communities. At the same time, inclusive planning can also help communities meet the necessary but often unfamiliar challenges of integrating new members

Endnotes



have stimulated the growth of agriculture by concentrating population in the relatively limited areas of well-­ watered valleys). Alternatively, they may have resulted from social and technological revolutions such as the positive inventions of writing and the wheel or the negative ones of organised warfare and slavery. iii In the early years of this century, the World Trade Organization produced proposals for a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which would have made legislation by national governments to protect local land ownership illegal (Monbiot 2004). This proposal, which would have opened the way to dispossession of the only economic resource of billions of rural dwellers in economically disadvantaged nations, had to be abandoned owing to the campaigning and lobbying of coalitions making use of global information networks. iv I am indebted to my daughter, Lucy Heywood, for pointing out that the logical next step  –  that the Deconstructionists seldom take  –  is re-­construction, which would involve embracing Karl Popper’s logic (1972) of an upward spiral of problem-­solving. This is an important point for community planning because it provides a pathway to channel initially negative community contributions into positive dialogue. Lucy goes on to suggest that this could also make positive community development contributions of ‘me-­construction’ for all participants. v Darwin never precisely defined the mechanisms of natural selection, though the full title of the first edition of the former is instructive: On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Desmond and Moore, 1991). His colleague and disciple, Thomas Huxley, equated this struggle as being like ‘nothing as much as a giant gladiatorial contest’ and spoke of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ (Kropotkin 1939). A parallel powerful school of ‘Social Darwinists’ including theorists like Darwin’s friend Thomas Carlyle (satirised by Charles Dickens in the character of ‘Gradgrind’ in Hard Times [1861]) developed these views to depict human communities as depending on dominant leaders such as Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan and the new Captains of Industry. This interpretation has them emerging by force of character and determination and creating, out of spasms of conflict, the stable conditions in which great civilisations could flourish and local communities could shelter under their paternal mantles. vi The American behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner accurately conveys the intentions of behaviourism in the title of his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1974), in which he advocates a totally conditioned community life, rather like that uneasily anticipated by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1955). vii Forty years earlier, Karl Popper had vigorously demonstrated how these absolutist theories were directly linked to the terrible results of intergroup conflict and extermination in the mid-­ twentieth century in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In his

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Open Society and its Enemies (1998), he laid the basis for the pluralism which justified the community activism of Paul and Linda Davidoff, who argued that every interest should have its own watchdog (Davidoff 1965). This gave a community application to the upward spiral of social problem-­solving that Popper (1972) termed ‘social engineering’ and saw as a more continuous, connected and less destructive path to social evolution than either the dialectical materialism of Marx and the Neo-­Marxists or the rigid social order of Plato’s Republic (1980) or Machiavelli’s princely dictatorship (1961). viii The successful artistic, scientific, social and economic history of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia Romagna has been shaped to a quite remarkable extent over the past eight centuries by the accumulated social capital of these city communities. Since the late twelfth century, when St Francis first sent his messages of universal cooperation throughout Western Europe from the small Umbrian hilltop town of Assisi, this spirit of mutual aid has contrasted with and overcome the bleak warring political and military history of these city regions (Heywood 1904). ix The fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­ century British Lollards and Bohemian Hussites, for instance, advocated replacing lordly and priestly control by independent and self-­ regulating congregations (Cole and Postgate  1976). Later, Thomas Paine and William Godwin advocated a society built on this cooperative basis, as did Fourier with his proposals for phalansteries, or cooperative workshops, in nineteenth-­ century France. Robert Owen, though ambiguous about adopting cooperative principles in his own New Lanark model industrial settlement (1800–1821), did provide a clear and effective explanation of them in his ‘Report to the County of Lanark’ of 1817 (Hamilton 1946; Mumford 1961). x This was the pattern which still applied in Igbo land in Nigeria in the early 1960s and was still recalled by old-­timers in the Forest of Dean in 1980, when I conducted a community preference survey there with students of the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design. xi However, at the global scale, the rights of international refugees to seek new lives for themselves and their families in safer or more promising places is often physically denied by governments of such prosperous nations as Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom, and from time to time, the USA. Governments of these countries have routinely refused to accept international refugees while energetically promoting immigration by more affluent individuals, amounting – as in Australia – to many hundreds of thousands of relatively prosperous migrants every year. Protection of the personal rights to freedom of movement of refugees and asylum seekers in today’s global community can only rely – somewhat insecurely – on supportive arrangements and provisions at wider international and global scales (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2021; Dantas et al. 2021).

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Lyons, J. (1991). Chomsky. London: Fontana. Machiavelli, N. (1961). The Prince (translated with an introduction by George Bull). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Mackay, H. (2018). Australia Reimagined: Towards a More Compassionate, Less Anxious Society. Australia: Pan Macmillan. Magee, B. (1973). Popper. Glasgow: Fontana. Margerum, R. (1999). Getting past yes: from capital creation to action. Journal of the American Planning Association 65 (2): 181–192. Margerum, R. (2002). Evaluating collaborative planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 68 (2): 171–192. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1846 and 1996). With An Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. The Communist Manifesto, A Modern Edition. London Verso. Mayor of London (2008). Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, A National Scale Network. London: Author. McConnachie/Peters (2009). Surrey Docks Farm, Agri-­ culture in the City. http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/ features/footnmouth/cfarm.html (accessed 1  January 2023). McLoughlin, J. (1971). Urban & Regional Planning, A System’s Approach. London: Faber. Miller, G. (1981). Cities by Contract. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Monbiot, G. (2004). The Age of Consent, A Manifesto for a New World Order. London: Flamingo. Mondragon Corporation (2022). Mondragon Corporation, A Different Experience. https://www.mondragon-­ corporation.com/urtekotxostena/mondragon-­l a-­ experiencia.php?l=en (accessed 1 January 2023). More, T.T. (1516/1965). Utopia. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moscow Times (2020). With Lake Baikal’s key protections set to expire, Russia’s eco-­ advocates sound the alarm. https://www.themoscowtimes .com/2020/12/21/with-­lake-­baikals-­key-­protections-­ set-­t o-­e xpire-­r ussian-­e co-­a ctivists-­s ound-­t he-­ alarm-­a72305 (accessed 9 January 2023). Moss Eckhardt, J. (1973). Ebenezer Howard,1850–1928. Aylesbury: Herts, Shire Publications. Mumford, L. (1938). The Culture of Cities. London: Secker and Warburg. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New  York: Harcourt, World, Brace. Naipaul, V. (1979). India: A Wounded Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin. National Aero Space Administration (NASA) (2021). Sea level rises. https://www.nasa.gov/specials/sea-­level-­ rise-­2020/ (accessed 10 December 2021). Obama, B. (2004). Dreams from My Father, 2e. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Obama, B. (2008). The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Melbourne: Text Publishing.



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Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus. Wilson, E.O. (1992, 1992). The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Works and Days (2021). Margaret Thatcher, There’s no such thing as Society. https://newlearningonline .com/new-­learning/chapter-­4/neoliberalism-­more-­ recent-­times/margaret-­thatcher-­theres-­no-­such-­thing-­ as-­society (accessed 1 January 2023).

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2

The Lives of Local Communities

Scope and scales of community Communities consist of groups of people who experience and acknowledge significant links, expectations and responsibilities towards each other. They do not need to be neighbours, but they do need to share neighbourly feelings that may be based on shared spaces, realms of interaction or fields of interest. Local communities are those that are defined by the physical possibilities of regular and direct personal contact. Their success depends largely upon how far this coexistence develops into sustainable community life and organisation. This chapter considers how different measures can help achieve this and suggests principles for effective integrated local community planning. It is organised into the following sections:

• Social, economic and organisational characteristics of local communities

• The physical forms of communities • Spatial justice • Planning places • Community governance and participation • Conclusion: the durability of local communities of place and contact

Social, economic and organisational characteristics of local communities contact and cooperation

The opportunities for contact and cooperation offered by local communities of place have never lost their attraction and are now rapidly regaining their roles and importance. Current trends are redressing the balance between city centres and local neighbourhoods, triggered by a wide range of decentralising pressures. As well as positive ones offered by new communication technologies,

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

negative ones of mounting problems of access to large centres are being posed by problems of congestion and pollution, and both are being compounded by the impacts of mutating pandemics increasing people’s experience of the benefits of working from home. Existing concentration of jobs, services and high-­density accommodation in and around central areas was already being challenged by the worldwide growth of importance of secondary centres, raising the prospect of a more even balance between city centres and local neighbourhoods (Roberts 2014). Roberts provides examples drawn from all five continents of the ways that these re-­asserted attractions of neighbourliness and local collaboration are influencing the shape and organisation of both long-­established and newly developing urban communities. The survival value of such capacities for local, face-­to-­face cooperation has roots extending over 10,000 years to early Neolithic farming villages (Mumford  1961; Childe  1976). Its later continuation in the collaborative life of medieval market towns, out of which the modern European city evolved, has been well explored by Peter Kropotkin (1939).i In India too, Mahatma Gandhi and his followers recognised thousands of years of village cooperation as the constructive core of Hindu ­culture and proposed its revitalisation in a contemporary model of inclusive village democracy or satyagraha, under the leadership of village councils or Panchayats.ii Recent developments in economic theory reflect this recognition of the significance of the spirit of local cooperation for successful modern life. Associational Economics, developed by Cooke and M ­ organ (1998) and discussed in Chapter  1, draws on the example of the successful network economies of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany in northern Italy, Baden-­Württemberg in Western Germany and the Basque region of northern Spain to show how shared community support for numerous small enterprises can support local funding and training facilities. By fostering flexibility, this productive dynamism promoted survival and prosperity in times when a volatile global market threatened

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Planning for Community

both prices and consumption systems elsewhere (Barlow and Clarke  2001). The equally historic system of Balinese water management, discussed later in this chapter, continues to operate well, both maintaining in local hands the complex pattern of irrigation canals and water distribution and reinforcing the bonds of social solidarity that underlie Balinese community life (Lansing 1996; Suarja and Thyssen 2003). Another significant example of collaboration geared toward transformation is the micro-­credit network described in Box  1.1 The Grameen Bank, in Chapter  1. Over the last 50 years, this initiative has built a multi-­layered, multi-­billion-­dollar organisation with over four million members (­ Bornstein  1997; Yunus  1998). Mohamed Yunus, the Grameen founder, explains that the system was designed to replace ‘financial collateral’ of centrally controlled traditional banking by the ‘social collateral’ of established community life in order to promote collaboration amongst ‘the poorest of the poor’ (particularly landless peasant women) in Bangladesh, which is one of the world’s poorest, most heavily populated and environmentally threatened countries (Yunus 1998). Although these

successes remain exceptions in a world still dominated by economic competition, they do indicate that collaboration can make and is already making, increasingly significant contributions to balance capital competition and promote distributional justice and cooperative efficiency in communities worldwide. mix and meeting

Opportunities for both purposeful and casual contact are greatly enhanced in places where people can undertake a wide range of activities amicably and enjoyably. They need to offer spaces suitable for exchange of both goods and ideas. The roles that thoughtful planning can play in fostering their development have been well described by both Randolph Hester (2010) and Jan Geyl (2011). Christopher Alexander (1979) has also demonstrated that they may also result from the winnowing processes of evolution, reflecting the influences of numerous previous users. A good example of a community enriched by such processes is Brisbane’s West End, described in Box 2.1.

Box 2.1  Brisbane’s west end Enclosed within the sweeping arc of the Brisbane River, this peninsula has always been a destination as well as a zone in transition. With the arrival of European settlers 200 years ago, its traditional role of camping ground was expanded to become the reception area where successive waves of newly arrived migrants found spaces to live and establish their cultural anchors of churches and places for sociable meeting and eating while remaining an important cultural foothold for the indigenous community. This enduring role as a melting pot of cultures has successively integrated waves of Anglo, Celtic, Balkan, Russian, Greek, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, New Zealand and Chinese arrivals as well preserving an essential foothold for Murri people – each signalling its continued presence by the cultural anchors of prominent buildings and spaces, including churches, meeting halls and parks to create a composite living culture, providing both visual variety and places of nurture, prospect and refuge for their communities. Former residents, who may have long since left their original place of arrival in West End for new homes in the middle and outer suburbs, still value the old inner suburb and return weekly to refresh cultural and historic associations. The housing stock, too, has developed in response to its role as one of the city’s reception areas. More than half of all dwellings remain rented (well above the city average) a fifth of them in public ownership, with an impressively high level of Indigenous housing including a number of hostels owned and run by the Aboriginal Housing Corporation (Brisbane City Council 2022). Powerful gentrifying pressures of the past four decades have challenged these melting pot roles. Triggered by the post-­Expo ‘88 redevelopment of South Brisbane, a steadily rising tide of high-­rise residential redevelopment has replaced the old riverside industrial and warehousing areas. Australian and international investors have acquired key sites for accelerating residential and commercial redevelopment (Heywood 2018).



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As well as these developments of high-­density, high-­rise residential apartment blocks, largely accommodating one, two and three-­person households, this progressive redevelopment is taking other forms, encouraged by the adjacent growth of the state’s major cultural complex: these include the development of living and work spaces of a ‘creative class’ of designers, innovators and digital professionals, including the scientific and technical practitioners who now make up more than 20% of the area’s employed residents. Next, are the inner-­city entertainment and recreation venues forming the city’s main focus of youth culture. Finally, there are clusters of ‘Third Places’ – neither homes nor workplaces, but social spaces where people gather for company, entertainment and discussion. The area’s active community groups are voicing a number of policy proposals and campaigning for a review of the decade-­old Neighbourhood Plan that has prompted erosion of these continuing and evolving roles by encouraging concentration on massive high-­density, high-­rise residential redevelopment. Community proposals for planning reform include:

• ‘Inclusionary Zoning’ for up to 20% affordable and social housing in new schemes • Requirement for developers to donate 15–20% of the space of all large new residential developments to Council or community groups for public open space

• Accompanying provision for open space, transport, community facilities and drainage infrastructure

• Specific population and residential density caps related to the area’s capacity for habitable and sustainable living

• Designation of key Character Conservation Areas, • Corridor Studies including tree planting along major streets. Another of West End’s distinctive characteristics is its history of influential political representation – including in the last two decades a Commonwealth Prime Minister, a Deputy State Premier and a Brisbane City Lord Mayor. Current representation by Greens Party activists in each of the City Council, State and Federal Parliaments (Australian Broadcasting Commission 2021) maintains this tradition of political activism and ensures that the community is well able to find spokespeople to proclaim and defend its cultural character in similar ways to both Toronto’s Annex and New York’s Greenwich Village with Jane Jacobs and London’s Covent Garden with its university academics and students. The roles of melting pot, cultural, arts and creative industry focus and inner-­city refuge, though threatened, still endure.

physical patterns

Worldwide, the spaces and places where people live, meet and make the contacts that help to mould their everyday lives share many recognizable social and physical characteristics. These normally include a central focus, containing spaces for shared activities and exchange, with shops or stalls lining one or more central streets, some form of school, a religious focus or shrine, and, in many cases, access to public or community transport. A local centre, connected to surrounding residential areas by networks of streets or pathways, is normally also linked by road to other neighbouring communities of similar or greater scale. People’s lives in these communities are influenced by their density, structure, grain, permeability, mix and meeting points, discussed below. These help to shape everyday lives and influence the future

evolution of neighbourhood form and character and thus can provide significant levers in planning to shape and improve localities. settlement structure and activities

The physical structure of localities directly affects many aspects of daily life: how much contact we have with neighbours; whether we walk, cycle, bus or drive a car to work, play or school; and whether we shop locally or travel to a large supermarket chain store. Factors of grain, mix, permeability and meeting places influence these choices (Lynch  1983). Grain is the term that has come to be used for the scale of the basic building blocks which go to make up settlements. Fine grain consists of short streets with many ­intersections, many small local parks and play areas, and a tendency for many buildings to be at the human scale.

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Pedestrian movements are then spread fairly evenly throughout whole districts, encouraging a mix of small shops and other uses. Coarse grain, on the other hand, results from large-­scale elements, whether in terms of height, bulk or basic floor plan, such as big apartments blocks and major shopping centres. Jane Jacobs (1961) memorably castigated the ambitious coarse-­ grained open space plans in many major America cities. She contrasted the sociable virtues of small local open spaces with the array of large public spaces, proudly created in many great American cities, which generate ‘border vacuums’ and provide such extensive areas so remote from the protective scrutiny of ‘eyes on the street’, that she catalogues them as ‘Rapists Parks, Perverts Parks, Mugging Parks and Misdemeanour Open Spaces’. Mixed uses, by contrast, can thrive where there is a fine grain of physical form encouraging both access and custom, whereas, rigid and doctrinaire segregation of activities separating residential, commercial, home office and craft production discourage the development of a lively street life and frustrate the natural evolution of new activities within communities. Members of the ‘Creative Class’ identified by Richard Florida (2004) both seek and need the variety and opportunity that mixed uses and supportive development control can provide to help people meet easily and casually and exchange ideas that can develop and compare new approaches and products. Permeability is another useful phrase that captures the convenient movement characteristics of fine-­ grained communities, where people experience a sense of easy flow along choices of routes, to reach a variety of interesting destinations. Lanes and arcades are good examples, while walled and gated communities destroy informal contact. It is not difficult to frame planning regulations that will enhance permeability in new developments and prevent the development of coarse-­ grained new suburbs, which would encourage physical and social exclusion. For instance, a rule that new developments will only receive planning permission if all their dwellings are within 50 m of a freely traversed public right of way would encourage permeability and effectively prevent the establishment of disruptive walled estates. If permeability offers the pathways, meeting places can provide the magnetic attractors. Many roles and methods can be combined to help develop these focus points round which communities can build a strong sense of the image and ownership of their localities. Small portions of streets may be closed to traffic or pavements widened to

create little squares, pocket parks or play areas. New public spaces can occupy, for instance, one corner of a significant road intersection. Excessive and redundant road surfaces (which may become increasingly common with the automation of transport) can be re-­purposed for community gardens, rest and play. Landmarks, not necessarily large or dominating features, can be designated. Often it is their cultural significance rather than their bulk that creates a sense of place and legibility for residents and regular users, as with the celebrated small statue of the little mermaid which sits on a rock in Copenhagen harbour, or the little bronze statues of deer and other native animals that are placed at intervals along the pavements of the main street linking Portland’s city centre to the State U ­ niversity campus. Collectively, these characteristics of grain, permeability, mix of uses, landmarks and meeting points, do much to endow localities with the spatial qualities that can endear them to, or estrange them from, their residents. All of them, however, are much influenced by the over-­riding factor of density. density

Dominant among the influences impacting community life is this density of development, which has  been  long recognised as a powerful factor in shaping the servicing, sociability and health of local communities. The celebrated dictum, ascribed to the eighteenth century English complier of the first Dictionary of the English Language, Dr Samuel Johnson, that “It is density, Sir, that creates convenience!’’ now applies not only to the convenience of residents in their access to facilities and provisions but also to the convenience of local and state governments, responsible for providing essential services. However, as in most aspects of human life, there is a ‘Goldilocks’ median level where intensity of residential development is sufficient to promote social interaction and economic provision of services, but not so great as to endanger basic personal needs for sunlight, play, exercise space and contact with nature. Too low a density may result in the anonymous and space-­consumptive urban sprawl of the outer suburbs of many contemporary cities of North America and Australia, while too much may infringe basic human needs for healthy living and family life. In traditional rural village communities, densities tend to have evolved to a sociable and serviceable mean level of around 20 dwellings to the hectare as populations cluster to conserve productive land and resources and promote convenience



and security. In the affluent low-­density suburbs of such contemporary major cities and metropolises as Houston, Perth and Los Angeles, by contrast, densities may fall to an average of half this level, while elsewhere in such crowded inner ­cities of both developing and developed nations, as Kolkata, New York, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Wuhan, they may vary upward by ten times to as much as two to three hundred dwellings – or up to one thousand people – per hectare. This is the same size as a standard football field, which is a small space for a thousand people, even when they are stacked in high-­rise towers. Actual densities thus vary widely between and within different cultures. In the intensively developed traditional networks of courtyard dwellings of one and two-­storey neighbourhoods of the Suks, Kasbahs and Bustees of North Africa and Southern Asia, this may produce averages around 100 dwellings to the hectare, while in the quarter-­ acre blocks of many New World suburbs, urban sprawl and large private gardens produce one-­ tenth of that with only 10 dwellings to the ­hectare (Newman and Kenworthy 1989). Population densities vary accordingly. For instance, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, accommodated its 2008 population of approximately 12 million on roughly 1400 km2, at an average density of 85 persons per hectare. This is eight times that of Brisbane City, a typical low-­density New World city, which spreads over a similar area to accommodate only one-­tenth the population  –  currently 1.3 million people  –  at an average density of approximately 10 persons to the hectare (Australian Bureau of Statistics  2022). However, this is not purely a distinction between more and less-­developed communities. It is interesting to note that New York City’s overall density of 26,429 persons per square mile is 103 persons per hectare, which is about 20% higher than that of Dhaka. In Manhattan, with its densely packed and often high-­rise development, average densities rise to over 260 persons per hectare, three times the Dhaka average and 26 times the Brisbane one. For comparison, the density in San Francisco, the next most intensively developed city in the USA, is about 65 persons per hectare, less than two-­thirds that of New York. High densities proposed for new developments often raise concerns among local communities and existing residents and families. Corporate, community and individual interests may clash. Established authorities, governments and developers may favour radically increased densities to promote civic income, assist convenient provision of common services and support maximum

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commercial profits and yield from property taxes. Households and families adjacent to such proposed developments, by contrast, may express strong concerns about diminished amenities, over-­ burdened local facilities and social and physical infrastructure including roads, schools and public and community open spaces. In market economies, households often express their consumer preference by seeking dwellings in lower-­density middle and outer suburbs where there is more generous provision of public, personal and family space, privacy and resulting amenity. In extreme cases like that of Pruitt Igoe’s deck access residential slab blocks, unpopular developments may actually have to be blown up (Newman 1973). These are clearly issues where policy, land values and technological innovations can all exert major influences. Basic human needs are involved, including access to private and public open space for young children to exercise, daylighting standards for dwellings, and appropriate scale of communities to promote access to primary schools, local shops, and public transport. Communities’ attitudes towards high-­rise development, solar access, traffic generation and choice of form of transport, whether active, private or public will also be significant. Choices are available (Adams 2009). Studies undertaken for Melbourne City (discussed further in Chapter  9, Place, Space and Community Design) suggest that considerable increases in densities can be achieved by selectively concentrating medium-­ rise development of 6–8 storeys along radial corridors enjoying good access to public transport, in similar patterns to those that have evolved over the last century in many European cities, including Milan, Barcelona and Paris. In considering appropriate residential densities, account also needs to be taken of the scale of future housing demand, based on projected population trends. For several decades, throughout the developed world, households will continue to age and shrink as baby boomer generations are succeeded by ones with smaller families. The United Nations Department of Economics and Social Research’s 2022 update of World Population Prospects already forecasts that this trend will lead to an overall decline in world population as early as 2080 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division 2022), due to greater access to means of birth control and increased opportunities for equal education for women. In Australia, for instance, more than half of all households already consist of two or fewer people, and this proportion is steadily increasing. As a result, there is scope in new schemes to increase the proportion of small

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dwellings, including attached and medium-­ rise apartments, though this should not be interpreted as a justification for increasing acceptable building heights of new blocks of units. community organisation

Differing types of social and economic collaboration have developed varying styles of community organisation. The collaborative spirit of early Owenite model settlements in the USA (Bestor  1970) has re-­ emerged in more practical forms in initiatives including the many community development corporations (CDCs) now active in the United States, especially in New  York, dedicated to providing affordable housing and job creation (Wolf-­Powers  2014). By 2021, there were nearly 5000 of these CDCs, promoting community life and prosperity, especially among disadvantaged black communities. Since they first emerged in the mid-­ 1960s as part of Robert Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme, they have been responsible for over half a million units of affordable housing and nearly a quarter of a million private sector jobs. In 2010, across the nation, they were developing 86,000 units of affordable housing and nearly nine million square feet of commercial and industrial space per year (Case Western University 2021). In New York City, Wolf-­Powers (2014) shows how local groups and organisations had enlisted the support of the City Council to reclaim and run rental housing previously abandoned by landlords in the economic downturn and crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The city’s Association for Neighbourhood and Housing Development (ANHD) estimates that over the preceding three decades the 94 members of the Association had rehabilitated and developed no less than 100,000 dwelling units, frequently with the assistance of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development in establishing ownership title. By 2012, they were still acting as property managers for 35,000 households (ANHD 2012). Amitai Etzioni (2006) a leading advocate for the Communitarian Movement in the United States, widens the ambit of community activism to propose a structural shift in social responsibility from central government to such local communities. He cites the performance of an increasing range of service roles by community organisations as effective means to balance the centralising tendencies of statism in contemporary society. He instances the ‘charitable choice’, introduced under the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, as a significant example of how

religious and other local organisations can expand their social activities to create new centres of local power to balance the centralising roles of national governments, by encouraging states to provide funds for the provision of social services by religious and other charitable groups rather than delivering those services themselves. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s turn-­of-­the-­century experiment with ‘Third Way’ politics, discussed further in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation, encouraged the development of social and not-­for-­profit enterprises to take over some of the country’s traditional service roles. It adapted the philosophy, developing across the Atlantic, of governments ‘not rowing but steering’, to advocate delegation of responsibility for major social programmes to voluntary organisations such as Housing Trusts and Community Action agencies, similar to the ideas discussed above by Amitai Etzioni (2006). Advocated by academics like Anthony Giddens (1994) and activists like the Reverend Andrew Mawson (Andrew Mawson Partnerships  2022), these ideas were enthusiastically taken up by New Labour’s policymakers in the first decade of this century, and rapidly entered the mainstream of shared political doctrine. M ­ awson is a United Reformed minister who took over the derelict East End parish of Bromley-­ by-­ Bow in London in the late 1980s and set about a process of community development involving social entrepreneurship, assisting communities and individuals to help themselves to renew their own lives and those of their communities. He founded the United Kingdom Community Action Network to promote the concept and support new initiatives around the country, later including the Lea Valley Regeneration scheme redeveloping that area after the 2012  London Olympic games (Andrew Mawson Partnerships 2022). This approach built on earlier Fabian and Syndicalist ideas already being applied in the many thousands of housing associations then providing over a million dwellings under the umbrella of the National Housing Corporation (now ‘Homes England’). Such approaches involve collaboration between government, voluntary and private sectors at a number of scales, both local and regional. The intention of Homes England is to encourage maximum local ownership and participation in such schemes. However, recent informed criticism (Wainwright  2022) suggests that such Third Way initiatives themselves require careful scrutiny and accountability measures to ensure that they do not become absorbed into market activities to abandon their originally stated social objectives (in this case affordable housing) in order



to achieve large scale commercial profits that run counter to their declared intentions. Community organisation is also a major theme in many developing nations. In India the Panchayati Raj System, long advocated by the Gandhian movement, was formally integrated into Indian National legislation under the 1992 seventy-­third amendment to its constitution, giving constitutional recognition and status to a three-­tiered system with panchayati with appropriate planning and implementation powers at the village, block and district levels, with members being selected for five-­year terms in elections supervised by state election commissions (Mitra 2001). In the Indonesian island of Bali, the comprehensive framework of ‘subaks’ has been developed over a thousand years to manage water supply and irrigation. Over 1500  local groups, each with an average of 200 members, administer areas of a little under 1 km2 each. In all 1500 subaks are responsible for 90,000 hectares of irrigated land. Suarja and Thyssen (2003) report that all members of the local water-­consuming communities are members of the ‘general assembly’, which appoints a board to decide distribution of water rights and responsibilities as well as taking on other roles in local agricultural administration. It is significant that although this system grew out of the traditional culture of the island, membership is open to all water users, whichever religion they practise or whenever they acquired their water rights. As open-­ edged communities, the subaks provide a highly relevant model for the contemporary world where community membership is often subject to rapid change. spatial justice

Many long-­established cities throughout the developed world, already experiencing major problems resulting from the decay of long-­ standing concentrations of densely packed and economically declining inner areas, are now being confronted by the special difficulties and needs of many new international migrants. Notable examples occur in New York’s Harlem and Brooklyn, California’s San Diego, London’s Brixton and Tower Hamlets, Glasgow’s Easterhouse, Manchester’s Droylesden and Cheetham Hill, Liverpool’s inner ring of relative deprivation in suburbs such as Toxteth and Walton and Sydney’s Cabramatta (Yates  2009). Although such cities often enjoy remarkable resources of social capital and community spirit expressed in the irrepressible music of New York’s creative jazz scene, Detroit’s ‘Motown’ bands and

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the silver and brass bands and choirs of the old Yorkshire and Lancashire mill towns of the United Kingdom, the life chances of many of their occupants have often been impacted by poor opportunities for education, healthy living or well-­paid work. In New  York, for instance, the concentration of poorly maintained, low-­quality housing in ­Harlem resulted in the crises of the 1970s and 1980s discussed earlier in this chapter, while among the ‘rustbelt’ communities of the country’s north east, places such as Detroit were severely affected by the rapid contraction of the United States’ automobile industry, and are now experiencing high rates of unemployment and increased competition for jobs. Nevertheless, inclusive community organisation and planning can provide effective paths and steps to rectify such problems, as is demonstrated by the work of New York’s CDCs, and enlightened administrations in Cleveland (Wolf-­Powers  2014; Brown 2015). problems of  planned communities

Planned communities may face their own problems, often produced by insensitive interventions. Some of the most notorious of these result from the toxic confluence of two unhealthy streams of the mid-­ twentieth century. The  first was  the assumption of some administrators that disadvantaged and less competitive individuals and families should be conveniently concentrated in areas where they would not offend the sensibilities of more successful neighbours. Next came the authoritarian design principles of modernist architects, which often favoured construction of rows and clumps of high rise dwelling blocks of public housing in places like Tower Hamlets in East London, Manchester’s notorious Oldham and Rochdale Roads, Liverpool’s Scotland Road, Glasgow’s eastern satellite of Easterhouse and the infamous Pruitt Igoe development of St Louis (Jephcott 1971; Newman 1973; Heywood 1974; Gray 1976). There are countless others. More insidious problems, reflecting well-­ intentioned aims of amenity, resulted in carefully shaped swathes of more traditional public housing, which, though decent and carefully designed, were often socially segregated, physically isolated, sometimes sterile and lacking in social mix and activation. They frequently gave rise to feelings of alienation and despondency, often summarised in the generalised phrase ‘New Town Blues’. English examples include Manchester’s Wythenshawe, Liverpool’s Kirby and numerous council estates scattered throughout their middle suburbs

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Planning for Community

by London County Council and Birmingham City Council. In Australia, Brisbane’s ‘Housing Commission’ suburb of Inala and much of Sydney’s western suburbs of Airds, Bidwill and Villawood are physical reminders of such problems. United States’ experience, more focussed on private sector development, was generally more successful, led by the 9 Levittowns, each housing several tens of thousands of people on city fringes in a string of ‘edge city’ developments down the United States east coast from New Jersey to Virginia (Delafons 1969, 2003; World Atlas 2022). Nevertheless, in extreme cases such places of planned segregation may deteriorate to form ‘sink estates’, where groups of people including single-­ parent families, immigrants, long-­ term unemployed and ex-­prisoners, who are unwanted as neighbours by economically and socially more successful groups, are concentrated in socially isolating public housing estates, the fate of which is sealed when they are subjected to sensationalized labelling and given unsavoury reputations by the mass media. They provide eloquent reasons to pursue the very different policies of social mix and correspondingly diverse land uses. spatial inequity and the  workings of  the free market

Unequal and unsuitable housing cannot be blamed solely on administrators and architects. An unconstrained free market system itself can have dire consequences for the social and physical organisation of cities. These were accurately, if uncritically, understood, explored and forecasted, a century ago by the theorists of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (Burgess  1925). They recognised that as the city’s population and economy grew and central business districts expanded, the original occupants of the inner suburbs, often consisting of families of workers employed in the manufacturing activities that were then mainly located in the inner city, would be forced to seek cheaper new accommodation on the urban fringes and to commute daily back to their work places. This resulted in rippling re-­development of a ring-­like sequence of ‘invasion and succession’ driven by spasmodic but continuing escalation in the land values of central and inner areas (Burgess  1925). This process of property acquisition, construction, demolition and reconstruction would create a constantly changing and unstable ‘Zone in Transition’, where short-­term rental housing would be mixed with derelict buildings and provident land assembly could prepare the ground for the next phase of expansion of the central city. Later, the pattern

would be repeated as further waves of displaced working families and recent arrivals to the city would be driven to relocate to new outer rings of low-­cost housing on the expanding city fringes. The difficulties arising from these theories of the emerging form of such major commercial and industrial cities were that their authors and many amongst their readership assumed that ‘is’ implied ‘ought’  – and accordingly set about advocating urban policies that promoted this pattern of successive waves of rippling redevelopment, blighting and replacement. These assumptions led to failures to evaluate, mitigate and optimise  –  in short to plan  –  better urban forms and social outcomes. After a hundred years, some of these dysfunctional processes still survive and are demonstrated in the case study of Brisbane’s West End in Box  2.1, included earlier in this chapter. However, such policies of constantly increasing densities are increasingly coming into collision with the decentralising effects of contemporary communications and transport technology, with their inherent tendencies to disperse population and stimulate the evolution of new and more stable ‘polynucleated’ patterns, as identified by Hall (2002, 2014), Roberts (2014), and Heywood (1998). These trends are promoting polycentric metropolitan regions, raising the prospects for improved spatial justice for the residents of the inner city.

The strategies of social justice In matters of social justice, global influences are exerting equally strong, but more negative, influences on local communities. For instance, in cities such as San Diego, Mexico City, Mumbai, Bangkok, Sao Paulo and Shenzhen, the international division of labour continues to recruit new concentrations of workers to manufacture industrial components and consumer goods to serve the global economy. Accommodation varies from sterile and crowded caravan parks to under serviced favellas and bustees. Organisations such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency play their part in mitigating these problems with support for targeted infrastructure investment programmes to improve living conditions in many rapidly expanding cities, as described later in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design in Box  9.1, Placemaking in K ­ olkata. The dedicated action of voluntary organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Care, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam and World Vision can assist in tackling the negative effects of global



trends and free market-­based profit maximisation, through activities such as fair trade campaigns and squatter upgrading schemes. Meanwhile, the global economy accelerates the decline of old manufacturing areas in such long-­ established ‘rustbelt’ communities as Baltimore, Buffalo and Detroit in the USA, Bradford, Manchester and Sheffield in the UK, and Lille and the old Moselle industrial towns in France. Although this division of labour has its origins in global trends, its local effects can be mitigated by community planning initiatives. For instance, in recovering ‘rustbelt regions’ of the First World, the successes of cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the USA and Manchester and Leeds in the UK in reorganising to meet these challenges, going back in some cases to the 1980s, indicates that solutions are possible (Brown 2015; Wikipedia 2022). In developing countries, technology transfer is another commonly advocated strategy, encouraging the establishment of foreign-­owned enterprises in the hope that the development of local skills will stimulate economic development. This has had mixed results, with western technological partnerships in the ‘Young Tiger’ economies of eastern and southern Asia such as Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea, and is now being pursued in parts of Vietnam and Indonesia and with Chinese investment in Pakistan and Myanmar. The World Bank and World Trade Organisation actively encourage such trends with their championing of Direct Foreign Investment (DFI). However, there are well-­ justified concerns about the long-­term effects of such arrangements alienating local ownership, generating economic dependency, exerting undue political influence and even encouraging such military interventions as the allied 2004  invasion of Iraq (Heywood  2006). Worldwide, more collaborative arrangements, based on national government agencies and local enterprises entering into partnership arrangements with international concerns appear to offer more secure and productive long-­term outcomes. In Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, government agencies and private enterprises have formed many such carefully shaped international trading arrangements and partnerships. Spatial injustices involved  in the international division of labour are also entrenched in the mechanisms of world debt regulated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) (Monbiot 2003). The increasing support for debt redemption (on the basis that the debtor nations have already many times repaid their original loans) could cause a significant

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improvement in economic justice within the global community. Debt redemption could offer a level playing field; fair trade would provide even-­ handed rules; and continued local ownership and control of enterprises could ensure a majority of local players in the home team. refugee camps, reception areas, bidonvilles and shanty towns

For refugees driven to international migration to escape from such life-­threatening conflicts as those in  Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, or in search of more secure livelihoods, the immediate experiences may be ones of acute spatial inequality in their new countries of adoption. Caravan parks, Bidonvilles,iii shanty towns, sink estates, and crowded rental accommodation in physically decaying and crowded terrace housing within declining industrial settlements are their most likely first homes in their arrival locations. They frequently experience cramped detention, punitive living conditions and poor quality of life relative to others in their host countries, with the most acute problems being stated as isolation, alienation and low absolute standards of shelter and services (Dantas  2022). Prominent examples of places of first settlement are the migrant areas in San Diego, Miami and Mexican border communities in the USA, the older areas of declining industrial towns such as Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the United Kingdom; parts of Lille, Marseilles and the old Moselle Valley industrial towns in France; shanty towns on the fringes of Madrid and Milan and Australia’s Cabramatta in the western suburbs of Sydney (Lucassen  2005; Reuters  2009a,b). Despite policies of dispersion in the United Kingdom, immigrant communities have become concentrated in such old industrial towns where feelings of alienation have given rise to occasional outbreaks of violence. As early as 2001, demonstrations involving Pakistani and other Muslim communities in inner Liverpool resulted in repeated battles with police riot squads over periods of up to a week. Better integration of such refugees into their new communities to achieve mutual understanding and benefits remains a prime task and opportunity for community planning. The housing and integration difficulties faced by newcomers are sometimes compounded by the existing senses of exclusion and disadvantage already felt by long-­standing members of the host community, who may themselves lack satisfactory and socially desirable housing. Throughout Western Europe, many migrants are drawn to seek

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Planning for Community

cheap accommodation in such pioneer industrial communities, already experiencing  palpable disadvantages of strained services and insufficient jobs. Massive post-­ war clearance and high-­ rise re-­ housing programs intended as solutions to the problems of such  older industrial areas had already been found wanting (Heywood  1974; Hall 2002). Not only were they economically infeasible, socially insensitive and culturally destructive, but also environmentally wasteful, in an age increasingly concerned with sustainability. The polar opposite policy of leaving the solution to market forces did even less to help current residents or future seekers of affordable housing: it merely continued the cycle of invasion and succession discussed above to produce constant social and family stress. In the Netherlands, public housing provision to help integrate immigrants from Surinam and Sumatra from the 1960s and 1970s onwards has been, on balance, more purposive and successful, based on the traditionally active role of Dutch local government in providing affordable housing and the country’s long-­ standing tradition of accommodating newcomers and refugees (Hall  2014). Responsibility for providing public housing for legal migrants was accepted by housing authorities such as the city of Amsterdam, where many were located in the large planned suburb of Bijlmermeer. Largely composed of 11-­storey blocks served by aerial corridors, this new south eastern suburb was very similar in form to the demolished slab blocks of Pruitt Igoe, though having an even larger population, which originally approached 50,000 residents. Because the housing was not attractive to local people it came to be largely occupied by recently arrived immigrants (Tower Renewal Partnership 2008; OMA 2022). Soon, familiar problems akin to those of Britain’s ‘sink estates’ started to emerge with instances of crime and drug taking, leading to labelling and stigma. This developed to the extent that by the mid-­nineteen eighties, the City Council was considering mass demolition, along the lines of the St Louis housing authorities in Pruitt Igoe. However, Amsterdam’s system of active local community councils in each of the major divisions of the city meant that local views could be clearly formulated and expressed, and they favoured physically and socially re-­ shaping the district rather than mass clearance. Surveys indicated that about one-­quarter of residents wanted to preserve the estates in their original modernist design; a further quarter wanted to leave the district altogether;

and the remaining half supported progressive remodelling to more mixed forms and tenures (Tower Renewal Partnership  2008). This policy of selective redevelopment, originally adopted in 1992, involved three elements: first, progressive demolition of about a quarter of the original slab blocks; second, quadrupling the amount of single-­ family housing to constitute over a third of the total housing stock; and finally, sale of a fifth of all dwellings to private buyers. While Netherlands as a nation still has major problems of mutual distrust between Christian and Muslim communities, the combination of physical and social aspects of community planning in Bijlmermeer must be counted as an overall success. Many people in both communities want to join hands across the barriers of race and religion, and the renovated Bijlmermeer is a good example of this community spirit at work (Tower Renewal Partnership 2008). Many English local governments are also trying their best to meet migrant housing requirements fairly on the combined basis of level of need and time already spent on waiting lists. However, this is made more difficult by much reduced available stocks of social housing, following 20 years of continuous enforced sale of public housing to current occupiers and new purchasers. The figure of 2% of all council housing being occupied by recently arrived immigrants suggests a cautious but fair-­ minded approach, but the widespread resentment of other local residents against any provision of this sort highlights the difficulties involved in inclusive community building (Rutter and Latorre  2009). Community-­ run social enterprises can go some way to overcome these objections. However, the most effective solution to these problems of meeting the housing needs of recently arrived migrants remains the Social Market Housing policies of the German government, maintained by parties of different political complexions throughout the last seven decades, discussed in Chapter 7, Homes and Communities. sink estates and transit zones

The spatial disadvantages of the high density, and often high rise, inner-­city public housing estates, associated with St Louis’s Pruitt Igoe, parts of inner Philadelphia, London’s Thamesmead, Glasgow’s Easterhouse, Melbourne’s Housing Commission tower blocks in Kensington and Amsterdam’s original Bijlmermeer development, often seem to invite dramatic and revolutionary solutions such as demolition by explosion. Nevertheless, this is



seldom necessary or justified. The mixed and collaborative solutions applied in the United States since the 1960s by CDCs and Housing Associations in collaboration with city councils in New  York, Cleveland and elsewhere and over the past 30 years in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer constitute more sensible community planning methods (Case Western University 2021; Tower Renewal Partnership  2008). The first step to solve the problems of poverty and disadvantage that fester in such areas is to create no more single-­ class, single-­ minded designs that treat people as units of space consumption when they should be seen as future members of interactive communities. Social housing needs to be a responsive policy rather than a statistically based construction program. Affordable social housing can be integrated with the normal processes of physical development of a mixed economy, both by subsidised and regulated market providers and by social enterprise providers such as housing associations and publicly sponsored housing companies (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, Homes and Communities). Next, the often well-­ intentioned mistakes of the mid-­ twentieth century can frequently be reclaimed by selective conversion of suitable public housing blocks to community or individual ownership. Appropriate buyers and renters include community housing associations and student accommodation bodies, as well as such renters as one and two-­ person households of young people, empty nesters and childless couples. Clear legal and financial controls, along the lines of New  York’s CDCs can ensure that the communities that emerge from these inclusive policies enjoy both the security and responsibilities of ownership. It is clear that such solutions require the kind of ‘joined up’, cumulative and inclusive approaches of purposeful and responsive community planning. These will involve community consultation and engagement, as in Manchester’s Northmoor (Northmoor Community Association 2021), coherent combinations of social and physical activation as in Bijlmermeer (Tower Renewal Partnership 2008); implementation involving cooperation between public, private and social enterprises as originally intended in the Lea Valley and Stratford Olympic Legacy schemes in East London (Maccreanor Lavington  2012); and the inventiveness of innovative community organisations, like New  York City’s and Cleveland’s CDCs (Wolf-­Powers  2014, Case Western University 2021). Despite obstacles, complexities and shortcomings, such processes are being developed and successfully applied in many local communities throughout the world.

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Planning places Place-­ making, like home-­ making, requires careful collaboration, active listening, and confident participation. In communities, as in families, roles need to be identified and organised, personal space shaped and equipped, communal access planned and provided and methods of participation negotiated. the organisation and distribution of  activities

Place-­ making demands not only providing fair and convenient access to shelter, work, play, learning, health and transport, but also to such rapidly expanding activities as communal child care and retirement living, which are being increasingly emphasised in current political debate. Social inclusion, to provide full scope for individuals and families to express their preferences and personalities as active social beings, is among the most important of the goals of community planning and deciding how new facilities can best be co-­located and integrated should involve consultation on issues including convenience, scale and access. For instance, primary schools need to be small enough for all their students to live within walking or cycling distance, but large enough to justify such necessary facilities as a library, playing fields and varied learning spaces. Similar principles will apply in different ways to clinics and health centres, shops and parks, causing the task of place-­making to involve challenging sequences of progressive problem solving (Alexander 1964). Central Place concepts developed over the last one hundred and fifty years, can be used to guide decisions about how services can best be distributed and located, to promote convenient co-­location and access to activities such as shopping, education, health and transport (Hall  1985). Long-­established theories of central place hierarchies are currently evolving to encompass more multi-­centred forms of settlement, the scale and characteristics of which are discussed later in Chapters 8, Facets of Community and 9, Place, Space and Community Design. They suggest the adoption of more flexible patterns of service distribution and delivery from more dispersed systems of central places, which will be more readily accessible to those who need them throughout the growing urban fields and m ­ etropolitan regions of this millennium of high mobility. The extent of these fields will vary according to their purposes, from the global scale distribution of electronic information on the world-­wide web to the very local ­organisation of children’s care and play. Within these most local

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Planning for Community

communities, good inter-­ agency communication and collaboration are needed to improve the capacity of their co-­located schools, clinics, play spaces, local government offices, shops and active community and public transport systems to foster secure, convenient and sociable community life. the shaping of  space

When consulted, local communities often indicate particular concern for issues of urban design; and community planning presents invaluable opportunities to shape the scale, density and appearance of places to reflect these preferences (Menzies et  al.  1997). Firmly based starting points can be derived from human dimensions of average height of about 1.75 m and eye level at about 1.65 m. On this basis, Kevin Lynch (1961,  1983) has developed a most useful vocabulary of factors, based on people’s stated perceptions of urban space, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter  9, Place, Space and Community Design. Consulting different samples of city dwellers, Lynch identified, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, the elements of districts, nodes, landmarks, paths and edges, to which might be added the seams which link neighbouring communities. Christopher Alexander (1977,  1979) has taken this approach a stage further to develop a pattern language of 253  models of ideal features, to provide a well-­stocked palette from which communities can choose patterns to meet their own local needs and preferences, discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, Ways and Means. Such vocabularies and patterns can provide valuable tools for basing design in people’s own perceptions and experiences. Alexander (2002) has continued to develop his thinking to distil 15 principles of good design, including such matters as Levels of Scale, Roughness and Repeated Alternation (see also Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design). People’s reactions to existing deficiencies, strengths and preferences can be identified, recorded and used to indicate appropriate kinds of design models and patterns to guide future development. In these ways, design schemes can be developed to reflect and express user objectives across a wide array of activities, while also creating the most imaginative possible new solutions. Randolph Hester (2010) takes this a stage deeper by seeking out people’s senses of ‘sacred places’ in the local environment and then identifying the underlying ‘sacred structure’, which will assist new developments to adopt a scale, form and role that will assist their fitting

into a pattern that will be treasured by local people and visitors alike. The local primary school, or riverside wharf area, for instance, can play invaluable roles in establishing, maintaining and supporting community life, as well as providing a convenient location for after-­hours and weekend community activities. place-­making

Spaces for meeting and mutual support can provide communities with places for focus and opportunities for empowerment. People can meet in shared spaces and buildings to which they have guaranteed rights of access, such as local parks, schools, church halls, licensed premises and meeting rooms over local shops or within cafes or milk bars. Existing communities will often have developed a wealth of such places, and their continuing viability can be supported by reduced local property taxes. Opportunities to support community life through more casual and informal meeting can be provided by small local spaces (Jacobs  1961), incorporating Lynch’s ‘loose fit’ (1983), Alexander’s ‘roughness’ (2002) and Hester’s ‘sacred places’ (2010). Such incidental open spaces have often evolved naturally in established communities, linked to cultural associations. In New Zealand, for instance, traditional Māori Marae, protected from development by the New Zealand Planning Act, provide ideal meeting places as well as spaces for traditional ceremonies (New Zealand Government 1991). Similar spaces can be designated elsewhere in both existing and new communities and linked to cultural and community associations. In such ways, culture and communication can be empowered to help maintain and enhance community life. access

Local communities need convenient daily access to regularly recurring activities of children’s play and weekly access to opportunities for both adolescent sport and adult recreation and self-­ expression. Such opportunities help to promote neighbourly feelings; lacking them, isolated individuals may become mere spectators of life being enacted on impersonal screens. Daily access to work places is also essential to the economic life of modern trading cities. Five different forms of access are available to local communities to bridge such gaps:

• active movement of walking and cycling • personal transport of recently  introduced  electric scooters



• community

transport involving communal pro vision • public transport of mass transit, by bus, train or ferry • Private transport, normally involving the use of individual motor vehicles. Capacities for active movement of walking, cycling and running are deeply enshrined within our genes. It has great survival value in terms of health, awareness and personal security, and still predominates at the local scale in most communities, bringing many advantages to individuals and groups (Solnit  2000). A well-­ walked neighbourhood is far safer than one mainly traversed in a private car at 30–40 mph (40–60 kph), while possibly conducting a phone conversation or half listening to music or a radio program. Pedestrian movement plans can take account of natural topography and drainage. Foot and cycle paths can lead past schools and shops to link to creek corridors that can in turn flow down to suburban and city centres and up to nature reserves and forest parks. These open space networks can then extend onwards and outwards to wilderness areas in the regional hinterland, forming part of a connected system that can encourage individuals and families to combine essential daily movements with health-­giving exercise and promote invaluable community awareness and oversight. The personal mobility afforded by electric scooters is, by contrast, dependent on the shared use of channels originally designed for other purposes. Under different administrations, these may include footpaths, cycleways, bus lanes and in some cases, the sharing of roads with cars. Their advantages include convenience, speed, compact form and ease of use offering the potential for convenient movement around congested cores and radical reduction of demands on peak hour road space. All of this would improve the permeability offered by central areas to workers, residents and visitors. However, many state and local governments, in return for collection of generous operator licensing charges, are permitting their use, without requiring the training, licensing, safe operation or parking requirements necessary for scooter riders’ own safety and that of other users of movement channels. As a result of this under-­ regulation, they are often resented by other travellers, especially cyclists, who are moving at lower speeds and constrained by more regulations. Rules differ among different members of the EU, and among States in both the USA and Australia. The resulting

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problems are well summarised by Hayes (2022), describing the situation in the USA: It can all become confusing as electric scooter laws differ from state to state. They don’t require riders to pass an e-­ scooter-­ specific DMV test; people can get away with riding them without particular knowledge of motorised scooter laws. As a result, they are frequently a danger both to themselves and other users of the channels on which they are travelling. Consequently, they present a classic case of the importance of two principles of community organisation:

• the

need for state governments to make and enforce prudential regulations for new and existing roles and uses that impact the wellbeing of others and • the need for governments to subject new technologies to scrutiny and controls before allowing their introduction for general use. Community Transport is another field of considerable undeveloped potential. One form, car-­pooling for the journey to work, is already widely practiced in many parts of the USA; Cervero (2009) has shown that it frequently combines well with the transit-­orientated developments discussed below. Making financial contributions to the fuel costs of those providing the vehicles, people can car pool/ ride share into a convenient rail or bus way station, where public transport can then take them to within walking distances of their workplaces. Such arrangements can ultimately encourage commuters to get rid of their cars or not to acquire them at all. Other types of community transport can involve different forms of sharing. At the moment a typical outer suburban community may be separately served by school buses, hospital and day care collection vehicles, and shopping buses provided by partnerships between local government and shopping centers, and yet still contain many isolated individuals and households. A system of community transport convened by local government and operated by a local community transport group can combine many of these functions, using vehicles purchased and maintained by the council, but managed and driven by suitably qualified people drawn from the local community. Local councils may also fund ‘Council Cab’ schemes that allow otherwise housebound elderly people to take taxis to shops and community services either free or for a nominal charge for each visit, thus alleviating

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Planning for Community

the worst effects of the isolation of the elderly and the disabled. At the other end of the age scale, ‘walking buses’ can make use of rosters of parents to collect and take groups of children to their local school, combining healthy exercise and sociable contact with the development of children’s capacities for observation and conversation. Such community induction into active transport can also establish good habits to help reduce their later carbon footprints as adults. Good public transport is often the tipping point between an isolated and alienated location and a vigorous and confident community, enabling people to join in sociable life, instead of staying at home watching shadows moving around a screen. The profit and loss account of public transport should therefore not be calculated solely in terms of the costs of fleet maintenance and ticket revenue: equally important are its contributions to community vitality and safety. Regular and convenient public and community transport, whether by buses, trams, trains or ferries, can have wide-­ ranging beneficial effects. People may be encouraged to move around the city and suburban streets at many times of the day and evening, to enjoy increased social contact through being able to visit friends and establish informal relationships with others. Commercial prosperity may be promoted, with shops enjoying an expanded clientele and employers an enlarged labour pool. The personal autonomy of both the young and old and those disqualified from driving by health may be transformed. Supporting nets of local cycle and footpaths can be designed and built to focus on rail and bus way stations to form nodes in the communications net and bring bustling activity to district centres with their shops, clinics, council services and proximity to local primary schools. All members of the community may be helped to become more equal participants in an active society. Private transport cannot, and should not, be overlooked. From the days of 5000 years ago when the invention of the wheel made possible the introduction of buffalo and horse-­drawn vehicles and chariots and more recently, cars and SUVs, such private carriages have become the emblems of personal power and independence. The car has come to be seen as a symbol of a free society enabling people to move freely and expand their range of choices across a wide range of jobs, schools, play spaces, entertainment opportunities and living locations. There are many positive aspects of car ownership and use. Its strengths are choice and

flexibility. Cars and their drivers and passengers can bring life and vitality to local strip shopping centres if parking provisions are made nearby. The social advantages of a private vehicle for maintaining family contact at weekends and during holiday times are enormous. Many mountain and beach resorts are most easily accessed by car. However, its failings include intensifying consumption and disruption of scarce urban space and resources and creation of increasing levels of pollution and conflict. The use of the private motor car becomes an apt expression of J. S. Mill’s dictum that ‘the boundary of one man’s freedom is that of his fellows’ (Mill  1859, 1983). Private transport thus requires careful planning, including evaluation of options, weighing of unintended consequences and consideration of alternative provisions. Whether we are commuters in London and New York, residents of outer suburbs in California, or increasingly affluent Beijing knowledge workers, we cannot all continue to drive 10 m3 of steel or extruded plastic at an average vehicle occupancy of 1.3 persons or less to the same places at the same time along the same congested roads, emitting on average of more than a kilogram of carbon dioxide every 80 km of our journey (My Climate  2022). Given continued increases in metropolitan populations and mounting levels of atmospheric carbon, these problems demand immediate attention. Because unregulated journeys to work in city centres are unsustainable for reasons of space, pollution and resource consumption, they need to be managed by prudent planning policies and parking controls. London and Singapore have achieved success with combinations of excellent public transport of both buses and surface level and underground trains, and the imposition of congestion charges on peak hour traffic. In cities such as Vienna, Rome and Padua, key central areas have recently been closed to daytime traffic and parking, while for over a thousand years nature has ordained the same outcome in the canal-­based elegance of Venice. Worldwide, parking controls are being applied with increasing effect. Although private vehicles have become an integral part of human life, this does not mean that they should be given free rein to dominate city life at all times of the day and in all places, irrespective of their effects upon others.iv Looking at the streets of a local community in a typical metropolitan suburb in the developed world over the span of a day, an interesting pattern of movement emerges. As dawn light returns,



active movements predominate. Early morning joggers and walkers can be seen maintaining personal fitness and exercising pet dogs. Soon, they are joined by early commuters, as they emerge from their homes to walk to bus stops or cycle to local railway stations. Later again, driver-­only cars begin to fill the streets on their way to resume their daily battles with congestion on their journeys to work. Then mothers and carers gather children together to escort them to school. By mid-­morning, activity is much reduced, with occasional cars taking housewives and carers to shops, gymnasiums and part-­time jobs. From late afternoon onwards, the morning rush hour pattern is reversed with return journeys to home again choking the streets until intensity declines between 6 and 7 pm. By the time dinner is finished and children are settled to homework, movement is reduced to a steady flow of couples and groups, some walking to bus stops and others driving through the now calm streets to social occasions and entertainment attractions. Outside the 90-­ minute morning and afternoon rush hours, the streets function quite well as both meeting places and channels of movement. The inherent manageability of this pattern of access has been enhanced by urban development policies favouring ‘transit-­ orientated development’ (often known simply as ‘TOD’), which integrates transport and land use, concentrating new housing around public transport nodes, linked to hinterlands of about 5–10 minutes walking distance, or a radius of approximately 500–1000 m (Cervero  2009). Within this walking radius, commercial buildings and residential apartment blocks may rise to as much as 6–8 storeys (or 16–24 m) in height. TODs of this sort can achieve densities of 200–300 persons per hectare, producing populations as high as 50,000 people in their compact core within 500–600 m of the local transport station, capable of supporting a good array of commercial, health, educational and recreational and cultural facilities. Such approaches suggest that prudent diversion of journeys to and from work onto public and community transit combined with the mounting shift towards electric vehicles with their greatly reduced carbon output could allow people to continue to enjoy the benefits of personal ownership of prized individual vehicles for social, recreational and shopping purposes. Metropolitan areas such as Portland, Toronto, Vancouver and Melbourne (Adams 2009) provide good examples of this approach, often associated with innovations in community engagement and governance that are discussed in the next section.

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Community participation and governance Community governance involves far more than the familiar representation of local wards and constituencies by elected councillors. Equally important is the participation of individuals and voluntary organisations in the management of community activities, outlined in Table 2.1, below. In the most successful and self-­sustaining communities, many of these activities are being performed simultaneously and collaboratively by different sets of ­participants – volunteers and voluntary organisations, as well as delegated bodies and representative governments  –  all capable, at their best, of working together to support each others’ contributions (Putnam 1993, 2000; Etzioni 2006). personal participation

The basis of participation lies in the rights of individuals to control their own minds, bodies, energies and actions, as defined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations  1948). This extends from the most local levels of community activity  –  walking buses, street gardens and community festivals  –  to the internationally significant campaigns and urban movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century that generated the energy to reform city life and government in many countries throughout the world. These contributed powerfully to transforming or replacing such authoritarian regimes as 1970s Spain (Castells 1983; Vila 2014) and 1980s Poland and East Germany. It was such pooling of individual energies that powered the passing of power of the Polish Gdansk shipyards to workers control and later the phasing out of communism throughout the country’s entire system of government starting with the workers movement ‘Solidarity’ in the early 1980s (Dobbs et al. 1981). Later results were even more significant in the tides of individual energy resulting in the 1989 destruction of the Berlin Wall and the later abandonment of the Soviet regime itself in Russia. It must be acknowledged that such individual freedoms and rights to personal choice are now being threatened by the resurgent tide of repressive government, at its most blatant in the campaigns by the People’s Republic of China in Xingjian and Tibet and by Russia in its neighbouring countries of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, where it is currently confronted by the heroic defiance and defence of its people’s rights to individual and

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Planning for Community

Table 2.1  Forms of local community governance. Source

Personal participation

Individual

Individuals’ personal Membership of Councils Membership of Membership of energies and rights of Social Service and school committees, political parties and to apply them in environmental action, and community support groups free associations, e.g. conservation and space and community service, resource management conservation street gardens, city groups. Participation in management farms, low carbon community centres groups networks, urban social movements Accountability Churches and charities; Management Workers and Housing provisions for e.g. housing, community boards of public Cooperatives, management of care, welfare and and community management and non-­government health services, sport, enterprises, e.g. maintenance of local organisations play and sheltered voluntary school systems, e.g. urban committees, (NGOs), and workshop activities, farms, open space neighbourhood community community festivals, and natural habitats, association housing trusts and social support activities, community festivals, committees, elected child care centres e.g. home visiting ‘Meals street parties, vacation School Boards in on Wheels’ groups, camps and holiday USA and Canada schemes lay groups, sporting associations, bulk buying and recycling networks Communication, self-­ Resource conservation, Community Peak body Community expression and sharing: community gardens, stakeholding Councils and community farms and urban agriculture and membership coalitions gardens, choirs, dance and active transport of local plan representing local clubs, yoga groups, initiatives of bodies like preparation and activist, functional community theatres, Transition Towns administration and voluntary etc. teams groups

Organised Group

Community interaction and Life

Voluntary organisations

national independence (Schlein 2022). Such recurrent excesses provide renewed reminders that the rights of citizens to participation in governance, if not energetically exercised, may be rapidly usurped by self-­promoting populists and military dictators. groups and voluntary organisations

In more peaceful expressions of this spirit of local participation, groups such as Bali’s Water Subaks have for centuries worked together to manage open space, common areas and shared resource systems (Suarja and Thyssen  2003). Such bodies often grow to become highly significant at broader national and global scales, as have both the ­ Grameen Bank, starting in Bangladesh and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, starting from its base in the Basque region of Northern Spain and rapidly spreading from its original roles in finance and production to make transformative contributions to the conduct and governance of education, housing and community life. Such creative energy is also expressed in the community

Delegated management

Representative government

choirs, theatres, dance groups, ramblers’ associations, cultural organisations and book clubs that create the social capital to sustain community life through collaboration rather than coercion. In so doing they have also helped to shape events, such as the local emergence of Gay and Lesbian communities into the mainstreams of life in western democracies of the last 20 years, symbolised by occasions such as Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, as well as the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Me Too’ movements of recent times. Individual voluntary organisations of this sort may follow a life cycle from birth, through maturity to decline, but overall their influence is indestructible. It reappears in new forms and organisations that span, for instance, from local street gardens to the international environmental networks that aim to transform community life in developed countries and to support the rights of communities as far afield as the island states of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatened by sea level rises triggered by global warming. They have potentially significant roles to play in both local and global governance (Monbiot 2003).



Churches and charities are also often involved. In the United States, ‘Charitable Choice’ (­Etzioni 2004: 167) recognises their roles by advocating devolution of major responsibilities in the administration of welfare to such organisations. Devolution of powers and funds to voluntary agencies is also a major theme in ‘Third Way’ and ‘Fourth Way’ politics discussed earlier in this chapter. As voluntary organisations develop and take on formal structures, they often evolve into social enterprises such as Housing Associations and managers of major social assets in education, income and health including the Salvation Army and the United Way. Such organisations are involved in daily events at scales ranging from the provision of morning breakfasts to boarding house residents to regular local clean-­up days and systematic recycling programs. Networks may grow very quickly. Transition Towns, for instance, spreading from its origin in the small English seaside town of Totnes in 2005, grew in less than five years to a Transition Network that is now involved in Transition Hubs in nearly 300 cities and towns in 16 countries in five continents, all aiming to create initiatives to help communities make transitions from fossil fuel dependency and mass consumption to living within sustainable limits (Transition Network 2022). After the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the very partial successes of the 2016 Paris Climate Change Agreement, such voluntary organisations re-­doubled their efforts to provide global ecological leadership by voluntary action, as many governments turned their attention away from global environmental management (Avaaz Organization 2022). official representation

There is a widening gap between the small scale of local communities, grounded in the relatively intimate life of daily personal contact (see Table  2.1 above), and corresponding electoral units, which are generally being enlarged in response to the expanding scale of city regions. In Toronto, for instance, the 1996 electoral reform increased the most local level of city administration to a scale of 2.3  million people, which has since grown to 2.8 million; the city’s 44 wards thus now have an average population of over 60,000 people each. In Brisbane, a population of more than 1.3  million is similarly divided into 26  wards forming the most local level of representation of around 50,000 people each (Demographia  1997; City of Toronto  2022;

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Brisbane City Council  2022). This rapid escalation of scale, which is removing people further and further from direct contact with their elected representatives, is increasing the importance of the participation by individuals and voluntary organisations in both long-­standing and newly emerging roles of local governance. In the USA and Canada, elected School Boards provide a special case of such representative governance, often credited with providing a fertile training ground for larger and wider forms of government. Despite problems of distance, motivation, commercial co-­option and the challenges of populism, representative democracy remains the prevailing system of government for more than half of the world’s population, even if precariously so. As Winston Churchill is credited with commenting ‘The only thing that can be said in its favour is that all known alternatives are worse’. This should not prevent us from seeking to tackle its evident current failures including venality; undue influence by commercial interests, such as media magnates; populist pandering to electorates’ baser instincts; and avoidance of major long-­term issues. Measures to tackle these problems are discussed in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation. Some reforms speak for themselves. Electorates should be small enough to allow genuine communication and representation. Safeguards are needed to forestall collusive arrangements between media owners and political party establishments. Factional interests should be prevented from taking priority over more widely felt and important public concerns. Grass roots link with local groups and Community Governance and Participation should be enshrined and nurtured as effective means of balancing dangerous and potentially corrupting influences. There are some practical ways to maintain and improve communication and representativeness:

• Local Ward Community Boards may be elected

at the same time as local government councillors, as has been mandated in New Zealand, since 1993 (Local Government New Zealand 2022). This could do much to bring life back to the grass roots, which elsewhere are currently withering in many representative democracies. • Systematic support of Neighbourhood Associations along the model successfully adopted for the past 30 years in Portland, Oregon (discussed in more detail in Chapter  10, Community Governance & Participation) has equal potential to transform the relations between local governments and local communities, by accurately

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Planning for Community

reflecting and balancing the different and complementary roles of participatory and representative democracy. • Community governance and planning can benefit greatly from recognising the potentialities of informal and participatory arrangements and devolution of powers, roles and funds to local groups, in line with the Principle of Subsidiarity (which states that all government powers should subside to the lowest possible level at which they can be effectively performed). The field of governance is much wider, deeper and more fertile than simply electing a preferred government at intervals of three to five years.

Conclusion: the durability of local communities of place and contact Despite the universal impact of electronic communications and the Internet, the importance of local community life has never been greater. The local community remains the place where children acquire their values and attitudes, learn how to socialise, develop skills of living and thinking; negotiate conflicts; and establish positive or negative attitudes towards personal responsibility and social life. Added to these, new roles in health and safety are also emerging, emphasised by the challenges of climate change and its associated recurrent disasters of fire and flood and by the impacts of mutating pandemics that have shifted the focus of new urban activity from crowded single centres to multiple and more local ones, as people become accustomed to the advantages of working from home and communities recognise the dangers posed to personal convenience and public health by continuing mass concentrations of work and travel. Meanwhile, local communities also remain the places where people can learn to manage the ‘shock of the new’ in times like these of unusually rapid rates of change. In an increasingly systematised world, the local community provides both the nursery for healthy development and the stage where the personal, creative and playful characteristics of individuals can and should be enacted in the everyday performances and rewards of community life.

Endnotes i Kropotkin went on to develop the theme into an advocacy of collaborative local governance in his Fields,

Factories and Worships of Tomorrow (1974). Earlier, in Renaissance Europe, Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516,  1965) had advocated a society in which local groups cooperated in work and recreation, with collaborative involvement in such enjoyable communal activities as cooking, eating and discussion. The example of Robert Owen’s large model industrial community of New Lanark (1799–1821) involving 1,600  workers organized on cooperative principles, was taken to further levels of mutual aid in Fourier’s proposals for Phalansteries, or collaborative communities of shared production, advocated in his 1829 New Industrial and Societal World. The organisational basis of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities were deeply imbued with these cooperative principles of community associations enjoying common ownership of the entire array of community land and dwellings, and making inclusive social provision for all citizens of whatever condition, specifically the blind, the deaf, the orphaned, the inebriate and the impoverished (Fishman 1982, pp. 114–116). ii This is still proving very influential in the widespread resistance currently being mounted by local communities throughout India to the policies of concentrated investment and mass urbanisation of current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi (Azad 2020). iii The Webster’s Dictionary definition of ‘Bidonville’ is a shantytown on the outskirts of a city, characterised by squalor and extreme poverty, as in France and formerly Algeria or Tunisia. iv A celebrated ‘Mr Magoo’ cartoon of the nineteen sixties depicts the bumbling ‘Everyman’ character of Mr Magoo, emerging from his front door as an amiable and smiling Mr. Walker, patting his dog on the head, greeting passing neighbourhood children and walking to his car, where he is instantly transformed into a snarling, fierce and long-­fanged Mr Wheeler who drives out of his garage and spreads death, destruction and dangerous fumes throughout the city!

References Adams, R. (2009). Transforming Australian Cities, Melbourne, City of Melbourne. Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form (reprinted 1979). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, C. (1977). A Pattern Language. New York: OUP. Alexander, C. (1979). A Timeless Way of Building. New York: OUP. Alexander, C. (2002). The Nature of Order, Book One, The Phenomenon of Life, Book Two, The Process of Creating Life, Book Three, A Vision of a Living World, Book Four, The Luminous Ground. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Andrew Mawson Partnerships (2022). Building Communities. https://amawsonpartnerships.com/ (accessed 7 July 2022).



Association for Neighbourhood and Housing Development (ANHD) (2012). From collaboration to transformation: the initiative for neighbourhood and citywide organising and the power of grassroots community development. New  York: ANHD. https:// anhd.org/report/collaboration-­t ransformation-­ initiative-­neighbohood-­and-­and-­citywide-­organizing-­ power (accessed 1 January 2023). Australian Broadcasting Commission (2021). How does Greenland’s election impact Australia? https:// www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/ greenland-­e lection-­t he-­b ackstory-­w ith-­i sobel-­roe/ 13293104 (accessed 25 October 2022). Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022). Brisbane, 2021 Cen­sus, all persons. https://abs.gov.au/census/find-­ census-­ data/quickstats/2021/LGA31000 (accessed 1 January 2023). Avaaz Organisation (2022). A World in Action. https:// secure.avaaz.org/page/en/about/ (accessed 25 March 2022). Avaaz Organization, 2022, A World in Action https:// secure.avaaz.org/page/en/about/ accessed 25 March 2022. Azad, T. (2020). ‘Polarisation, repression and resistance in Modi’s India’. http://isj.org.uk/polarisation-­ repression-­and-­resistance-­in-­modis-­india/ (accessed 7 July 2022). Barlow, M. and Clarke, T. (2001). Blue Gold. http:// www.globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/03bluegold.pdf (accessed 1 January 2023). Bestor, A. (1970). Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bornstein, D. (1997). The Price of a Dream, the Story of the Grameen Bank. Dhaka: The Grameen Press. Brisbane City Council (2022). Brisbane Community Profiles. https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/about­c ouncil/governance-­a nd-­s trategy/business-­i n-­ b r i s b a n e / b u s i n e s s -­o p p o r t u n i t i e s / b r i s b a n e -­ community-­profiles (accessed 25 October 2022). Brown, B. (2015). Krumholz and Equity Planning in Cleveland. https://teachingcleveland.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2015/03/Norm-­K rumholz_and_ Equity_Planning_in_Cleveland-­ final.pdf (accessed 7 October 2022). Burgess, E. (1925). The Growth of the City (ed. R.E. Park, E.W. Burgers, and R.D. McKenzie). The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Case Western University (2021). Community Devel­ opment Corporations. https://case.edu/ech/articles/ c/community-­development-­corporations (accessed 1 January 2023). Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. London: Arnold. Cervero, R. (2009). ‘TOD & Car Sharing: A Natural Marriage’ Access. Transport Research at the University of California, No 35, Fall, 2009. Childe, V. (1976). What Happened in History. London: Penguin.

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City of Toronto (2022). Ward Profiles. https://www .toronto.ca/city-­g overnment/data-­research-­m aps/ neighbourhoods-­c ommunities/ward-­p rofiles/ (accessed 5 January 2023). Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998). The Associational Economy, Firms, Regions and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dantas, A. (2022). Refugee Camp: from temporary settlement to enduring forms of human settlement. https:// www.academia.edu/77003228/Refugee_Camp_from_ temporary_settlement_to_enduring_form_of_human_ habitat (accessed 7 October 2022). Delafons, J.  (1969, 2003). Land-­Use Controls in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Demographia (1997). Local Government Reorganization in the Greater Toronto Area-­a Review of Alternatives. http://www.publicpurpose.com/tor-­d emo.htm (accessed 1 January 2023). Dobbs, M.R., Karol, K.S., and Trevisan, D. (1981). Poland, Solidarity, Walesa. Oxford: Pergamon. Etzioni, A. 2004; 2006, The Common Good, Cambridge, Polity Press. Etzioni, A. (2006). The Common Good. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fishman, R. (1982). Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Florida, R. (2004). The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Geyl, J. (2011). Cities for People. https://www.slideshare .net/alabarga/jan-­gehl-­cities-­for-­people (accessed 9 January 2023). Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gray, F. (1976). Selection and Allocation in Council Housing. Transactions of Institute of British Geographers, NS, 34-­46 (cited in Short, 1996). Hall, P. (1985). Urban & Regional Planning. London: Allen & Unwin. Hall, P. (2002). Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning & Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, P. (2014). Good Cities, Better Lives, How Europe Discovered and Lost the Art of Urbanism. London: Routledge. Hayes, N. (2022). Scooter Guide: what are the rules in the USA for electric scooters? https://scooter.guide/what-­ are-­the-­rules-­in-­the-­us-­for-­electric-­scooters/ (accessed 8 September 2022). Hester, R.T. Jr. (2010). Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heywood, P. (1974). Planning and Human Need. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Heywood, P. (1998; 1997). The Emerging Social Metropolis, Progress in Planning. Oxford: Pergamon/Elsevier. Heywood, P. (2006). Universal Rights and Global Wrongs. Commonwealth Association of Planners Newsletter. Heywood, P. (2018). Growth plans and growing pains in Brisbane’s sunbelt metropolis. In: Urban Regeneration in Australia (ed. K. Ruming), 19. New York: Routledge.

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Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jephcott, P. (1971). Homes in High Flats. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Kropotkin, P. (1939). Mutual Aid. London: Penguin. Kropotkin, P. (1974). Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow. London: Allen & Unwin  (first published 1899, Boston, MA). Lansing, J. (1996). Priests and Programmers: Technology of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. New  York: Princeton University Press. Local Government New Zealand (2022). Community Boards. https://www.lgnz.co.nz/local-­government-­ in-­nz/community-­boards/ (accessed 5 January 2023). Lucassen, L. (2005). The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Residents. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lynch, K. (1961). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1983). A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Maccreanor Lavington (2012). Olympic legacy, A new piece of the city. https://www.maccreanorlaving ton.com/work/detail/olympic-­legacy/ (accessed 10 January 2023). Menzies, C., Rogan, B., and Heywood, P. (1997). Social Planning Guidelines. Brisbane: Local Government Association of Queensland. Mill, J.S. (1859 1861,1983; Mill J, 1983 (first published 1861)). Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (ed. H. Acton). London: Dent. Mitra, S. (2001). Making local government work: local elites, Panchayati Raj and governance in India. In: The Success of India’s Democracy (ed. A. Kohli). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monbiot, G. (2003). The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World. London: Flamingo. More, T., 1965, Utopia, Harmondsworth, Penguin (first published 1516). Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New  York: Harcourt, Brace and World. My Climate (2022). My carbon footprint. https://co2 .myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=5149579 (accessed 8 October 2022). New Zealand Government (1991). Resource Management Act. Wellington: Author. https://legislation.govt.nz/ act/public/1991/0069/latest/DLM230265.html. Newman, O. (1973). Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City. London: Architectural Press. Newman, P. and Kenworthy, K. (1989). Automobile Dependence: A Sourcebook. Aldershot: Gower. Northmoor Community Association (2021). Northmoor Community Centre, https://hsm.manchester.gov .uk/kb5/manchester/directory/service.page?id= kH9hH1rM7P0 (accessed 9 January 2023). OMA, Office Work Search (2022). Bijlmermeer redevelopment. https://www.oma.com/projects/bijlmermeer-­ redevelopment (accessed 1 January 2023).

Putnam, R. (1993). Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Reuters (2009a). Madrid calls time on shameful shanty town. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE56R 0P020090728 (accessed 5 January 2023). Reuters (2009b). Gypsy slum a world away from Milan’s fortunes. http://www.reuters.com/article/ idUSL098416920070116 (accessed 9 October 2022). Roberts, B. (2014). Managing Systems of Secondary Cities: Policy Responses in International Development. Cities Alliance. https://www.academia.edu/16904361/ Managing_Systems_of_Secondary_Cities_Policy_ Responses_in_International_Development. Rutter, J. and Latorre, S. (2009). Social Housing Allocation and Immigrant Communities. Research Report No. 4. London: Equality and Human Rights Commission. Schlein, L. (2022). UN report: human rights violations permeate conflict in Eastern Ukraine https://www .voanews.com/a/europe_un-­report-­h uman-­r ights-­ violations-­permeate-­conflict-­eastern-­ukraine/6208123 .html (accessed 13 July 2022). Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Suarja, I. and Thyssen, R. (2003). Traditional water management in Bali. Liesa Magazine. https://www .researchgate.net/publication/237798402_Traditional_ water_management_in_Bali (accessed 9 October 2022). Tower Renewal Partnership (2008). The Bijlmermeer: an Amsterdam success story. http://towerrenewal.com/ amsterdam-­success-­story/ (accessed 4 January 2023). Transition Network (2022). A movement coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world. https://transi tionnetwork.org/?msclkid=5a224859abf011eca949b04 203bae9d7 (accessed 25 March 2022). United Nations (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-­us/universal-­ declaration-­of-­human-­rights. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2022). Vila, G. (2014). From Residents to Citizens: the emergence of neighbourhood movements in Spain. In:  (ed. N. Gallent and D. Ciaffi), 59–78. Wainwright, O. (2022). A massive betrayal: How London’s Olympic legacy was sold out. https://www.theguard ian.com/uk-­news/2022/jun/30/a-­massive-­betrayal-­ how-­londons-­olympic-­legacy-­was-­sold-­out (accessed 17 January 2023). Wikipedia (2022). The Economy of Manchester. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Manchester (accessed 16 October 2022). Wolf-­ Powers, L. (2014). New  York City’s community-­ based housing movement: achievements and prospects. In: Community Action and Planning Contexts, Drivers and Outcomes (ed. N. Gallent and D. Ciaffi), 217–236. Bristol University Press.



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World Atlas (2022). The Levittowns of the United lifeandstyle/2009/nov/22/liverpool-­d eprivation-­ States. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-­ broken-­britain (accessed 1 January 2023). levittowns-­of-­the-­united-­states.html (accessed 3 Yunus, M. (1998). Socially Conscious Capitalism: Towards a January 2023). Poverty Free World, Public Lecture Transcript. Brisbane: Yates, R. (2009). Inside Broken Britain. The Guardian Queensland University of Technology. (22  November 2009). http://www.guardian.co.uk/

3

Communities of Interest and Interaction

Introduction: scales of community organisation and issues Chapter 2 focussed on the local communities where many of life’s daily activities take place. This chapter widens the scope to include the larger scales of community life that are becoming increasingly significant, including civic, regional, national, supranational and global communities, which are creating associations of mounting significance and influence in the contemporary world. A separate section of this chapter is accordingly devoted to each of these levels:

• city communities; • regional communities; • national communities; • Supranational political communities; • Global communities; • Integrating the many levels of community planning.

Two concluding sections then draw together the common themes of the contributions of ‘mixed scanning’ and the challenges posed by managing simultaneous membership of communities of different scales. Though all five levels of community interact and influence each other, the ways they do this, indicated in Table  3.1 below, are identifiably distinct (local communities, discussed in the preceding chapter are included for purposes of comparison).

Cities as communities Cities are now humanity’s most significant form of settlement, accommodating more than half of the world’s population (United Nations-­Habitat 2022). They are the places where shelter, work, play, education and social life most regularly overlap with

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

administration and regulation. People associate strongly with their combination of contact, culture and history, but their dynamism gives rise to problems of sustainability. Because they have accommodated so much of the explosive growth of human population of the last century, they have become the greatest consumers of natural and human resources. Although most now have some form of responsible local government, reflecting the needs for coordination of their high levels of daily and weekly interaction, they remain very much zones of conflict and contestation. Writing in 1958, in the midst of their century-­long period of explosive growth, the American sociologist, Don Martindale commented: Every city.  .  . is an argument in millions of kilowatt-­hours, millions of short tons of coal, iron, steel, concrete and brick. It is a metric assertion in linear miles of steel rails. It is a rebuttal in cubic feet of air space.  .  . It is a protest expressed in terms of percentages of criminality, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, recidivism, mental illness and senility. It is a suave assurance in volumes of transactions, in gross sales, in amounts of credit, in retail and wholesale vales, in the size of payrolls, in cash services and balances. It is not, however, lacking in institutions of service and governance. He goes to ask. What is a city without political parties, bosses, machines, chambers of commerce, credit associations, labour unions, factories, newspapers, churches, schools, welfare agencies philanthropic societies, humane societies, museums, art galleries, lodges, zoos, auditoriums, parks, playgrounds, slums, red light districts . . . jungles, sanitation plants and taxi cab companies? (Martindale 1958, p. 10) Martindale’s synoptic view suggests that sensitive application of community planning principles is required if we are to manage the vitality of the city without destroying its energy. Jane Jacobs in a series of milestone books over a period of more than 40 years investigated the ideas that should



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Table 3.1  Types and characteristics of different scales of communities in the contemporary world. Type

Basis of community

Characteristics and trends

Locality Identifiable Neighbourhoods with shared interests. City Established city communities

Shared spaces and services and regular personal daily-­ weekly contact

Sense of community Access to adequate 5,000–500,000 reinforced by shared services; pace and scale environmental and of physical and economic social experiences changes

Integrated administration, regulation, and exchange of goods and services Shared cultural, social, economic and environmental activities, institutions, concerns and problems Established legal, linguistic and cultural institutions and affiliations. Trade, culture, peace keeping and international relations

Cultural, social and Liability to conflicts of 10,000–1 million economic bonds and interest among social and interdependence economic groups

Metropolitan and provincial region Interactive concentrations of population Nation Nation States Supranational associations

Global social, economic and environmental organisations

Shared human values and economic and environmental interests

Typical problems

Intensifying impacts Environmental pollution from rapid growth and degradation and of physical, social, spatial and informational and economic conflicts and productive activities polarisation and networks Organisational, Concerns and debate over financial and extent and legitimacy policing powers of national and group interests Geopolitical and Problems of rapid growth continent-­wide in size, membership, interests in economic roles, populations and and cultural proneness to global promotion and conflicts of interest conflict resolution Global environmental, Conflicts from entrenched communication and national economic, economic systems religious, environmental and military agendas

enliven such city communities and economies (Jacobs  1961,  1969,  1985,  1992,  2004). Recognizing the needs for both cooperation and competition, she viewed the city as a zone of confrontation where ideas and goods can be created and displayed in a cascade of comparison and exchange. Deals are done and honoured because people trust each other to the extent that they can recognise mutual advantage from relations with trading partners who stand to gain longer-­term benefits from further trust-­based associations and transactions.i This approach led Jacobs to devote much time and energy in the last two decades of her life to promoting micro-­credit, which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, makes use of collaborative ‘social collateral’ to replace conventional financial collateral and support the successful participation of formerly poor people and communities in local and wider markets. In rather similar ways, the participants in Cooke and Morgan’s ‘associational economies’, also discussed earlier, rely on each other to enable them to adjust rapidly and effectively to new market preferences.

Population range

500,000–30 millions

1 million–1.5 billion

100 million–2 billion

8 billion, increasing to 10 billion by 2060

Jacobs’s celebrates cities as markets and centres of exchange. She also draws attention to the disastrous effects of the ‘self-­destruction of diversity’ that she observes in the centres of great American cities where trading successes have attracted tidal waves of what she terms ‘cataclysmic money’ bent on concentrating new development in ‘best and highest uses’ devised to achieve short term profits. These then swamp and replace the original mixed uses and set in train processes of overconcentration, which result in economic and physical blight. In order to forestall these market failures, Jacobs is prepared to advocate a measure of cautious community planning, to foster diversity and constrain market monopolies. An equally important civic role, overseen by local democracy, is to act as the centre for the provision of common services. Just as local community life focuses around recurrent human and physical contact and spontaneous meeting, cities tend to be the units of administrative organisation where services can be planned, managed and coordinated, often spanning such related systems as economy,

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health, education, housing and transport. Because they are the ideal places to integrate these activities, general principles of urban form, discussed in more detail in Chapter  9 have been developed for this purpose. Planning methods, detailed in Chapter 5 Ways and Means have been designed to guide this coordination without retreating to rigid or sterile ‘cookie cutter’ formulae  –  which would tend to stamp out rigid and repetitious patterns on the ground – irrespective of people’s preferences or local situations or histories. Cities have always been one of societies’ main generators of economic wealth. Similar forces have made them the centres for a number of other related activities. They provide the focus for journeys to work and for public transport systems, both publicly and privately owned. In societies such as Netherlands and Britain the planning, building and management of public housing has been a major role of city governments. Parks, gardens and management of public open space is another much-­valued role. Cultural activities are frequently most vigorously developed in cities, large enough to generate a community of interest but small enough for shared interests, activities and performances. Health is a common concern, and many countries have local Medical Officers of Health based in City Hall to share oversight of standards of health and prevent overcrowding and insanitary practices that might lead to the spread of disease. Though schools are more often provided at the scale of neighbourhoods and localities, coordination with public transport and open space facilities demands their citywide planning, often by state authorities. Social and physical services of water supply, libraries and solid waste collection are also most usually provided at this level. planning city communities: three general principles

In addition to the advantages of collaboration, three general principles, concerned with administration, space and form, can be applied to the planning of city communities:

• Administrative ‘Subsidiarity’. • Integrated Environmental Design. • Urban Containment. Subsidiarity is the principle of devolving responsibilities and roles for the planning and provision of services and activities to the lowest level at which they can be well performed, in the interests of sensitive decision-­ making, prompt feedback, and opportunities for community involvement

(Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management  2022). This approach can be applied to reinforce and enliven existing and new local hubs, locating facilities such as schools, clinics and libraries around local public transport nodes, and involving communities in their day-­to-­day administration. Integrated environmental design has become all the more important because of the likely effects of climate change producing more volatile and extreme flooding events. New developments can be planned and existing areas managed to take full account of natural features such as valleys, hills, wetlands, forests, shorelines and floodplains. Collaboration between environmental, land use, transport, health, educational and economic planners and agencies can locate new housing, employment and services away from river valleys, creek corridors and coastal wetlands, which can instead be dedicated to open space networks. These can form continuous open space systems that shape and serve the local settlement patterns at the same time as providing active transport routes and spaces for recreation and habitat conservation. Public transport routes joining neighbourhoods and district centres to the central activities core of the city centre will help to maintain the circulating lifeblood of the city. Applied through the cyclical activities of community planning, these principles can progressively steer evolving urban communities and settlements towards more sustainable and attractive forms. Urban containment aims to prevent urban sprawl from creating inconvenient and unmanageable megacities where congestion, conflict and pollution would become the norm, eroding amenity throughout growing cities until they become over built and heavily trafficked dystopias. It is thus of the greatest importance to preserve the habitability of urban communities by ensuring access to open spaces both within and around their current extents. In modern times, this approach has often taken the form of ‘green belts’ maintained around cities such as Portland (Oregon) in the USA  and London and Manchester in the UK (Hall  1973,  2014; Heywood  1997). To avoid these problems of sprawl, such cities have introduced urban growth boundaries, green zones and urban footprints, beyond which open space and rural uses will be protected to preserve amenities and natural resources and act as reservoirs for habitat conservation and recreation. These approaches are now evolving into proposals for regional networks of cities linked by public transport and set among attractive and productive rural and open spaces,



thus also meeting frequently voiced community objectives concerning scale and amenity of settlements and conservation of rural environments (Hall 2014; Roberts 2014).

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57

planning (Faludi and Waterhout 2002). Designation of annual ‘European Capitals of Culture’ in such regional centres as Athens, Glasgow, Lisbon and Liverpool also stimulates interest in their regional communities, based on their shared history and cultural strengths (European Commission 2022).

Regional communities Championing of regional communities dates back to the urbs in rure (towns in the countryside) of early Renaissance Italy, well captured in Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-­century painting, The Allegory of Good Government (Figure  1.1) where the peasants and farm workers are to be seen, filing in at sunset from the rural areas to return to the security, social life and economic vitality provided by the sheltering walls of the city of Siena. Such regional networks developed harmonious relationships between urban resource demands and rural supplies of air, water, food and natural resources. More recently, the evolution of European governance of the last 60 years has been towards building on these foundations to strengthen regional bonds and ensure that actions taken in one part of a region exert beneficial impacts on job creation and educational opportunities in related areas and avoid harmful pollution and resource depletion (Balchin and Sykora 1999). cities and their regions

The continuing contributions of such regional communities, where cities and supporting nets of rural activities have for centuries benefited from shared traditions and cultures, are attracting increasing attention. In mainland Europe, homes of long-­ standing regional cultures, such as Italy’s Tuscany, Netherlands’s Zeeland, France’s Provence, Spain’s Catalonia, Scotland’s Strathclyde and Scandia on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula, are all focuses of mounting regional economic development. In India, the states of Kerala, Bengal and Rajasthan, among others, plan development on a regional scale. Such regions often reflect self-­awareness of historic cultures and patterns of association, which are now converging with new desires to decentralise governance and management within nation states. The European Union is particularly active in promoting this kind of regionalism, building on long-­established feelings of affiliation to promote equality of economic opportunity through distributing assistance under programs such as Structural Adjustment and Objective Three Funds (LeLABA 2022). The long-­running European Spatial Development Perspective also promotes regional

natural resource and valley regions

Another form of regional community, growing out of natural resource conservation of ecological communities combining many species, has deep roots in the natural sciences.ii Rachel Carson in her Silent Spring (1961) demonstrated the need to safeguard the inter-­connectedness of all life forms, combining to make up the unique character of localities and ecosystems. Practical theorists such as Benton MacKaye (1928), Lewis Mumford (1938, 1961), and Marion Clawson et  al. (1960) have  created a synthesis of natural resource conservation, social progress and physical planning that continues to inspire succeeding generations of regional planners and provide firm theoretical grounding for both the resource conservation and regional planning movements of the new millennium. These ideas can be recognised in the pioneering regional planning schemes introduced in many parts of the world during the second half of the twentieth century (Friedmann and Weaver  1979). The trail-­ blazing Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) adopted resource management principles to tackle social and physical problems throughout a very large area including all or part of no fewer than six states, vividly demonstrating the relevance of the concept of the Valley Region (Lilienthal 1944, Hartshorne 1960; Selznick 1984; Gray and Johnson  2005). Playing a centrepiece role in President Roosevelt’s New Deal program, the TVA tackled the three challenges of water on the ground, water in the channel and the transformational role of integrated  regional planning. Dams and roads were built that stimulated agriculture and brought cheap power to a formerly backward region. Eroded slopes were re-­forested and the TVA became the world’s greatest producer of softwood for paper pulp. Isolation was ended and new lakes and old construction camps became the focus of thriving new tourist industries. Farming practices were improved and local economies were benefitted. After nearly 90 years, the region is still one of the less prosperous parts of the country but it has regained self-­confidence, re-­joined the mainstream of national life and avoided some of the more toxic outbreaks of racial violence and bigotry that have characterised other areas of the ‘Deep South’

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lacking such a powerful public employer, practicing strict ‘equal quota’ employment policies. An early Chair of the Management Board, David Lilienthal, was led by these achievements to describe its record as ‘Democracy on the March’. This was by no means centralist planning: almost all of the 40,000 rapidly created new jobs were located within the region and only 10 were in Washington (Lilienthal 1944). Integrated Catchment Management is now being attempted worldwide by regional authorities, national governments and international commissions in locations as widely separated as the Mekong Valley, the Punjab development program and the Rhine River Commission, and has been widened to include discussion of the management needs of entire ‘bio regions’ as widely distributed as the North American Rockies and Cascadia, the Siberian Taiga, Australia’s Mulga Woodlands and Brazil’s El Chaco. Australia’s large Murray Darling Basin is a dramatic example of the need for such integrated thinking and planning, as it faces recurring major problems of alternating periods of devastation by droughts and floods. Environmental degradation and maldistribution of water flow have occurred between its upper reaches in Queensland, its middle ones in New South Wales and Victoria and its lower ones in South Australia, where for a number of the past 15 years, hardly any water has reached the sea at Lakes Entrance (although, in a typically Australian irony, at the time of writing, the entire basin is experiencing its most extreme occurrence of flooding of the past century). This extensive natural and geographic area, draining a sixth of the country’s land surface, is not currently integrated either culturally or administratively, but it does have shared interests based on common environmental resources and natural impacts. Increasingly, such areas should be seen as key sub-­national planning entities, often well-­suited to environmental arrangements by designated bodies, indirectly nominated from constituent areas and jurisdictions (Council of Australian Governments  2008). The present fractured and conflict-­ ridden situation results in repeated failures to manage the effects of natural disasters throughout this, by far the largest of Australia’s river basins. At the same time, improper and socially disastrous economic benefits have been conferred upon various business interests through dubious, often illegal, dealings in water rights and manipulation of compensation funds (MacCallum  2019; Simons  2021). A designated TVA-­ type authority with legislated powers and funds could

provide a promising  way forward out of the current deadlock of conflicting interests, environmental devastation and dubious, often illegal, conferral of water rights and compensation funds. the metropolitan region

A third, and very different, type of metropolitan regional community is experiencing the most explosive growth of all, becoming the dominant demographic entity in the contemporary world. Metropolitan regions such as London, Los Angeles, New  York, Tokyo, Toronto, Mexico City, Mumbai and Shanghai now have populations approaching or even exceeding 20 or 30 millions each and may include as many as 40 or 50  local governments originally intended and designated to manage movement patterns dictated by the horse and cart or rickshaw. They have now grown to accommodate more than a billion people – well over 1 in 5 of the world’s population of 8 billion (World Population Review  2021). This proportion is forecast to rise to more than 1  in 3 by 2025, which is an extraordinary level of spatial concentration for an entire species. There are approximately 400 such conurbations of very dense, populous and inter-­ dependent settlements, each composed of aggregations of hundreds of much more local communities (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018). The most recent UN study has discerned the growth of 40 even more populous mega-­regions, in heavily urbanised areas like Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou, which is already home to 120 million people. Other mega regions are forming in Brazil, Japan and North East USA, linking Boston, through New  York and Baltimore to Washington (sometimes called ‘Boswash’) in a corridor that accommodates more than 50 million people. Others again are developing in India and in West Africa, where they spread across national borders to include cities in the four separate countries of Nigeria, Togo, Mahoney and Ivory Coast (United Nations-­ Habitat  2022). The age of the international urban community may be arriving. Despite falling densities, the world’s forty most populous mega-­ regions cover only a tiny fraction of the earth’s habitable surface, but as early as 2010 accommodated almost one in five of its total population (Vidal  2010,  2023). Although such concentrated populations may sometime experience inter-­group conflicts of interests, they can also favour the recognition and negotiation of values, attitudes and options necessary for effective community planning. Such metropolitan



communities thus have both the capacity and the need to plan coherently. In doing so, they face many challenges:

• to

balance consumption and conservation of resources; • to match demands with supplies of adequate and affordable housing; • to provide infrastructure to meet needs within available resources over both short and long terms and • to reconcile urban needs with region-­wide environmental sustainability. Such metropolitan regions, with populations ranging from 1 to 30 million people are apt units for region-­wide community planning. Some have already developed metropolis-­ wide systems of governance of particular systems such as employment, education, health provision, communications or physical resources. They also have good access to national demographic data and the scientific information and analytical capacities of metropolitan universities. Community governance and planning are required to manage these emerging demographic and socio-­economic giants. Although few such new metropolitan regions have yet acquired integrated over-­arching regional governments, increasing numbers of experimental models are available for review and comparison (Heywood  1997). In the United States, Portland, Oregon, has a directly elected metropolitan government while Miami, Atlanta and Minneapolis-­St Pauls have looser indirectly constituted metropolitan planning organisations. Most, like Kansas with its admirable but under-­ funded Mid America Regional Council (MARC), rely on well-­ intentioned coordinating agencies (MARC 2023). In Canada, too, the tendency is for indirectly elected bodies such as Metro Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Service Board to be nominated by members of their constituent cities. Such separate and indirectly accountable public bodies offer convenient means to provide coordinated services such as water supply, public transport, regional park management and environmental monitoring throughout regional areas sharing common air sheds, watersheds and journey to work hinterlands. Elsewhere, as in London and Bangkok, directly elected Mayors and members of Metropolitan Authorities take responsibility for strategic land use and transport planning, while many other functions continue to be performed by local and national governments. As these rapidly expanding metropolitan regions accommodate an

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increasingly large proportion of the world’s population, they will require effective, innovative and imaginative community governance and planning, whether by power-­ sharing arrangements, devolution of powers or through the designation of fully elective metropolitan  regional bodies on the Oregon and New Zealand models.

National communities In the modern era, the scope of nation states has grown to integrate language, culture, economy, communication and governance within regimes. Most people living today associate themselves with some nation or other. The United Nations itself is based on the gathering of over two hundred separate nation states and is heavily influenced by informal coalitions of these members. Each nation is a centre of power, prestige and privilege, resting on sanctions of military strength and generating its own self-­sustaining culture of literature, music and community life. The nation state is almost as old as the city itself: Upper and Lower Egypt were unified by Menes as long as 5000 years ago (Gibb  1970). A thousand years later, the Epic of Gilgamesh, king of the Sumerian state of Uruk, celebrated in epic poetry the alliance between the  city and its  montane hinterlands that created the ancient states of Mesopotamia (Sandars 2006; Celle 2022). Persian and Roman empires spread far beyond their places and continents of origin and Chinese dynasties imposed Han culture over areas approaching a million square miles. It is a commonplace that the spread of printing – and the use of gunpowder  –  from East Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE-helped to extend the power of nation states to become universal within the space of four centuries (McLuhan 1964). Their cultural, social and economic roots are powerful sources of strength. Even where minority groups maintain their own original languages, national administrations normally employ a single official language, promoting common literary and oral heritages and imposing shared social attitudes and behaviour. Religion, too, tends to become a unifying factor and often reinforces other common bonds within nation states. The major  contributions of such shared heritages to national cultures is demonstrated in the way that people often refer to ‘American Inventiveness’, ‘Greek Philosophy’ ‘Roman Law’, ‘English Drama and Poetry’ and ‘Indian Dance and Music’.

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Economically, the rise of the nation state has coincided with the era of most remarkable increases in human productivity. Concentrations of industrial and military power have supported periods of relatively peaceful, though ruthlessly enforced, top-­down order (Sen 1991, 2009). The ‘Pax Britannica’ of the nineteenth century, for instance, promoted maximum specialisation of function and provided  ideal conditions for the ‘hidden hand’ of the laws of supply and demand to develop trade within and between nations, in line with the free trade doctrines of Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ (1950). Within the nation state, progressive taxation made possible the material support of community life in the forms of public education, health, welfare, transport and communication systems. Socially, many nation states have been successful in creating and maintaining bonds of mutual responsibility to support citizens in need and to create systems of social sharing that make societies more able to survive in difficult times and thrive in good ones. Social and human capital can often be fostered within the protective perimeter of the nation state. Social democratic states have come increasingly to recognise the collective nature of wealth creation and the need for progressive redistribution to forestall destructive social conflicts. In times when there is increasing acceptance of the fundamental importance of communication in community life and planning, the capacity of national communities to communicate in common languages, using established channels and calling upon shared symbols and images is of prime significance (Healey 1995; Forester 1999, 2009). However, there are also many negative aspects to nationalism and the  associated competitive relations among states, which have, for instance, caused Joseph Stiglitz (2002, 2016, 2019) and Amartya Sen (1991,  2009) to condemn the self-­interest of wealthy western nations in maintaining the conditions for permanent debt dependency of ‘Third World’ nations struggling to develop, but constantly obliged to reduce necessary services to their own people to repay outstanding debts on loans which have already, in total, been repaid many times over. Such injustices led George Monbiot (2003) to search for means to establish a global body that could oversee nation states more effectively that the United Nations. Internally, too, nation states have a mixed record. The exclusive spirit of tribalism has frequently stained national community life in the many outbreaks of recidivist bloodletting that indelibly marked twentieth-­ century history. The

atrocities of Germany’s Third Reich against Jews and Gypsies were echoed by those of the Serbian rump of the old Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic against Bosnian Muslims, and the Hutu slaughter of Tutsi neighbours in Rwanda (Robertson 1999). In a less dramatic but nonetheless similar pattern, there is a tendency for national communities to sustain their shared allegiance by denigrating other groups and practicing social exclusion against newcomers, even though they may, like the Huguenots and Jews of past times in Europe and the New World and the economic migrants of the current world, have much to contribute to the economic vitality of their host communities. Another negative aspect of cultural nationalism, as expressed in recent history, is the strong motivation it provides toward the economic and military colonialism, which may have contributed to the devastating social collapse of such colonised societies as those of the Congo Basin of central Africa and current repression in Xinjiang and among the minority communities of Myanmar. Most recently, the brazenly chauvinist justification by President Putin of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates all the worst aspects of nationalist self-­entitlement and reversion to licensed barbarity. Despite the prominence of these dangers of destructive dominance and exploitation, national communities remain amongst the most powerful sources of human energy in the contemporary world. Where regimes are democratic, long-­ established political systems of representation can provide widely understood forums for democratic control. These  may provide indirect public input into policy adoption, whether concerning land use, transport, cultural development, environmental care, resource conservation or climate change. Community planning at the national scale is often the key to effective action. Examples are not hard to find. The New Towns program of B ­ ritain’s mid-­twentieth century, creating more than twenty new communities that have grown to accommodate over a million people is one well-­known example (Osborn and Whittock 1963; Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions  2002). The refashioning of social and economic life throughout the six-­state TVA in the United States, still continuing after 60 years of unwavering Federal support, is another instance of the significance of regional-­ scale community planning. The Netherlands’ reclamation of the Ijsselmeerpolders and the integration of its reclaimed lands to create the new province of Flevoland with



Communities of Interest and Interaction

a current population of over 400,000, is an outstanding example of effective national planning, creating new communities at the local and regional scales (Britannica 2022). Past excesses are, on occasion, also being recognised and redressed. Canada’s determination to confront many decades of abuse and exploitation of its indigenous communities is one such instance (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women  2019). Another is the commitment of the current Australian Government to hold and support a referendum to create a constitutionally recognised First People’s Voice to Parliament to represent the special concerns of the country’s original inhabitants in future legislation (Australia Institute  2022). This resolve to address and redress past wrongs is especially significant because it would amend a national constitution to recognise the specific interests of a particular community  –  an especially clear case of the links between community planning at the national and local scales. Community planners need to embrace and engage with the powers of nation states to shape community life for the better. When coupled with the application of the Principle of Subsidiarity

to allocate decisions to the most local scale of organisation at which they can be effectively conducted, the national scale of community planning can be seen to be of great importance. It is therefore not surprising that much of the most effective local community planning is often instigated from national commitments and discussions. Healey (2007) and Faludi (2005,  2020) both point to the way that national policy communities can provide the funds, energy and above all mandate for planning policies that exert profound effects on local communities throughout the nation. Prominent examples are the provision in both Netherlands and Britain of community access to high-­quality open space through national green belt and urban containment policies. The national tier is an inescapable arena for community planning. Where it is absent, it becomes the ‘dog which did not bark’ as in Conan Doyle’s celebrated detective novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, providing the clue to what has gone wrong. As Figure 3.1 The Scope and Scales of Community Planning illustrates, effective community planning demands not only lateral integration between activities ranging from work and shelter to play and education but also the

NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

SUB NATIONAL/ REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

SHELTER

WORK ACCESS

PARTICIPATION AND ENGAGEMENT

COMMUNITY ORGANISATIONS

Figure 3.1  The scope and levels of community planning.

61

PLAY

SPACE

DESIGN

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Planning for Community

connection of levels from the local to the national and even beyond to the global, with issues such as the accommodation of refugees and environmental conservation.

Supranational political communities The development of supranational political and economic alliances such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) provide convincing examples of the importance of this rapidly developing form of community. The first of such continental alliances in the modern era, the EU, developed out of the post-­World War 2 Common Market, comprising a customs union of the six nations of France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Since its foundation in 1947, it has grown at a remarkable rate to its current scale of 28 member nations with a combined population of almost half a billion. After a history of more than a thousand years of mutual devastation, terror and atrocity, the European nations have now come together to create one of the most effective international collaborative organisations ever known, bringing increases in prosperity and stability to all member nations, and extending its influence far beyond the boundaries of its European origin to include associate members in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The EU now has its own Parliament and President, selected not for reasons of personal charisma, but to reflect consensual values of compromise. The association’s voluntary nature and political resilience have both been recently highlighted by its successful management of the difficult but peaceful secession of the United Kingdom from the Union. In previous centuries such an attempted secession from an established association of states would have resulted in prolonged and devastating war. The EU is much involved in community planning at both the continental and regional scales, with equalisation incentives to rectify long-­ standing competitive disadvantages of such rural regions as Italy’s Mezzogiorno and Sardinia, France’s Brittany, Spain’s Andalusia, the Greek Peloponnese and parts of Southern Poland. As a supranational organisation, the EU has shown remarkable self-­confidence in admitting a series of new members from Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, which are recovering from many decades

of impoverishment under the sway of autocratic and often corrupt communist regimes. Andreas Faludi’s characterisation of the (EU 2020) as a supranational archipelago of sovereign nations is especially apt. The EU has also played significant roles in assisting Bosnia and Kosovo to recover from shocking genocide against minority populations. The European Court of International Justice tried and convicted Radovan Karadzic for war crimes committed 25 years earlier when he was the Bosnian Serb political leader and military commander, including the mass murders at Srebrenica and the 43-­month siege of Sarajevo carried out by forces under his command. It is significant that it is the European Convention on Human Rights that provided the framework for this case to be brought, rather than the United Nation’s International Declaration of Human Rights, which, though of monumental significance, does not contain provisions for bringing perpetrators of violations to justice. Now the Union is negotiating membership for North Macedonia and Iceland, and implementing widespread, though painful economic sanctions against Russia, in retaliation for the mounting litany of war crimes in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Other international organisations that reflect emerging interests are continually coming into being. A Latin American regional body, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC  2022), was formed in 2012 to represent the interests of 32  Latin American and Caribbean Countries, not including the United States and Canada, and influenced by members’ increased political independence and recognition that they now have access to diverse sources of investment capital and political leadership (Weisbrot  2010). Meanwhile, the 10-­ member Association of South Eastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the 55-­state African Union (AU) continue to provide forums for continental-­scale political, economic and sociocultural cooperation, despite the many difficulties being experienced throughout both global regions. Community planning at this supranational scale is destined to become increasingly significant as potential members recognise the advantages of trade, political stability and social progress that can be achieved through international negotiation and collaboration. Previously ignored benefits of enlarged markets for both production and consumption, the development of common currencies and the enjoyment of personal freedom of movement combine to provide fertile fields of exploration for economic, social and spatial planning that transcends national borders.



Global communities International networks are spreading rapidly in response to global events and trends in communications technology impacting local communities more directly than ever before. Rapidly developing information and communication technologies are encouraging such organisations and networks to achieve new levels of significance in both their range and scope. However, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that these brand-­new global organisations have roots going back deep into the history of early Buddhist, Christian and Islamic networks dating from  two and three millennia ago.iii More recently, global communities established to regulate investment and trade, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, have become increasingly significant (Stiglitz  2002,  2019), and charitable organisations such as the Peace Corps, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Medecin Sans Frontieres, Oxfam, World Vision and World Wildlife Fund are spreading their own networks to match and influence those of more official bodies. These community networks prepare their plans on public or community interest criteria, rather than commercial ones, because their aims are mutual benefit and shared values rather than financial profit. The influence of such groups is giving rise to the concept of the ‘­Glocal’  –  with local communities expressing and pursuing global values and causes, and global communities that are dedicated to achieving better local outcomes. These may range from increasing production of food staples such as ‘Green Rice’ to enhancing qualities of local life varying from social justice to environmental conservation. As long ago as the turn of this century, George Monbiot (2003, pp. 2 and 8–9) discerned a loose coalition of activists forming a ‘Social Justice Movement’, which he associated with the World Social Forum whose principles also include combating poverty. Their most recent meeting was held in Mexico in 2022 (The Transnational Movement (TNI) 2022). A different approach to globalism, the advocacy of place-­ less communities originated with such mid-­twentieth century theorists as Melvin Webber (1961, 1969), whose prediction of a global ‘Non Place Urban Realm’ relied on predictions that increasing use of modern communications and information technology would transcend local contexts and create communities of interest with a global span. However, it is important to recognise that many of the prime purposes of such global networks are to generate, coordinate or forestall actions in local and urban spaces, rather than to supersede them.

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Most global networks are therefore associations of widespread, but very real and grounded, rather than ‘virtual’ communities, though they may draw their abilities to enliven local action from powerful new technologies of global communication. Such ‘glocal’ communities are of four main sorts. They may be value-­based like World Vision, Oxfam or Greenpeace; religious like the Jesuits or the Muslim Brotherhood; economic like the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund; or governance based, like the United Nations and its sponsored bodies, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Their growth has been assisted by the rapid expansion in information and communications technology of recent times, but their concerns remain the local occurrences and outcomes that befall actual people in real places. There are strong arguments for global governance to match and control the rapidly expanding power and reach of the global economy that is subjecting billions of poor people throughout the world to unfair terms of trade and causing cycles of indebtedness and devastation of irreplaceable natural resources (Monbiot  2003, pp.  9–11; Stiglitz 2002, 2019). Monbiot discounts the capacity of the United Nations to evolve into this broader role because of the entrenched position on the organisation’s key Security Council of the original mid-­twentieth century founding powers – specifically China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and  the United States  –  all of whom enjoy powers of veto, which they are quick to use. Monbiot, therefore, argues for the establishment of a new World Governing body based on electorates of approximately 10 million people, providing a Parliament, which would therefore consist of about 800 representatives at present world population levels, not dominated by any existing national power structures. He envisages funding the World Government from adoption of the 1945 proposal by John Maynard Keynes to establish an International Reserve Bank (which would replace the IMF and the World Bank) and deploy its income to promote international development and finance the policing operations of the World Government. It is possible that Monbiot’s scepticism about the capacity of the UN to evolve towards the role of World Government is too pessimistic. Current mounting threats of environmental, economic, social and military disasters and chaos may actually cause leaders and their electorates to consider reforms necessary to meet these challenges

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to make the UN more democratic and effective. Recent threats to world health and peace presented by the SARS and Covid-­19 pandemics and acts of global piracy like that of the Russian invasion of Ukraine offer powerful arguments for global governance of one sort or another to protect the interests of all members of the human community. In the meantime, the vitality of global communities of different sorts is demonstrably strong and destined to become more so. Five types, based on concerns for values, economy, religion, governance and communications are identified and summarised in Table 3.2 below:

Such global communities combine local actions and connections with worldwide sharing of values and information. They do not supersede local communities but support them with better awareness and understanding of themselves and each other. As constellations of people experiencing and practicing self-­expression, global and local communities are closely linked by widely based and shared flows of moral, legal and financial support. They exchange information contextualising the situations within which local plans will have to operate, benefiting from wide ranges of shared instances of successes and failures. Most importantly, they

Table 3.2  Bases and spheres of activity of global communities. Basis

Sphere of activity

Examples

Values

Social justice       Global health     Environmental conservation     Climate change

Economy

Investment       Trade   Productivity Social and spiritual welfare     Piety and Social conformity Conversion, Prudential rules, International justice agreements, Concerted action,   Peace keeping

Sharing information, funds and World Vision resources Amnesty International Global conventions and agreements World Social Forum Concerted action and engagement     World Health Organisation Direct action on the ground Medecins Sans Frontieres     Information and publicity World Wildlife Fund Global networking and local action Greenpeace   Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Transition Towns International Monetary Fund and Global division of labour World Bank Direct foreign investment   Increased production and   consumption World Trade Organisation Multilateral Agreement on World Economic Forum Investment

Religion

Governance

Communication

Knowledge       Choice     Information dissemination

Christian Churches, Islamic Movements and Buddhist Associations   Religious revival groups United Nations International Court of Justice International Labour Organisation     UN support for regional peace keeping initiatives (e.g. Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor Leste, Sudan) Social Networking       Open access networks     Organisations such as Face book, My Space and Twitter

Directions

Increasing participation in social action and support   Possibilities of expanded religious extremism Increasing levels of participation and accountability Growth of international public services – e.g. World Health Organisation. Development of international peace keeping capacity Rapid and universal spread of information and disinformation and Media counter attacks   Growth of open edged ‘Wiki’ and similar networks   Struggles over creative and intellectual property and human rights



Communities of Interest and Interaction

apply strength drawn from these global alliances to exchange information and enliven activism. What are the implications for community planning? Global communities like Habitat (Housing), Greenpeace (Environment) and Medicin Sans Frontieres (Health) and networks like the World Social Forum (Social Justice) and the World Trade Organisation (Investment and Trade) have become increasingly significant planning organisations. The same principles of inclusion and communication that apply within local and face-­to-­face organisations become even more important because of the potentially distorting effects of scale and distance. Accountability, two-­ way communication and frequent comparisons between objectives and outcomes are all essential. Basic methods, like those discussed later in Chapter 5, Ways and Means retain their value. It is still essential, for instance, at all scales, to establish transparent planning processes that clearly identify goals, and link information, options and evaluation to strategies and implementation. Collaboration at each of these stages becomes even more essential. The extra complexities of global scale are well justified by the richness of information and support that can flow from the shared values and diverse experiences made available by the global reach of these communities of interest. These more than match the inherent complexities of distance and diversity.

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Integrating the many levels of community planning An example based on the case of Brisbane’s Norman Creek (Box  3.1 below) can help to illustrate this simultaneous involvement of many different scales of community life and planning in a single, initially quite local, issue. Norman Creek’s community action and planning grew out of local concerns over repeated flooding of neighbouring housing, and a general anxiety about the lack of environmental maintenance and management that was causing this potential asset of the Norman Creek valley to run downhill to start to attract unwanted uses such as fly-­tipping and industrial encroachment. The Norman Creek Flood Action Group (NCFAG) was formed on a stormy summer afternoon in a local school, where speakers had to shout to make themselves heard above the pounding of a tropical rainstorm on the tin roof of the old school building. Links were made with local universities, whose students collected systematic information on population, employment, environment, flood characteristics, traffic flows, open space patterns and governance issues in the area and around the creek catchment. Extensive research was conducted at the city level on the separate policies of the Parks, Engineers and Planning Departments and the city’s Office

Box 3.1  Norman creek flood mitigation and waterway common Norman Creek is a short, flood-­prone stream that flows through Brisbane’s inner, eastern suburbs to join the Brisbane River estuary a few kilometres downstream from the city centre, for which competing plans were being developed in the mid-­1980s. The local Norman Creek Flood Action Group (NCFAG) aimed to link flood mitigation to provide open space and habitat conservation, improved residential amenity, and regulation of industrial development and traffic. It aimed to preserve the area as a mixed-­status creek-­side inner-­city suburb. Simultaneously, a Sydney finance company, Turbo Investments, bought a large disused industrial site on the southern slopes of the valley and proposed a scheme that would solve the flooding problem at no cost to the city council by straightening and culverting the creek and creating a large area of approximately twenty hectares of flat land for industrial development with direct access to major road and rail routes to the city centre and south-­east. Different sections of Brisbane’s city council and the state government were lobbied by both sides, with responses varying between occasions and departments. Support for the Turbo proposals came from the city works, parks and industrial promotion sections, impressed by cost savings to the public purse. The city planners adopted studied neutrality, unimpressed by the demanding style of the NCFAG, and the implications of a ‘planning led’ approach to local development. The state government’s departments of transport and education were interested because of issues of major road construction, and potential impacts on several school sites and therefore  kept careful watching briefs.

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Planning for Community

The NCFAG worked with planning staff and students of the Queensland Institute of Technology (now Queensland University of Technology) to produce an alternative scheme that would preserve the existing valley and meanders for open space and habitat conservation. By creating a medium-­level floodway across the meanders, excess water would be quickly removed from the valley in times of flooding, preventing the accumulation of water that had previously caused flooding and transforming the creek from a barrier to a focus for recreation, conservation and transportation. This plan was enthusiastically adopted by the local community who resolutely maintained their commitment through the succeeding four years of conflict and negotiation. The lord mayor formed a liaison committee, which received promises of state and federal funding for flood mitigation, but passive resistance by council officers, who disliked the implied ‘local area management’ approach, resulted in two years of abortive discussions and the eventual collapse of the committee. Following this period of deadlock, and under the shadow of a council election, the lord mayor, Alderman Sallyanne Atkinson, instructed the manager of her Inner Suburbs Action programme to resolve the issue. Consultants were appointed to produce a scheme under the guidance of a community consultative committee with equal numbers of NCFAG, schools and industry members. Council officers were to be co-­opted, as necessary without voting rights, though ultimate decisions remained with the city council. The resulting scheme, adopted by the council in 1990 and gaining a 1991 Planning Institute award for strategic planning, largely incorporated the 1986 QIT scheme for balanced conservation, mitigation, integrated industrial and educational sites and residential improvement. In November 1990, the Norman Creek Community Common was opened, where the first of several community festivals was held the following year. By 1994, the council was referring to the area as ‘Norman Creek Waterway Park’. For nearly 20 years the creek corridor has provided a network of bike and walking paths and inner-­city natural habitats which link the service hub of Stones Corner to the residential areas of Coorparoo and Norman Park to the shores of the Brisbane River estuary. Community participation has continued to thrive. In 1994, a proposal for a massive flyover spanning the creek was successfully opposed, and the city council is now in partnership with the local N4C (Norman Creek Catchment Coordinating Committee) to maintain and extend areas of public access and nature conservation along the creek’s meandering course (see Figures 3.2–3.4).

Figure 3.2  Norman Creek Greenway: Athletics track, cycle path and creek corridor regeneration in inner Brisbane.

Figure 3.3  Saturday Morning at the creekside skatepark.



Figure 3.4  Team training in Greenway playing field with playground and creekside revegetation behind.

of Economic Development. In particular, the Lord Mayor’s Office was involved because of my membership as an associated academic on her Citizen’s Advisory Committee. It soon transpired that the creek corridor, which provided the open spaces of three adjacent schools, was a significant concern of the State Education Department. Equally, the Commonwealth ­Government was the responsible body for providing flood mitigation funding, and the federal MP was approached and confirmed that funds would be available for the scheme that had been produced by the collaborative work of the local universities and the NCFAG. Metropolitan access needs were also involved because it emerged that the State Department of Main Roads had been planning to take advantage of the likelihood of massive consolidation and tipping of the valley (to create a new industrial estate) to itself plan a new 160-­m flyover to carry a major radial road over both the creek and a nearby suburban commuter railway line. This proposal had both traffic generation and aesthetic implications that caused a great deal of local concern. Within a couple of years of the local community meeting, the issue had grown to involve two universities, five sections of local government, three state government departments and two commonwealth government agencies, as well as a major national-­ scale property developer and voluntary groups concerned with environmental conservation. Not surprisingly, there was little consensus and the situation became deadlocked. The city government would not accept the local community’s flood mitigation scheme, even though it was guaranteed

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funding by the Commonwealth Government. No one apart from the property developers accepted the City Engineer’s Department’s preference for a culverting and tipping scheme. Different sections of the state government held opposing positions, Main Roads favouring the flyover, and Education sympathetic to retaining an open space corridor. The resolution, which took another three years to set in train, resulted from the Lord Mayor’s active participation in global community networks that took her on international visits to locations in North America and Europe afflicted by advanced urban blight and the city rot of the eighties. She reacted by creating a new city council section, which she named Inner Suburbs Action, dedicated to community participation, development of mixed uses and environmental improvement to forestall disasters she had seen develop elsewhere. Despite the strong reservations of many of her own Liberal Party about such an interventionist agenda, the prospect of a forthcoming election meant that the Norman Creek imbroglio had to be resolved and managed in a manner consistent with the objectives of the high-­profile and highly publicised Inner Suburbs Action  –  which in turn meant revisiting the original collaborative community and university plan for an open space creek corridor. This would combine flood mitigation with a number of other community objectives including habitat conservation, residential improvement, limited extension of the existing industrial estate, emphasis on active transport rather than urban freeways and a viaduct and integration of public and private open space including school grounds and flood plain into a council promoted Norman Creek Waterway Park. This would extend for six kilometres from the inner city suburban node of Stones Corner to the estuary of the Brisbane River (Brisbane City Council  1992; Heywood  2013). The Norman Creek Catchment Coordinating Committee, which included a number of members of the original local action group, became the model for a comprehensive set of Creek Catchment Coordinating Committees that formed the city’s most successful initiative in citizen participation in open space management for more than two decades (Brisbane City Council 2022). One of the most significant aspects of this story is that it is not unusual. Most cities could produce several similar narratives, illustrating how the different scales of community ranging from the local to the national inevitably coexist and intersect, involving each other in a dense web of mutual interaction and support.

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Conclusions: mixed scanning for integrated community planning interactions through space and over time

For these reasons of overlapping spheres of influence and time horizons, the practice of ‘Mixed Scanning’ can make contributions of the greatest significance, applying across both time and space (Etzioni 1968). To move confidently into the future, and avoid striding resolutely up dry gullies, we need to identify long-­term directions to test and guide our short-­term actions. Equally, in terms of physical extent and scale, we need to be equally well informed about both local conditions and impacts, and the wider contexts that influence them, reaching as far as global developments and trends. In these ways, we shall be well-­positioned to create and benefit from coordinated and collaborative review and research.iv This balancing of short-­ term needs to ‘muddle through’ with longer perspectives to achieve purposive beneficial change gives rise to methods of ‘cumulative innovation’, which are discussed in Chapter  5, Ways and Means. Essentially, they consist of adopting a cyclical approach to planning, balancing evidence of successes and failures of current actions and policies against systematic comparisons with long-­ term directions, to give rise to regularly renewed sets of proposals for phased action. Grounded in the present, these should propose careful and signposted paths towards better futures. local and wider issues

Mixed scanning also offers useful methods to relate the different scales of planning to each other. An obvious case is the need for local transport planning to take account of citywide policies and journey-­to-­work patterns and problems, and for city transport planning to be grounded in and integrate a sensitive and qualitative understanding of local conditions and needs. The impacts of such global influences as climate change must also, of course, be taken into account, as should national policies on reducing carbon emissions. By contrast, the narrowly focussed incremental planning approaches of many cities’ Land Use Transport Plans of the mid-­twentieth century, designed to respond to immediate demands for more road space, have often left damaging legacies for metropolitan communities because they failed to look at repercussions on other metropolitan systems

of environment, housing and atmospheric pollution or long-­term impacts on localities. They can now be seen as predictable and avoidable mistakes (Hall 1973; Heywood 1974). There is a parallel need for community planning to take into account different spatial scales of community life. This is also reflected closely in matters of governance, discussed further in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation. Community planning activities can help different levels of government to collaborate better with each other. In purely operational terms, there are great advantages for different levels to be well informed about each others’ concerns, motivations and proposals, which often impinge significantly on their own options. the psychology of  spatial comparison

Psychologically, mixed scanning also has considerable contributions to make to contemporary life where rapid developments in transport, communications and information technologies have brought individuals into contact with a far wider range of mental and emotional stimuli than ever before. When we focus on one scale or locality at a time, and consciously postpone our immersion in the others, we can gain a sense of clarity, agency and mastery while still knowing that later on, we shall return to compare these draft findings with longer-­ term directions, and a wider scan of the relevant major forces. In such ways, individuals can come to terms with and benefit from the dramatic increases in stimuli and impacts of contemporary life. Feelings of individual satisfaction and agency can be increased rather than diminished by selectively taking control of the ways we use and respond to these enlarged capacities to know and act. Such potential benefits apply equally to the cultural, emotional and cognitive worlds, by constantly expanding opportunities for people to better understand themselves and their own cultures, by looking through the prism of the eyes of others, as expressed in novels, plays, poetry, dance, song and music. These benefits extend to our appreciation of the diversity and detail of the physical world and its constantly expanding sources of wonder. By momentarily discarding thoughts of the polluted city and the warming world in which we are daily immersed, in a further application of mixed scanning between the ideal and the actual we are able to enter fully into such moments of physical elation



as when we burst into totally committed movement or sense the perfect coincidence of the warmth of the early-­morning sun on our skin and its harmony with the temperatures of our own bodies. Later, we can return refreshed to the different satisfactions of planning better futures, with opportunities for more such moments of self-­actualisation for ourselves and our communities. In such moments, when we are enough for ourselves, we become most sympathetic to the needs of others. We are all simultaneously members of many communities. Daily life takes place in a local community of familiar neighbours and accustomed places. The city is where we work and vote for the local government that provides many of our services. The region provides our resources of refreshing air, drinkable water and the available space on which we depend for life support and where we frequently go for recreation. The nation enacts the laws, which guide our lives, and maintains our borders. International communities are increasingly widening our perspectives of trade, contact and culture towards a continental scale. The communications of the global community reduce contact time between all parts of the connected world to a matter of seconds, creating possibilities for new communities of scholars, traders, activists and investors. Integrated community planning will typically involve an awareness of many of these global, national, regional, metropolitan and local levels. Simultaneous participation in many of these communities contributes to both the strains and the satisfactions of being alive and active  in the twenty-­first century. Recognition of the parallel existence and interdependence of all  these  levels of community at such a wide range of scales can help us to balance and manage the dramatic increases in stimuli and impacts of contemporary life. Such expanded capacities to know, act and control can increase individual satisfaction and agency. Benefits can also be enhanced by forging links among the cultural, emotional and administrative fields, with constantly expanding opportunities for people to better understand themselves and their own cultures through the prisms of the literature, dance and music of others. Similar benefits can extend to our appreciation of the physical world, where diversity and detail can give rise to constantly expanding sources of personal understanding. In such moments, we can scan between personal experience and universal empathy.

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Endnotes i In rather similar ways, the participants in Cooke and Morgan’s ‘associational economies’ discussed earlier, rely on cooperation with each other to meet the challenges posed by new and changing market preferences. ii As far back as the eighteenth century, the Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, provided the taxonomy to describe the distribution and relations of species, while in England, Gilbert White recorded their daily and yearly interactions. Later geographers, including Herbertson in England and Passarge in Germany, identified natural resource regional types based on combinations of such influential factors as climate, soils and topography (Hartshorne  1960). In France, Buache recognised the way that valley regions bring together many elements of topography, geology, microclimate, settlement and movement patterns to form clearly defined regions for purposes of classification and management. Starting in Russia, another geographer, Peter Kropotkin, applied his observations of symbiotic responses to changing natural conditions to develop a theory of mutual aid within and between species throughout regions that is still highly significant for all forms of community planning (Kropotkin 1939). iii Buddhist teachings travelled from India to China, Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Christianity spread from its Mediterranean origins to Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Southern Africa, the Americas and Australasia; and Islam from Arabia to Northern Africa, South Eastern Europe and Central and Southern Asia. Each now forms a family of communities, based on shared values and beliefs, reinforced through regular local religious observances. Strong emphases on attendance at church, Madrasahs and regular communal prayers support powerful feelings of local affiliation. Administrative and mutual aid networks such as the Knights Templers, Masons and Free Foresters. also pre-­date modern electronic communications. iv Etzioni argues (1973, pp.  217–218) that the classical rationalist planning approach of concentrating exclusively on long term goals may make us insensitive to immediate conditions, significant opportunities for beneficial change and the corrective evidence resulting from searching for unintended consequences. Future visions are therefore best  checked against short-­term implications and immediate needs. On the other hand, he exposes the potentially toxic consequences of incrementalism (pp.  219–223), which are limited to ‘oiling the squeaky wheel’ and failing to identify crucial long-­term issues in times of radical change. Preoccupied with just keeping the boat afloat and preserving the current allocation of roles and rights, they may proceed round in circles or alternatively steer straight into icebergs. Mixed scanning is the appropriate solution, systematically refocussing between different scales of time and space.

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References Australia Institute (2022). Polling  – Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. https://australiainstitute.org .au/report/polling-­v oice-­t o-­p arliament-­i n-­t he-­ constitution/ (accessed 18 October 2022). Australian Governments 2008 Agreement on Murray Darling Basin Reform https://federation.gov.au/sites/ default/files/about/agreements/Murray_Darling_ IGA.pdf accessed 3 April 2023 Balchin, B. and Sykora, L. (1999). Regional Policy and Planning in Europe. London: Routledge. Brisbane City Council (1992). Norman Creek Waterway Park. Brisbane: Author. Brisbane City Council (2022). Know your creek and catchment. https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/clean-­ and-­green/natural-­environment-­and-­water/creeks-­ and-­w aterways/know-­y our-­c reek-­a nd-­c atchment (accessed 6 January 2023). Britannica (2022). Ijsselmeerpolders. https://www.britan nica.com/place/IJsselmeer-­Polders#:~:text=The%20 four%20polders%20reclaimed%20from%20the%20 IJsselmeer%20increased,industrial%20and%20recrea tional%20purposes%20and%20as%20residential%20 areas (accessed 5 January 2023). Carson, R. (1961). The Silent Spring. London: Penguin. CELAC (2022). Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. https://celacinternational.org/ (accessed 18 October 20222). Celle, S. (2022). Gilgamesh: A new Translation of the Ancient Epic. New Haven: Yale University Press. Clawson, M., Burnell, H., and Stoddard, C. (1960). Land for the Future. Baltimore, MD: Resources for the Future, Johns Hopkins Press. Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management (2022). Principle of subsidiarity. https://link.springer.com/ referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­02006-­4_113-­ 2#Sec1 (accessed 17 October 2022). Etzioni (1968) 1973). Mixed scanning: A Third Approach in Decision-­making’. In: A Reader in Planning Theory (ed. A. Faludi), 217–229. Oxford: Pergamon Press. European Commission (2022). European capitals of culture. https://culture.ec.europa.eu/policies/culture­i n-­c ities-­a nd-­regions/european-­c apitals-­o f-­c ulture (accessed 19 October 2022). Faludi, A. (2005). The Netherlands: a culture with a soft spot for planning. In: Comparative Planning Cultures (ed. B. Sanyal), 24. New York: Routledge. Faludi, A. (2020). European spatial planning beyond sovereignty. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 349920602_European_spatial_planning_beyond_ sovereignty (accessed 17 January 2023). Faludi, A. and Waterhout, B. (2002). The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective: No Masterplan. London: Routledge. Forester (1999). The Deliberative Practitioner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forester (2009). Dealing with Differences: dramas of mediating public disputes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedmann, J. and Weaver, C. (1979). Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning. London: Arnold. Gibb, H. (1970). Egyptian history. In: Encyclopedia Brita­ nnica, vol. 5. London: International Learning Systems. Gray, A. and Johnson, D. (2005). The TVA: Regional Planning and Development Program. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hall, P. (1973). The Containment of Urban England. London: Allen & Unwin. Hall, P. (2014). Good Choices, Better Cities, How Europe Rediscovered the Lost Art of Urbanism. Abingdon, VA, Oxon: Routledge. Hartshorne, R. (1960). Perspective on the Nature of Geography. London: John Murray. Healey (1995). 2007 Urban Complexity and Spatial Structures. London: Routledge. Heywood, P. (1974). Planning and Human Need. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Heywood, P. (1997). The Emerging Social Metropolis, Progress in Planning. Oxford: Elsevier. Heywood, P. (2013). People making places. Building Better Cities Conference, Portland, Oregon. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jacobs, J. (1969). The Economy of Cities. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Jacobs, J. (1985). Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Harmonds­ worth: Viking. Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Jacobs, J. (2004). Dark Age Ahead. New York: Vintage. Kropotkin, P. (1939). Mutual Aid. London: Penguin. LeLABA (2022). Lelaba toolbox/local development European structural and investment funds. https:// lelaba.eu/en/le-­l aba-­t oolbox/local-­d evelopment-­ european-­structural-­and-­investment-­funds/ (accessed 18 October 2022). Lilienthal, D. (1944). The TVA Democracy on the March. New York: Harper. MacCallum, M. (2019). Deep trouble: the Murray darling basin. https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/mungo­maccallum/2019/04/2019/1549243344/deep-­trouble-­ murray-­darling-­basin (accessed 18 October 2022). MacKaye, B. (1928). The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning. New York: Harcourt Brace. MARC (2023). Mid America Regional Council http:// www.marc.org/ (accessed 1 January 2023). Martindale, D. (1958). Prefatory remarks: the theory of the city. In: The City (ed. M. Weber), 9–52. New  York: Free Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-­Hill. Monbiot, G. (2003). The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World. London: Flamingo. Mumford, L. (1938). The Culture of Cities. New  York: Harcourt Brace.



Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New  York: Harcourt Brace. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (2019). Final report. https://www.mmiwg-­ ffada.ca/final-­report/ (accessed 20 October 2022). Osborn, F. and Whittock, A. (1963). The New Towns: The Answer to Megalopolis. London: Hill & Leonard. Roberts, B. (2014). Managing Systems of Secondary Cities. Brussels: Cities Alliance. Robertson, G. (1999). Crimes Against Humanity. London: Penguin. Sandars, N. (2006). The Epic of Gilgamesh (translated by N.K. Sandars). London: Penguin. Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions, Nineteenth Report (2002). https://web.archive .org/web/20160303220058/http://www.parliament. the-­stationery-­office.co.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/ cmtlgr/603/60304.htm (accessed 18 October 2022). Selznick, P. (1984). TVA and the Grassroots: A Study of Politics and Organization. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Sen, A. (1991). Inequality Re-­Examined. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simons, M. (2021). Up the river. The Monthly. https://www .themonthly.com.au/issue/2021/april/1617195600/ margaret-­simons/river#mtr (accessed 25 October 2022). Smith, A. (1950). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen. Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and its Discontents. London: Penguin. Stiglitz, J. (2016). The Price of Inequality. London: Penguin.

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Stiglitz, J. (2019). People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane. The Transnational Movement (TNI) (2022). The World Social Forum. Mexico. https://www.tni.org/en/ event/world-­social-­forum-­mexico-­2022 (accessed 18 October 2022). United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018). World urbanization prospects. https:// population.un.org/wup/ (accessed 26 October 2022). United Nations-­Habitat (2022). State of the world cities report. https://unhabitat.org/wcr/ (accessed 15 October 2022). Vidal, J. (2010). UN surveys a world of ‘endless cities’. Guardian Weekly (25  March). https://www .theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/22/un-­c ities-­ mega-­regions (accessed 16 January 2023). Vidal, J., Healey, P., Forester, J. (2023). Opinion Cop27 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/ nov/15/population-­8-­billion-­climate (accessed 3 April 2023). Webber, M. (1961;1964). The urban place and non-­place urban realm. In: Explorations into Urban Structure (ed. M. Webber), 79–137. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Webber, M. (1969). Planning in an environment of change: part II: permissive planning. Town Planning Review 39 (4): 277–295. Weisbrot, M. (2010). Changing balance of freedom. Guardian Weekly (5–11 March). World Population Review (2021). https://world populationreview.com/continents (accessed 13 September 2021).

4

Human Values and Community Goals

The place of values in planning Values–  the things we care passionately about  – should drive planning. As the Scottish philosopher, David Hume observed two and a half centuries ago: Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions (Norton  1999, p.  401). On this basis, it is our deep-­seated wants and goals that should be the ultimate source and guides to the objectives that will drive plans to achieve lasting beneficial change. We receive regular reminders of these values and goals in the form of the problems that we daily encounter in their pursuit. Since the energy that drives purposive planning is our natural capacity for problem-­solving, what we sense as problems or obstacles in the way of our values, becomes highly significant and this link between value expression and problem-­solving is explored in Chapter 5, Ways and Means.i There are both ethical and practical reasons why this approach provides a better and more secure basis than attempting to extrapolate objectives from observing current behaviour:

• ethically, existing patterns of behaviour may be

poor guides to frustrated needs, because people do not do things solely because they want to, but also because they may be coerced into that pattern of behaviour by the pressure of existing power relationships or dysfunctional conditions. Their objectives and values may be frustrated, but can nonetheless be discovered through questioning and reflection and then satisfied through planning and providing appropriate new activities and land uses. • practically, there are likely to be better and more effective ways of fulfilling deep-­seated wants than the patterns of shaped behaviour that are currently observable. Values are therefore primary in planning. In order to explore their place and contributions, Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

the chapter is organised into six sections. Following a review of the processes of value formation, successive sections explore the planning implications and interactions of four major values of key importance to community planning  –  prosperity, justice, liberty and sustainability  –  with each being devoted to examining that value’s particular importance for community life and organisation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how these concerns may be combined to form the basis for creative and fulfilling plans. The specific sections are therefore:

• value formation • the values of prosperity • the values of liberty • the values of social justice • values for sustainable

communities environments • relations among community values.

and

The chapter concludes with a consideration of how values can be combined to generate solutions to problems and shape creative plans and successful communities.

Value formation Such  basic values as  health and sustenance stem from biological needs that are essential to our survival. Ignoring them would threaten  the continuation of our genes and over time would diminish survival chances. Consequently, such values become essential parts of our genetic endowment. There are also other  very significant values that are products of our human self-­ consciousness, such as choice, knowledge and beauty, which have come to be almost as important to us as those supporting our primary survival needs. Interesting debates are possible about which values derive from biological drives, and which are products of self-­consciousness, because developed values such as knowledge and social justice may acquire survival value over the many millennia of humanity’s evolution and therefore become incorporated within our genetic structure by natural



Human Values and Community Goals

Table 4.1  Examples of  survival needs and values of  self consciousness. Primary survival needs (Life sustaining)

Values of self consciousness (Life enhancing)

Sustenance Health Rest Play Shelter

Choice Knowledge Glamour Beauty Diversity

Safety Nurture Procreation Recreation Sustainability

Fraternity Justice Wealth Progress Self-­expression

selection. Nevertheless, the distinction is a useful one, since ignoring primary survival needs would lead to extinction or degradation, whereas values of self-­consciousness are distinctively human and involved in the pursuit of our highest ideals of self-­ fulfilment and community life. The classification in Table 4.1 is based on this distinction between survival drives, based on biological needs, and values of self-­consciousness, which have derived from the development of intellect and culture. Such primary survival needs as health, sustenance and rest provide a firm basis for planning. How each is interpreted will be influenced by other values, including choice, knowledge, diversity, justice and progress, of great  significance for community planning. The most important values driving a community’s life and planning will vary according to its composition, history, culture, current challenges and the choices of its members, and it is they who should decide what values and the priorities should be pursued at any particular time. Nevertheless, the four widely held ones of prosperity, liberty, justice and sustainability, identified in Figure 4.1, are deeply embedded in human nature and will often feature in people’s list of highest priority aims. It is their significance that this chapter explores to demonstrate the ways in which values-­ based community planning can shape programs to fulfil widely held and deep-­seated aims. As will be seen they overlap and embrace many of the other most important human needs and community concerns and in doing so make crucial contributions to human life and flourishing, which are central to beneficial community life and planning. Prosperity creates the physical conditions to maintain life and nurture the young and is reflected in our daily search for sustenance, from the first need for mother’s milk to the creation of complex systems of production and transport. It has therefore become inscribed within our genes. Individual liberty is no less necessary for survival, allowing us to escape from danger, find favourable living

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PROSPERITY Progress Knowledge JUSTICE Equity

Security

Shelter Self Expression

Energy

Sustenance

SUSTAINABILITY

Survival Recreation Nurture

Health

Fraternity LIBERTY Choice Procreation Diversity

Comfort

Rest Beauty

Figure 4.1  Four value sets in community planning.

conditions and develop our own inventive capacities. Social justice, the other side of liberty, is a value of self-­consciousness that has grown to become essential for a gregarious species whose members must share space, activities and resources. Perception of its destruction can provoke resentments that can power militant action in defence of continued community life, as is demonstrated by the current national and global instances of conflicts, such as the response of the people of Ukraine to Russia’s invasion and mass targeting of their cities, ports and installations; opposition to repression as in the Chinese Re-­education Camps of Xinjiang and resistance to state terrorism, as in contemporary Syria. Finally, sustaining human, institutional and physical resources are categorical imperatives for societies’ survival. Time’s arrow, which drives forward human life and planning into the future, demands prudent conservation to foster the continuation of successful community life. We can and should scan our schemes to discern and forestall unintended consequences that might threaten the very elements needed to achieve successful futures. Community planning can therefore be judged by its capacities, at a minimum, to make substantial contributions to the achievement of these four values.

The value of prosperity Floating within most people’s sub-­ conscious minds are latent visions of abundance, cornucopias replete with free-­flowing sources of sun, air, water, food and space, offering recurrent opportunities for prosperity, play and pleasure, free of conflict

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or strain. However great our daily pressures of work or health may be, this image of abundance is always available to float back into our minds, ready to prompt us to maintain the search for better futures. Such images are well caught in David Hockney’s painting of England’s North Country in his ‘Road over the Wolds’, (Figure 4.1) painted in 1997, depicting the abundant prosperity of the extended landscape of his native Yorkshire, first glimpsed in his youth and still inspiring this vision of thriving places. Community life can promote and protect such prosperity in a number of ways:

• Communities foster the creation and transmis-

sion of productive skills by creating conditions for beneficial exchange of goods and products. • They make possible the combination of individual energies and skills required in coordinated projects and production. • They support the growth and mix of population that promotes the collaboration needed to produce innovation to build new enterprises. • They act as seedbeds of technical innovation, incubating invention and substitution and making possible the collaboration and collective investment necessary for the production of such highly prized items as, for instance, heart pacemakers, cell phones and communication satellites. creation and transmission of  productive skills

The regular contact of  community life can foster new productive skills through collaboration among specialists (Florida  2005). As these skills develop, so, too, do the communication networks to promote their transmission. This pattern of contact, communication and exchange within stable but open communities encourages creativity and further invention of new ideas and products. Such  patterns are not new.ii In similar ways, the pace and reach of today’s innovation in fields including information technology, space exploration and genetic engineering often come from the transmission of skills promoted by free exchange of ideas at the meeting points of previously separate spheres of knowledge. Jane Jacobs argues in both The Economy of Cities (1969) and Systems of Survival (1992) that the contact, communication and exchange of ideas, goods and money in city life promote not only prosperity but also social justice, as people who are trading skills, knowledge and goods with each other develop self-­sustaining relationships of mutual advantage.

combination of  energies and skills

Larger communities may produce economies of scale that result in further economies of transfer, labour, localisation and urbanisation (Isard 1956, 1975; Richardson 1973, 1978). Transfer economies which occur where the outputs of one activity are the inputs of another have given rise not only to productive complexes like the petroleum and chemical industries in major port areas such as Europoort, Corpus Christi and Baton Rouge, but also to knowledge industry hubs such as the office, research, tourism and education clusters of San Francisco’s Bay Area, Bangalore, the French Riviera’s Nice, both Cambridges (in the United Kingdom and Massachusetts, USA) and Austin (Texas). Labour economies relate to the capacity of locations to create and provide adequate functioning pools of skills of both hand and brain to encourage new industries to take up opportunities for expansion and new developments. Urban communities also make possible the economies of scale essential to high productivity, including local markets, banking, information technology, mass transit, container depots, social and cultural amenities, public services and technical, vocational and higher education. Localisation economies favour the development of industrial clusters and include pools of skilled labour, proximity to auxiliary industries (such as specialist electrical engineering for automotive and aerospace industries) and subcontracting facilities, such as information technology and access to research and development support – often linked to higher education – as people who are trading skills, knowledge and goods with each other develop self-­sustaining relationships of mutual advantage. In such ways, the activities of exchange, innovation and communication flow from and support the basic survival value of communal prosperity. communities as  seedbeds of  innovation

Urban communities can also provide seedbeds for innovation, offering industrial nurseries for new activities in low-­cost premises, which have long since paid off their acquisition and development costs. These can provide opportunities for productive links between local specialisations and enterprises, which can spin off related activities to provide components and services in the process termed ‘horizontal integration’ (Richardson 1975). Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, massive ‘Fordist’ vertical integration had diverted much production away from such long-­established



city centres to large greenfield sites dedicated to production-­ line assembly extending over many tens of acres like those developed by Ford in Detroit and the Nuffield group in Longbridge, Birmingham in Britain. Large concentrations of highly specialised labour in contracting ‘rustbelt’ regions of these old production-­line cities are now experiencing great difficulty in finding alternative employment, contributing to widespread disenchantment and resentment of workers who feel that their skills are no longer valued and their voices are no longer heard. As this manufacturing employment contracts, pressing needs are created for social support and skills retraining. The alternative – of mass redundancies, unemployment and major social alienation – can have far-­reaching consequences, extending to political choices and the rise of authoritarian populism in countries as different as the USA, Brazil and the Philippines. Elsewhere, in the inner cities of attractive urban and metropolitan environments, economic dynamism and success are being generated from knowledge-­ based activities (including the celebrated FIRE quartet of Finance, Insurance, Research and Education), which are clustering where innovative and problem-­solving practitioners want to live in open and supportive environments. Florida (2005) has shown that it is such inclusive communities that attract the ‘Creative Class’, who are making the inventions that create jobs to maintain full employment, despite rapid losses in the manufacturing sector elsewhere. Florida identifies the three ‘Ts’ of Technology, Talent and Tolerance as the vital ingredients of the creative capital that is driving these successes and explicitly relates them to the fluid community life identified and advocated by Jane Jacobs (Florida  2005, p.  32; Jacobs 1969). The values of prosperity and productivity, clearly apparent at the dawn of civilisation in the dense networks of specialist workshops in Mohenjo-­Daro and in the bustling life of medieval European cities, are still apparent in contemporary metropolitan cores like those of the City of London, New  York’s Greenwich Village, the Galleria of Milan, and the crowded streets of inner-­city Amsterdam, San Francisco, Boston and both Cambridges – in Massachusetts and England. As a result, the values of prosperity remain a driving force in successful community life. Modern governments should do no less than did renaissance monarchs and later parliaments to  ensure  public investment in human services of education, culture and the common goods of community access, exchange, play and communication, which favoured the production and exchange of ideas and

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products. These often gave rise to the long-­standing ‘associational economies’ identified by Cooke and Morgan (1998) within well-­ established regional communities like those of Tuscany in Italy, Cataluña in Spain and Kerala and  Bangalore  in India, benefiting from well-­established social capital. Equally, twenty-­first century versions may develop in the fertile ground and creative capital of rapidly evolving knowledge industry communities like downtown San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Austin (Texas) and Cambridge, Massachusetts (Florida  2005; Heywood  2008). In such seedbeds of innovation, community life is daily making possible new links between people who had formerly been strangers, generating new human capital. In contemporary societies, where the pace of technological change is so rapid, energetic community planning is required by governments to restore communities, retrain workers with viable new skills and support those cast out of work through no fault of their own.

The value of liberty These characteristics of prosperity are strongly supported by values of liberty since freedom of movement, speech, exchange and association are all crucial to the resilience and productivity of successful individuals and  communities. Humanity has evolved to seek and practice personal liberty, often moderated by the ‘emotional intelligence’ to avoid destructive conflicts and permit cooperation. Such  skills of negotiation remain as important in contemporary negotiations of the boardroom, the council chamber and team sports as they were in their origins in the tribal hunt (Leakey  1982, p. 140). These values are also well demonstrated in the ancient and classical worlds.iii Their enduring relevance for community planning is well captured in the words of Pericles’ Funeral Oration where he commends the people of Athens, who (unlike those of Sparta where helots must fight for their commanders as little better than slaves) defend their city as free citizens: Our administration favours the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar.  .  . The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are

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not suspicious of one another and do not nag our neighbour if he chooses to go his own way. But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured (Popper 1974, p. 186) Despite their flaws of sexism and slavery, such liberal values of Athens have lasting significance for the human community, surviving the widespread destruction of settled community life of Europe’s ‘dark ages’ and Asia’s nomad conquests to help inspire the medieval dawn of the Renaissance.iv This spirit of free association and mutual aid is well captured in the early fourteenth-­ century painting of Pietro Lorenzetti’s Vision of Good Government (see Figure 1.1) which celebrates the abundance of the sociable and productive civic life of Siena, where it was created and remains on the walls of the Palazzo Publicco as a reminder of the powerful civic traditions of cooperative life of this and the other emerging city states of the early Renaissance. More than four centuries later, in North America, the claim of the Declaration of Independence (2021) of the self-­evident truth that human beings were born with equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is still working its way through community life, having influenced the eventual abandonment of the institution of slavery (never achieved in ancient Athens) and the adoption of strong national social justice and environmental protection laws in Britain  and the United States (Cullingworth 1993).

and freedom from fear. . .as the highest aspiration of the common people’ (United Nations  2018). It is, however, a set of criteria that has more often served to condemn failure than to measure success. Liberty and choice attract literary and cultural expressions and many idealist philosophers and writers have been drawn to proclaim their indestructible worth. Writing in 1871, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1972) proclaimed the angry assertiveness of the extreme individualist in his Notes from the Underground. Speaking in the words of a despairing minor public servant, addressing the collectivist values of utilitarian socialists, he exclaimed: Your advantages are wealth, freedom and peace and so on, and so on.  .  .but you know this is what is surprising: why does it happen that all these sages, statisticians and lovers of humanity when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave one out? That is that Man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.  .  .one’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up, at times to frenzy, is that very most advantageous advantage that we have overlooked, which comes under no classification, and against which all systems and all theories are continually being shattered to atoms.v charters of  rights and liberties

personal liberty and self-­expression

However, elsewhere and in other fields, personal liberty has proved to be the human value that the twentieth century most badly failed to respect, although great energy was expended and significant successes were sometimes achieved. The newly founded ‘Parliament of Peoples’, the United Nations, has struggled for the last 75 years to uphold the liberal ideals proclaimed by Mill and developed by such visionary political leaders as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Willi Brandt, John Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and the luminaries of the European Union like Guy Mollet and Angela Merkel (Robertson  1999,  2009). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a monument to the conviction and energy of Eleanor Roosevelt, is an enduring benchmark and shield for individual liberty, proclaiming ‘the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief

Political defences of these individual rights take on practical forms in Bills and Charters of Rights and Liberties, which have set the benchmarks consensual community life.vi A significant milestone on the path of human progress was reached in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly  2008), which has become a beacon of liberty available to all members of humanity. This charter has been applied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both adopted in 1976), which are influencing many different Bills of Rights worldwide, setting standards for guarantees of the liberties that states should provide to their citizens (Hellenic Resources Network  1995). The Universal Declaration has also inspired other highly significant initiatives, including the European Convention of Human Rights of 1950 guaranteeing life, liberty, freedom of expression, assembly,



personal security, rights to private property, privacy and family life and freedom from discrimination and significantly, torture. The Council of Europe, having produced the Convention, went to the crucial further  stage of establishing two administering bodies, the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights, which continue to safeguard the rights of individuals and minorities throughout all member countries of the European Union and to bring to justice the perpetrators of war crimes in places such as Bosnia and Croatia (Robertson 1999). Britain followed suit with the 1998 Human Rights Act, incorporating most of the provisions of the European Convention and establishing a Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to scrutinise all new bills and to report on their compatibility with the Act. In the first 10 years of its operation, the courts made 26 declarations of incompatibility, leading to amendments of legislation to protect the rights of homeless children and mothers, mental health patients, children of artificial insemination procedures, detainees held without trial and gay persons (Robertson  2009). Robertson quotes the view of Britain’s former Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, that the effects of the Human Rights Act had been ‘hugely beneficial’ with ‘very many of the beneficial effects coming from the fact that the state, whether it be central government departments or local authorities now have to consider legislation in the context of ‘Does what I do affect people to the minimum in terms of infringing their human rights?’ Robertson analyses outcomes under the Act to conclude that groups and individuals are being encouraged to use human rights law, often independently of lawyers, because its accessible language and ideas have inspired and empowered them to challenge mistreatment and to negotiate improvements to their public services. There are numerous examples of practices being amended without cases having to be taken to court, including recognising the rights of people with a disability to appropriate housing, hospital patients, reform of people threatened with domestic violence and imprisoned members of racial minorities. There are cogent reasons why such recognition of the rights of individuals and minorities is very important to whole societies. First is the inherent inter-­ connectedness of community life; meaning that what goes around, comes around, and injustices to anyone threaten injustice to all. Second, all of us are members of momentary minorities of one sort or another in some aspect of our lives, so self-­interest should ensure that we seek protection

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of our minority rights in such matters. Third, perceived infringements of the individual rights to provident and tolerant community life can often result in those at the receiving end rejecting not only the legitimacy of those laws that they see as taking away their rights but also of the wider community from which they feel excluded, as has recently been occurring in the United States, with the militancy of the ‘Alt-­right’. Such groups, perceiving themselves as disadvantaged or excluded may then react with dire, destructive and all too familiar consequences of outrage, sabotage and even terrorism or armed insurrection, as was attempted in the 2021 storming of Congress by supporters of ex-­President Donald Trump. Healthy community life should therefore be based on reciprocal recognition and acceptance of the equal rights of all. Perceptions of premeditated or casual disregard of the rights of any individual or group may trigger rejection of the whole set of laws, which seem to them not to have taken account of their own legitimate concerns. There are also more universal aspects to human rights. In the Statute of Liberty, written by Geoffrey Robertson (2009, pp. 205–206) as a contribution to Australia’s National Human Rights Consultation process, which was then considering the absence of any Act or Charter of Human Rights in Australia, he proposed a number of provisions. These inclu­ded citizens’ legal entitlements to universal rights to well-­being, education, democracy, justice and pristine and healthy environments; freedom of thought, religion, expression and movement; and rights to privacy and fair trials; along with opportunities for work and freedoms from slavery, torture and arbitrary arrest. These, Robertson argues, are all manifestly necessary to creating and sustaining full and satisfactory lives. It is an essential element of individual citizenship that personal liberty can only be fully experienced and safeguarded within healthy and prosperous communities.

The values of social justice In setting goals for community planning, the demands of social justice may often seem to compete with unlimited individual freedoms of expression, religion, movement and privacy. This limiting logic of liberty, that too much freedom for one person may result in too little for another, is highlighted by the utilitarian argument that unlimited personal rights should be constrained by imperatives to achieve the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ (Mill 1983).

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During the high tide of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, threats were posed to overall social justice by excessive individual freedom enjoyed by industrial entrepreneurs, as recorded  by writers of the times (Dickens 2003a,b). These were vividly demonstrated by the unconstrained impacts of concentrated financial power in the hands of entrepreneurs, which continue to exert significant effects on the distribution of freedoms to the present day. They allowed wage levels to be set by the ‘hidden hand’ of the laws of supply and demand’, ignoring basic human needs and the requirements of social cohesion. These tendencies were often reinforced by interpretations of human nature, produced by theorists such as Carlyle and Nietzsche, justifying commitment to the unfettered roles and rights of ‘Ubermensches’ or ‘Supermen’ – to justify distributing liberty in dangerously uneven ways, with vast power for the few and very little freedom or justice for the many.vii balancing the  rights of  individuals and communities

Contemporary political theory is still strongly influenced by these debates. Tom Paine’s proclamation of The Rights of Man (1792) and Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) both resoundingly proclaimed individual human rights,viii while John Stuart Mill looked more searchingly into their unintended consequences and human implications for the whole range of citizens, male and female, white and black, rich and poor and urban and rural alike, in an inquiry that was even more influential, and more in keeping with the practical spirit of both his and our own ages. In his seminal essay On Liberty (Mill 1983), he argued that many human activities such as those of belief, lifestyle, freedom of speech and writing and choice of association were primarily ‘self-­regarding’ matters that should be left to the free choice of each individual and safeguarded in a national Bill of Rights or through constitutional establishment. Others, however, were clearly ‘other regarding’ and should be decided by the representatives of the whole adult population, based on people’s choices expressed through use of their rights to vote in regular democratic elections with universal suffrage, working at both national and local scales. (Mill regarded local government as particularly important because of the opportunities it provided to increase individual and local participation in decisions affecting social justice and its role as a training ground for politicians who could later rise to perform well-­ grounded roles in national politics.) The matters

he identified as requiring democratic control and planning included a number of major issues:

• Public health and safety; • Working conditions in places of employment; • Minimum rates of pay; • Housing quality and affordability; • Environmental health; • Public access to urban and rural open space; • Forms and levels of taxation; • Educational provision and participation (see more detailed discussion below).

This list still forms a very useful and effective starting point and checklist for the legitimate scope of community planning. By tempering the logical and deductive concerns of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ of the early Utilitarians with the more radical libertarianism of theorists and poets such as Godwin and Shelley, Mill laid a sustainable basis for the representative democracy and inclusive community activities, which can still help sustain political life in contemporary mass societies, well expressed in his terse summary: ‘The boundary of one man’s freedom is that of his fellows’. Appropriately applied, such interpretations offer the key to balancing the values of liberty and social justice.ix Mill also recognised the need to give special attention to activities where the self-­and other-­ regarding arguments were more evenly balanced. He chose education, both as a good example of how such issues should be analysed and addressed and also because the development and transmission of knowledge is so crucially important to the evolution of healthy and just societies. On the one hand, education involves people’s nurture and rearing of their own children and is therefore close to the hearts of all parents, wanting both to pass on their own, often deeply held, values and to provide the best possible preparation for their children’s future lives. On the other hand, society has the right and need to ensure that all members of the upcoming generation develop knowledge and skills to maintain social prosperity and progress, even where parents may be negligent. Just rights and responsibilities should therefore be carefully allocated to each party. While the state should ensure opportunities for free and compulsory education for all, parents should be able, if they so wish, to select and shape the value systems that inform their children’s education and be free to develop religious and secular academies of their own devoted to different educational philosophies (as was later done, for instance, by such educational innovators as Rudolf Steiner, Maria



Montessori and A.S. Neil) or to educate their children at home, in each case provided that they met certain basic, regularly inspected, legislated and published standards. Generally speaking, this is the approach that has, often after various vicissitudes, come to be adopted by many contemporary democratic societies. This kind of careful analytical approach to determining the rights of each party has often succeeded in defusing potential conflict and is a good model of ‘inspired hair splitting’ for those involved in developing broadly acceptable and just social policies.x Such solutions can be readily applied to other activities. In urban planning and design, for instance, there are clear needs for some forms of physical and aesthetic controls over developments that might exert significant and continuing impacts on immediate neighbours and the general public. On the other hand, people should be free to exercise routine rights to shape their own home spaces to reflect their values and views. The outcome developed to balance these two sets of rights in Britain’s original General Development Order of 1946 (Cullingworth  1979, p.  45; Legislation Gov, UK 2015) is a good example of applied social problem solving: people are free to develop and adapt their own dwellings as they wish, up to extensions of 50% of total existing floor area, as long as they abide by the building laws and do not obtrude into the public domain or unreasonably impact on their neighbour’s views and privacy).xi Where the proposal goes beyond these limits, they must seek and obtain planning permission from elected governments subject to objections by neighbors before undertaking the development. Apart from its logic, this approach has the added advantage of appealing to people’s sense of natural justice. Most would agree that personal convictions and revelations should not be allowed to encroach on the freedom of faith and religious practice of others, thereby endangering amicable and sustainable community life.xii Resolution of such possible conflicts between public, private and sectional interests will therefore always demand continuing attention. It would be glib to assume that any single enlightened division between the rights of the individual and those of the state can resolve once and for all the scope of legitimate public and private interests. Problems, where hostile relations among individuals, groups and state authorities prevent one participant from recognising the legitimacy of the rights of the other, can sometimes only be resolved by open legal and arbitration processes. There is also the ongoing need to resolve how public policies should be interpreted

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and applied by elected decision takers. It is all to the good that laws and policies should be framed by elected representatives to achieve their interpretations of ‘the public interest’. However, the question remains: ‘How should electoral democracies determine and implement this public interest at local, urban and national scales, and what should be the distribution of roles in times of rapid social and technological change?’ giving most to  those who have least

Community life can be viewed as the product of a bargain or contract between the individual and the state. This contractarian tradition, developed over nearly four centuries of experimentation, application and criticism was usefully drawn together by John Rawls in his definitive work, A Theory of Justice (Rawls  1971). Accepting the idea of a social contract as the basis for an organised society, Rawls asks: ‘What principles would people themselves choose to regulate that society?’ He develops an ‘initial position’ of assumed equal power, in which people would adopt the ‘Maximin’ principle of maximum possible benefit from minimum acceptable risk (a version of the so-­called ‘precautionary principle’) rather than the chancier ‘Minimax’ principle of minimum inescapable risk from maximum possible benefit. They would, in short, prefer security to gambling to achieve windfall benefits – a basis, which looks even more rational in the twenty-­first century, when we are daily confronted by the mounting impacts and unintended consequences of rapidly expanding human power than it did 50 years ago when Rawls proposed it. Rawls argued that this position would influence participants to base decisions not on their own immediate bargaining advantages (which might well have changed by the time the principles and decisions came to be applied) but on their circumstances as typical members of society, uncertain of their future prospects. Applying this approach, Rawls develops two basic principles that he argues people in this ‘initial position’ would adopt: 1. The greatest possible freedom and benefit for each person compatible with a like freedom and benefit for others (adopting Mill’s position in On Liberty) 2. Distribution of economic irregularities (differences in levels of benefit) to confer most benefit to the currently least advantaged – giving most to those who have least  –  because that might well, on some future occasion, be any of us.

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This second, so-­called ‘Differences’ principle has attracted and survived a great deal of attention, review and criticism. Marxist doctrine stipulating that the state should tolerate no irregularities of outcomes has collapsed in the face of almost universal condemnation of the gross disparities of power and repression that actually developed in regimes of this type in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and contemporary Chinese-­ controlled ‘Autonomous Regions’ like Tibet and Xingjian. In such situations, assumption of totalitarian powers, ostensibly to prevent any economic disparities, has resulted in the greatest imaginable differences of actual power and material advantages between the  ruling party and its officials on the one hand, and the rest of society on the other, corroborating Lord Acton’s (1904, p. 372) celebrated dictum that ‘All power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Clearly, people should have sufficient control over their lives to make their own trade-­offs between one activity and another, to decide for instance, whether they want to take glamorous annual holidays and accept living in a more basic dwelling or to forego holidays altogether and devote their savings to more desirable year-­round shelter. These are the sorts of self-­regarding choices, which Mill points out should be left to the individual. Opposing criticisms come from economic rationalists and conservatives, who argue in favour of minimum government intervention in free economies, with interventions limited to promote aggregate social advancement as measured by Gross Domestic Product, irrespective of distributional differences. This would reverse Rawls’ argument by giving most to those who already have most, as is increasingly the case in contemporary Western societies, with very uneven distribution of income levels among managers, investors and workers. Supporters of such policies must face Rawls’ argument that those who still have more, have no ethical justification against redistribution of public funds in favour of those who have less because overall they remain well in advance of others. Rawls’ view that society is a column, where it is dangerous to allow large gaps to develop between the pace makers, the middle rankers and the back markers, intuitively speaks to us in an age where practical interdependence is becoming daily more inescapable. He goes on to examine the implications of such views for the conduct of social life, justifying Bills of Rights as open and acceptable bases for social organisation; civil disobedience as a useful

contribution to social dialogue; tolerance for the intolerant, on the grounds of the self-­inflicted damage that descent into intolerance would do to those who were initially tolerant; public consultation, as a practical application of his ‘initial position’ and regular and open debates on social directions, as guarantees of continuing relevance of policies. By updating and integrating the contractarian and liberal traditions of Locke (1978), Jefferson (Somerville  2020), Lincoln (Law and Liberty  2022), Mill (1983), and Russell (1988b), Rawls presents a spacious and comprehensive framework for the political economy of contemporary communities. In so doing, he demonstrates how the values of social justice can be applied in practice, which is  especially relevant to community planning. The pure philosophical rationality of these arguments and their attention to the rights, responsibilities and consequences for all parties may be difficult to achieve in practice. In the ‘lifeworld’ of daily experiences and demands, such careful logical deductive processes may appear as products of an intellectual ‘systemworld’ (Habermas 1987). In situations of unavoidable stress, when widely accepted methods of problem-­ solving are most needed, people may be drawn to more intuitive and visceral approaches, and tend to form their views of what to do next on the basis of their personal experiences and preferences, constrained only by their individual adherence to enforced common laws. Although compliance must ultimately be guaranteed by acknowledgement of the legislated policing powers of representative governments, there are increasing numbers of situations where such enforcing power must also rest on willing assent and consenting behaviour. In a free society, consent may thus become the decisive factor in acceptance of the rule of law  –  a view that lies at the heart of Rawls’ logic. Community involvement, dialogue, recognition and respect become very important (Honneth 2022). Psychologically, it can be argued that such consent to the rule of law rests partly on practical empathy and starts when we first recognise in childhood that others experience similar feelings and emotions, and by extension, should enjoy the same rights, as we ourselves do. We are then able to accept common rules, and ultimately develop shared cultures and loyalties. The rule of law is based more firmly on this recognition that our own rights are the mirror image of those of other members of society than on statutes, stun guns or tasers. When, however, people feel that reciprocal respect for their own rights is grossly infringed by others,



personal worth discounted whether on the basis of social status, skin colour or appearance, religion or value system ridiculed, culture or resources seized, or countries of their origin invaded and occupied, there is a strong tendency for their acceptance of the bonds of law to be loosened or abandoned. Commitments to personal liberty begin to conflict with mutual respect and toleration. Two particularly insistent current examples are the spread of international terrorism and the growing militancy of the American Far Right and the Q Anon and Alt-­right movements representing people who feel disenfranchised and devalued by the unmediated economic and political forces of the last three or four decades and find themselves stigmatised as ‘deplorables’ deserving the vulnerable economic and social outcomes to which they are increasingly subjected. In such situations, there are immediate needs for ways to re-­establish mutual understanding that can reshape daily events, rectify perceived injustices and avoid corrosive resentments and dissension. Recognition, communication and dialogue become essential. Community engagement, inclusive and proactive planning and responsive development measures may become matters of life and death, both for individuals and whole political systems. In these circumstances, the ideas of Jurgen Habermas (1990) on communication and of Axel Honneth (2022) on recognition, offer ways forward. Their arguments that the truth and reality of any situation can best be established by the exchange and mutual adjustment of views and interpretations between the actual people who experience that situation provides a framework to develop socially just policies and actions, generating practical  methods to shape consensual outcomes for both social and natural environments. Community participation, therefore, assumes ever greater importance. The most appropriate methods of inclusion are not so much ‘objective’ as ‘inter-­ subjective’ because they do not appeal to the authority of reported or published observations, or elevation of any one person’s experience into universal truths that others must accept, but instead emerge from constructive debate among equals recognising each others’ rights and having to justify their arguments around a discussion table, where no one person can claim precedence and each participant has an equal right and responsibility to contribute and be heard. Such contributions together can pool many experiences and ideas, winnowing each  against others. By these means, preferences

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and priorities can be moved forward, advancing from initial positions to achieve the best available collective outcomes. This approach displaces the more abstract, positivist and authoritarian definitions of what Habermas (1987)  describes as the ‘Systemworld’, with its reliance on rigid axioms and templates that tend to produce brittle and often competing assertions rather than robust and flexible principles. Such ‘systemworld’ outcomes often incorporate and privilege influential but hidden assumptions, which may inherently promote the views of those who stand to benefit most from them, in their commanding roles of traditional decision taking. Communicative methods, on the other hand, can go beyond consultation to include collaborative and exploratory participation in reaching decisions. This can empower communities of both place and interest to apply their social justice values in contributing to shaping plans for their communities of both place and interest.

Values for sustainable communities and environments The instinctive desire to conserve and sustain the health and wholeness of both communities and environments is demonstrated across many different cultures and times.xiii Community life, as much as the physical environment, depends upon the sustainable use and conservation of resources at all scales. It is therefore essential to the lasting success of all social and environmental communities that the web of life and humanity’s place within it should be safeguarded. Nevertheless, both are increasingly threatened by the unintended consequences of actions taken in pursuit of short-­term returns. In the past, entire civilisations like those of Viking Greenland and the Anasazi Indians, have been extinguished through over-­consumption of the resources on which they depended, as we have seen in Chapter 1 (Diamond 2005). Today, climate change and resource depletion pose equally stark and existential global threats. At the local scale, mounting challenges are being posed by contamination of land, air, rivers and oceans. At the regional scale, community life is menaced by sea level rises, deforestation, soil exhaustion, radioactive contamination, mining land contamination and subsidence and spasmodic flooding, as well as the many other impacts of global warming, including recurrent wildfires. At the scale of national communities, policies of reuse, recycling and reclamation are needed to

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establish and maintain healthy relations among natural resources, countryside and communities. At the global scale, harmony implies conservation of habitats and climates; symbiosis within and between species and preservation of stable relationships among the many different forms of life associated with the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of global inter-­dependence of all forms of life (Lovelock  1988; Flannery 2010). Rich rewards can be gained through fostering this harmony. Management that maintains natural ecosystems can also enhance human life prospects through conserving resource bases. The work of grassroots community associations and organisations, matched and encouraged by energetic government action, can help develop and maintain the environmental, educational, cultural and health services to foster the development of physical, social and cultural capital (see, for example, lcarb 2012; Guardian 2022; Kandos School of Cultural, Adaptation  2019). As much as they deplore entropy and destruction, many of the greatest advocates of conservation also find time to celebrate practical wholeness and interdependence.xiv David Attenborough is an inspiring example, now in his mid-­1990s and still active in writing influential books, making important films and addressing international conferences on a wide range of environmental topics, especially the need to take urgent action to forestall further climate change. At the other end of the age spectrum, Greta Thunberg continues to mount tireless campaigns to mobilise young people throughout the world to militant action (Attenborough 1979, 2011, 2021; Thunberg 2020). At the local scale, The Living Classroom Project, located in the rural setting of the fringes of the small township of Bingara in the New England Highlands of Australia’s New South Wales, provides an inspiring example of how to integrate resource conservation and creative insight into the productive and sustainable use of farmland. Like many other small rural towns, Bingara faces significant challenges of climate and social change on both global and local levels. In 2008, Gwydir Shire Council engaged John Mongard Landscape Architects (JMLA) to develop a strategy to guide the town’s future development (Figure  4.4). Using a community design process, Bingara residents generated ideas that ranged from main-­street improvements to a long-­term sustainable agriculture project called The Living Classroom, which aimed to regenerate 150 hectares of little-­used town common into a model for local food production. Combining agricultural activities with horticulture, aquaculture and forestry, The Living Classroom is focused on

quality food and the environmental and cultural links between the health of soil, plants, animals and people (Mongard  2022). Initially, the project was conceived without enough resources attached to it, and there was little headway. Breaking down into smaller activities and obtaining grant funding has allowed work to proceed, regenerating a large part of the town’s waterways, mitigating flooding and recycling stormwater run-­off through a revegetated swale and lake system. This has included replanting numerous channels that now feed the productive gardens. A cluster of buildings, farm sheds and nursery areas have been built as a teaching and learning hub and are being used for training, events, accommodation and productive garden projects by the university, school and community groups (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3).

Figure 4.2  Planting day at Bingara’s living classroom.   Source: Courtesy John Mongard Landscape Architects.

Figure 4.3  The living classroom in its rural setting.   Source: Reproduced with permission of Courtesy John Mongard Landscape Architects.



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Figure 4.4  Mixed uses, an aerial view of the living classroom.   Source: Courtesy of Gwydir Shire Council.

Landscape architects John Mongard and Jacqueline Ratcliffe work on the project alongside contractors, council workers and volunteers. Being hands-­ on makes the process more experiential and allows them to collaborate on site in shaping designs in response to the land itself. Students from universities and local primary and high schools have been involved in co-­designing and co-­ building interpretive gardens, with the local community and the Council’s Parks team, to create hands-­on experiences in designing and building a regenerative farm that includes woodlots, a lake precinct, Chinese medicinal and interpretive agricultural gardens and carbon offset forests as shown in Figure 4.4. The Living Classroom is also a site for creative learning and collaboration. One of the recent creative art projects is disarmingly entitled An artist, a scientist and a farmer walk into a bar, and involves the collaboration of a local farming couple, an Australian National University scientist and an experimental local artist in planning and creating a series of art projects that interpret the culture of regeneration on this site (Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) 2019). The works include temporal art, art in action and performance theatre .

as ways to explore the links between food, land and culture. The Living Classroom is attracting a great deal of well-­deserved attention because of its exemplary combination of collaborative approach, values-­ based methods, practicality and fulfilment of its objectives of applying creativity in the achievement of conservation and sustainability. In so doing, the project is setting an invaluable example of how the values of sustainability can not only be fulfilled in quite challenging situations but also integrated with other values of productivity, prosperity, social justice and reciprocity. reciprocity as  a factor in  social sustainability: giving, receiving and conserving

Socially sustainable systems also rely on a broad basis of reciprocity as recognised in many religions and ethical systems. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount with its instruction to ‘Do unto others as you would be done by’ is one of reciprocity’s most telling and compelling expressions. Another is Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative to act towards others in accordance with rules that we should willingly choose to have regulate our own lives (Kant 1934). It is significant that reciprocity also lies at the root of

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many aspects of animal societies. Grooming rituals are a powerful bonding activity among many forms of primates. In human communities, mutual aid has been extensively identified and explored from the Neolithic villages of 10,000 years ago up to the twentieth century (Kropotkin 1939), enabling communal systems of agriculture, water supply and irrigation to be practiced in locations as widely separated as India, Morocco and the Indonesian island of Bali. Similarly, in the first half of the twentieth century the anthropologist, C. Darryl Forde described how, in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia, the ceremonial interchange of gifts between individuals making adventurous expeditions circulated among different islands in a process known as Kula. Gifts of red shell necklaces, which circulated in opposite directions to ones of armlets of white shell, accompanied presents of food and other products, constituting an invaluable framework for safe trade among other­wise very warlike cultures (Forde 1957, p. 204).xv Similarly, the continuing growth and successes of microcredit discussed earlier, also rely explicitly on processes of mutual aid among people having very little else to offer each other except their own trustworthiness (Bornstein 1997; Yunus 1998). The practices of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank,  therefore, rest more on the solidarity of shared situations and the psychological rewards of common caring than any guarantee of legally enforceable benefits. Because their demonstrable major contributions to individual welfare and group cohesion include supporting the survival of people often described as ‘the poorest of the poor’, they favour the continuation and transmission of a wider range of personal characteristics and genes than would result from unalloyed competition, including the capacities for further cooperation. In times of rapid change like our own, support for such capacities for reciprocity can widen the gene pool to deal with the currently mounting uncertainties of future conditions. In so doing, they can play a powerful role in sustaining the resilience and continued evolution of societies and their  social systems (Ridley 1996). In an important and original contribution to social theory, subtitled ‘From human blood to social policy’, Richard Titmuss (1973) explored the roles of such crucial ‘gift relationships’ in promoting the growth and continuation of social organisation in advanced societies. Originally triggered by research into the dependence of medical ‘blood banks’, on widespread donations of human blood, he developed his ideas to explain much wider ranges of successful social arrangements, which are of particular significance for community planning.

David  Suzuki widens the scope of functional interdependence even further by arguing that inextricable links exist  between all forms of life. He quotes Shapley’s calculations about the common particle of Argon, which we breathe in and out every second, leading to the conclusion that ‘Your next breath will contain 400,000 of the Argon atoms that Gandhi breathed in his long life’ (Shapley quoted in Suzuki and McConnell 1998, p. 38). Suzuki, therefore, advocates a role and duty for humanity, as a sentient species, to promote the well-­being of all forms of life, in a contemporary global extension of Kant’s categorical imperative of 200 years earlier, and Christ’s of nearly 2000 years earlier again, to act towards others as we should wish them to act towards us. continuity and transformations

Ideas concerning change and continuity have very long histories. Two celebrated philosophical insights vividly summarise important common principles of sustainability. The earliest, that of Heraclitus in the fifth century BC, ‘I step, yet do not step, in the same river twice’, demonstrates the futility of attempts at total preservation because all life and matter are undergoing constant transformation (Graham 1999a, p. 376). Later, the eighteenth-­ century French scientist, Lavoisier summarised these ideas of the Greek philosophers of 2000 years earlier in the hauntingly similar: ‘Nothing is lost; nothing created: everything is transformed’ (Graham  1999b, p.  28). Change and sustainability can be made compatible within the living world once we accept our responsibility for custodianship. The significance of these insights for community planning is, therefore, the need for good stewardship to involve empathy, caring and conservation rather than the reflex reactions of the guardian watchdog towards precise protection because nothing can be maintained through time in exactly its present form. This is an insight pithily captured by the poet D.H. Lawrence in his exclamation: Ah, the wonderful slow flowing of the sapphire! (Lawrence 2002) Because conservation and change are thus compatible, careful and consistent forethought will be required about desired outcomes and unintended consequences. Sustainability and planning indissolubly need each other.xvi The need to conserve natural resources is strongly implied in the celebrated definition of sustainability by the World Commission on Environment



Human Values and Community Goals

and Development (1987) as ‘development meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. This view also supports the idea of the physical world as ‘Natural Capital’ proposed by Hawken et al. (1999), when they suggest that each generation should confine its consumption to renewable material (the ‘interest’) without diminishing the total scale or variety of the natural endowment of the globe and biosphere, which constitutes the world’s ‘natural capital’. Because of the web of connections linking all life, this applies equally at local, regional and global scales. Local action is required to stem global warming; regional action is necessary to prevent the poisoning of watersheds, which percolate into every tract of local environments; and global agreements and interventions are needed to provide funds to protect threatened environments in places like Amazonia, the South Pacific and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. In terms of physical conservation, it is fortunate that there are numerous ways to promote sustainability. These can be summarised as the 7 Rs of Resource Conservation. the

7

rs of  resource conservation: reuse, recycling,

reclamation, rehabilitation, reservation, rationing and regulation

Sustainability can be an elusive, as well as an essential, concept and needs to be approached

from different starting points along a variety of paths. A valuable first step is therefore to revert to the term’s origins, as an adjective describing specific resources such as water supplies; atmospheric conditions; sources of building materials; the forms and extents of settlements; traffic flows and community governance. In this way, the discussion is moved towards achievable objectives that can be defined and sought within identifiable political and practical processes, making them both more democratic and implementable. Another useful approach is reflective review, observing our own actions, and weighing their impacts on the other people, species, spaces and systems around us. Figure 4.5, Cycle of Human Use of Natural Resources is an example of this kind of ‘Reflection-­ in-­ Action’ (Schon  1995). This model suggests some of the techniques that can help sustain the human and biospheric systems on which we depend and which we influence, including the ‘7 Rs’, which are briefly outlined below. Reuse involves reconditioning and recirculating such items of repeatable use as batteries, printer cartridges, clothing and containers. In its most extreme form, on the outskirts of productive and dynamic cities like Mumbai, Kolkata and Lagos, it can provide a lucrative income for energetic people seeking to establish themselves in the city, at the same time as protecting large areas elsewhere from loss of habitat by landfill (Roy 2021). Creative community planning needs to support and help

Cycle of human use of natural resources MIND VALUES AND IDEAS Reclamation and restorationb Bio-hostile matter Energy sources Natural environment and matter

Polluted natural environment

Production refuse

Technological transformation

Raw materials Food sources: atmosphere, sun, soil, water

Human use

Transformed natural environment and matter

Recyclinga Natural ecological processes

The closing circle aRecycling:

water, metals, paper, glass, sewerage, and animal waste. mining spoil, chemicals, plastics, concrete, bricks, domestic refuse, derelict land.

bReclamation:

Figure 4.5  Cycle of human use of natural resources.

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integrate such energetic workers into community life, rather than marginalise and exploit them. In western societies, the enterprises and store places that are springing up throughout the outer suburbs and urban fringes of great cities to make reuse possible, similarly need to be supported and carefully located. Recycling, conversion and concentration of important resources such as water, construction material and paper pulp can drastically reduce the need for such environmentally damaging activities as new dam building, quarrying and deforestation. It can be seen as a human application of the life-­giving natural processes that draw water by evaporation from the oceans and move it through atmospheric pressure systems to hover over the land masses, where it can be precipitated by condensation into rainfall, bringing life to all terrestrial flora and fauna, before being safely returned to the oceans where it can continue to support the rich treasury of marine life. One specific well-­known example of such recycling is the reverse osmosis treatment of domestic and industrial water and its return to reservoirs for further use (Accepta 2022). Reclamation, increasingly important in today’s times of rapid technological change, can extend beyond the recycling of water to bring back spaces and resources to healthy use from formerly ruinous activities. Old ‘brownfield’ sites such as docks can be reclaimed for use as office spaces and urban farms. Previously polluted areas such as Sydney’s Homebush district of massive chemical contamination can be reclaimed to accommodate stadia, as was done for the city’s 2000 Olympic Games and later, in London, for the 2012 Olympic Games with the Lea Valley’s legacy used for housing and modern industry, as well as public open space and sports facilities. Rehabilitation involves restoring damage and blight resulting from superseded uses, often associated with extractive industries that can be converted to habitat conservation, sport, recreation and open space buffers to constitute one of the most satisfying and inspiring activities of contemporary community planning. Prominent examples include the redevelopment of derelict spoil tips for ski slopes at Nœux-­les-­Mines, in the old coal mining areas of Northern France near Lille (Spoil Tip Re Use  2022) and the development of subsidence-­ generated water bodies for bathing and boating in Germany. Kuter (2014) provides a valuable and comprehensive summary of available techniques and worldwide applications of these

widely adopted processes, introducing a welcome emphasis on playfulness into the serious business of sustainability. Reservation is being recognised as an increasingly important technique to safeguard areas to sustain, preserve and recuperate habitats and species. Locally, small reserves can safeguard threatened habitats, protect places of cultural significance and provide sites for play and refuge. At larger scales, the world’s many National Parks are protected by such designations. More are needed, nowhere more urgently than in the fish breeding grounds of the North Sea, Atlantic and western Pacific Oceans. Both the strengths and limitations of such designations are illustrated in the performance of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, occupying an area of more than 200,000 km2 and presided over by a statutory authority with strong zoning and planning powers. While the organisation has managed well the tourist visitation and shipping incursions into its vast area, it has been powerless to prevent chemical contamination from fertilisers used on the sugar cane lands of the neighbouring coastal areas, or the deadly effects of global warming on coral bleaching and destruction by the Crown of Thorns starfish. In both  land and sea management, ‘glocal’ influences are at work. Rationing, the control of access to an area or item of limited supply, can be based on democratic decisions and can operate through social regulation, market choice or a combination of both. ‘Resident Only’ vehicle  parking permits offer one example; congestion charges on city centre traffic another; and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETSs) a third, indicating the very wide range of scales at which this important control may be operated. Based on values of social justice as well as sustainability, rationing can make effective use, as its name indicates, of human processes of rationality, logic and apportionment. In a world of increasing constraints and ‘Limits to Growth’ (Club of Rome 2022), rationing has many valuable roles to play. Regulation is an essential aspect of planning in mixed economy democracies, which often require government controls over private and commercial developments to achieve sustainable land use outcomes. Despite campaigns against ‘narrow and negative constraints on private enterprise’ and attacks on ‘Green Tape’, regulation remains one of democracies’ most effective ways of implementing plans to achieve sustainable land use. Notable examples are the Urban Growth Boundaries and Urban Footprints that are increasingly being



Human Values and Community Goals

adopted to limit the urban sprawl of great metropolitan regions and preserve precious habitats and environments of surrounding rural areas around great cities in North America, Europe, East Asia, Australia and Africa, discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design. All plans can be viewed as reasoned accounts of what people should, may and can do, and by implication, should not, may not and cannot do. Every community’s vision for its future will ultimately require plans for its activities and land uses, which will in turn require regulations to be effective. The boundary of each  person’s freedom remains  that of their fellows.

Relations among community values The strength and resilience of communities are greatly influenced by the extent to which their dominant values can be integrated to support and reinforce each other. The four identified key planning values of prosperity, liberty, justice and sustainability emerge well from this compatibility analysis, but  each provides a limiting case for the others, like tent pegs combining to hold in place the overall canvas of community life. This pattern of relationships is summarised in Table 4.2 below.

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The impacts of prosperity the contributions of  prosperity to  liberty

Prosperity not only makes direct and powerful contributions to community life but also interacts with liberty, social justice and sustainability. Freeing people from the tyranny of hardship by creating and storing surpluses of food and funds, and providing comfortable shelter and financial security helps to develop the independence and freedom that promote sound personal judgement and decision taking (Keynes 1964; Rawls 1971).xvii Economic strength can also advance political power. The emancipation of women over the last 50 years, for instance, has been assisted by the strengthening of their economic position, as the skills of hand and mind required by the knowledge economy have displaced the dominance of strength-­based manufacture, even though women’s pay still lags badly in many countries. In similar ways, the global development of mass consumer societies may have supported the spread of representative democracy; and increased acceptance of the need for community consultation and participation may have been fuelled as much by the increased economic power of workers, consumers and voters as from changes in their political power. Elsewhere, however, the record is mixed. There are eddies and swirls where economic growth is

Table 4.2  Relationships among four community planning values Contributions to achievement of other values Prosperity Prosperity

Liberty

Social Justice

Sustainability

Liberty

Social Justice

Sustainability

Supports personal Supports personal and Supports reflective independence, mutual esteem and equilibrium and self-­expression and inter-­dependence sound judgment, educational attainment, but may threaten fair but may consume but may be used to shares for all natural capital justify inequality Favours personal Stimulus to individual Promotes free criticism, participation and responsibility and creativity, protection for fair reflectivity but can inventiveness and exchange shares but may intrude be abused to devour on equal rights of common goods and social justice rights Promotes productive Safeguards human rights Protects common goods social capital, capacity and personal initiative, from destruction for to contribute and the but may develop short-­term individual profit development of the excessive regulations gift relationship Maintains resource Protects living Safeguards resources bases, environmental environments but can and rights of future capital and long-­term be misapplied to justify generations, but should investment authoritarian shortcuts observe distributional justice

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being accompanied by social and political repression. While rising tides of development generally encourage increased personal agency, dominant political elites in the People’s Republic of China and Hindu hegemony in India are active in maintaining historic subordination of personal freedoms to social order and conformity, maintaining long-­established patterns of inequality, repression and exclusion. In ongoing conflicts of values, ‘Dalits’ (previously termed ‘Untouchables’), who for millennia had never been able to claim the most basic social rights in India are now, encouraged by economic advancement, stepping bravely into the highest levels of Indian political life. At the same time, the populist government of Narendra Modi promotes Hindu nationalism and conducts a continuing struggle against the rights of minorities. At a more local level, microcredit in Bangladesh and elsewhere is helping to emancipate people, many of them landless peasant women, who were previously ‘the poorest of the poor’ from both their destitution and powerlessness (Bornstein  1997; Yunus 1998, 2008). These advances have developed methods, described earlier, involving small loans based on social, rather than economic collateral, that make use of principles of collaboration rather than competition. Such imaginative innovations can play significant roles in achieving and sustaining beneficial outcomes worldwide.xviii Similar productive activities of contact and exchange can also underpin the growth of liberty. The conduct of trade has continued to promote both individual enterprise and the spread of knowledge, as identified and explored half a century ago by Jane Jacobs (1969). It is not necessary to be an economic determinist to appreciate how much human independence has benefited from rising levels of personal prosperity, allowing individuals to enjoy secure homes, incomes and personal access to health and education. These benefits, however, are not automatic. They must be advocated, secured and maintained in the face of powerful competing interests, including financially empowered business and media establishments, seeking to maintain their own maximum possible differentials of wealth. Elsewhere, personal prosperity must compete with the regimenting effects of political hegemony. In the People’s Republic of China, for instance, the New  York Times journalist Peter Hessler (2006,  2010) shows how in the early years of this century individual peasants and workers were succeeding in wresting increasing individual liberties and income for themselves and their families as the reward for their massive contributions to

booming national output. However, these freedoms never extended to such repressed minorities as the Tibetan Buddhists or Muslim Uighurs. Personal liberties have now also been withdrawn from the Hong Kong community (Affinity  2019). By themselves, productivity and gross national product cannot guarantee the development of healthy, just and happy communities. Recognition, communication and collaborative action present more effective pathways to achieve social justice. the impacts of  prosperity on  social justice

Principles of social justice should also influence the distribution of wealth and power: who will have what freedoms and how collective wealth will be distributed. Aggregate levels of prosperity in the form of indicators like the Gross National Product or average income levels may tell us nothing about achieving social justice. While some prosperous mixed economy societies, such as Finland and Sweden enjoy relatively egalitarian distributions of wealth and power, other equally affluent ones such as the USA and Australia achieve much lower social equity (Wilkinson and Pickett  2009). Widely differing levels of economic justice may operate in different parts of a single society, as in mid-­twentieth century Spain, where the rapidly expanding membership of the Mondragon Worker’s Cooperative (rising to over 74,000 by 2016) maintained a differential between the pay of its lowest-­paid operatives and its highest-­paid managers, of no more than six times, compared with ones many times that in the rest of the country, ruled until his death in 1975 by Franco’s fascist and elitist regime (Whyte and Whyte  1998; Wikipedia  2022). By comparison, in contemporary Australia, the widening ratio for Chief Executive Officers is approaching 60 times the nation’s minimum wage. Programmes aimed solely to increase the Gross National Product may therefore do little to improve social justice or the living conditions of the bottom quartile. Indeed, unconstrained appetites for personal wealth can assist energetic individuals and groups to expand their prosperity at the cost of opportunities available to their fellow citizens. For instance, current pay differentials in Australia between captains of business and investment bankers and the essential workers in water supply, aged care and refuse collection offend many people’s senses of justice and thereby threaten the stability and sustainability of community life. They may have also, as in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, endangered the prosperity, which was their original justification,



as senior executive officers in search of annual performance bonuses pursued short-­term profits and ignored necessary re-­investment in affordable housing and the infrastructure required for future production in favour of insecure investments in hedge fund derivatives and ‘sub-­prime’ housing markets at high rates of interest (Stiglitz 2016). At the global scale, too, there is evidence that the international division of labour and the effects of direct foreign investment can engender economic exploitation, mendacity and even armed interventions as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Monbiot 2003; Heywood 2006). By contrast, schemes such as Fair Trade and Renewable Energy can make invaluable contributions to human flourishing by balancing the dynamism of prosperity with the advancement of social justice and sustainability. relations between prosperity and sustainability

In the short term, prosperity has often been pursued at the cost of heedless consumption of irreplaceable resources of environment and habitat, and therefore, of sustainability. In keeping with the observation of economist John Maynard Keynes that ‘in the long run, we are all dead’, political leaders and economists tend to be notably uninterested in the long-­term future with which sustainability is most concerned.xix Nevertheless, if societies are to succeed in contributing to an upward spiral of social evolution and conservation of environmental capital, we should plan to avoid perpetrating new disasters. For nearly a thousand years, for instance, Greek landscapes were stripped bare of trees in order to smelt bronze and iron and build trading and war ships, until the peninsula’s environment was no longer capable of supporting its own population resulting in emigration to new colonies. Early Icelandic and Norwegian colonists of Greenland committed similar mistakes, resulting in their isolation in marginal and cooling environments inexorably condemning them to slow extinction through starvation and hypothermia, their skeletons becoming smaller and more diseased in their increasingly frozen and shallow graves throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Diamond  2005). Single-­minded pursuit of wealth may be misconceived into such short time spans of resource consumption and pollution that environmental sustainability is lost. Nevertheless, consideration for longer-­ term prosperity can lead communities to adopt more sustainable practices, like the forest preservation and reafforestation of Tokugawa Japan and twentieth-­ century Scandinavia and the irrigation practices

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of Bali and Sri Lanka (Diamond 2005). Prosperity is also often cited as a means to produce sufficient wealth to enable protection of the resources on which shared futures may depend. Such extra wealth, it is sometimes argued, is necessary to fund the additional costs of environmentally compatible production, recycling of resources, rehabilitation and reafforestation of damaged landscapes and protection and reuse of resources. The reintroduction of adequate fuel supplies to East Timor in 2001, for instance, ended the tragic necessity to strip trees of their branches, day by day, branch by branch, to provide the wood for essential cooking. Local people returning in 2000  to the Dili waterfront from their flight from the marauding militia would circle sadly round well-­loved local trees, clasping their machetes, trying to select a branch whose loss would not prove fatal to the whole tree. As soon as fuel supplies were reinstated, careful conservation of local timber was resumed, to prevent erosion and to nurture local insect life and fauna. Now Timor Loro S’ae has won control of a significant and fairer share of its own petroleum resources. A similar pathway to tree preservation is also desperately needed on the unstable steep slopes of western and central Nepal. Viewed coherently, achievement of long-­ term prosperity, when linked to policies of fair distribution of wealth and rewards, may thus offer powerful support for adoption of sustainable practices. It should not be, as it often is, reduced to a justification to provide short-­term wealth for prizing long-­term resources away from their source locations. Sustainability, like social justice, can produce highly significant benefits for long-­term prosperity by recognising, in the celebrated phrase of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987, p. 8) that current development should be designed to ‘ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

The impacts of liberty The exercise of the independent judgement, essential to develop the knowledge on which prosperity is based, requires freedom of speech and publication. Without liberty to contest conventional wisdom, there can be, in the words of John Stuart Mill, ‘no force to keep truth vital’ (1983). It was, for instance, the enquiring atmosphere of the relatively free Italian city states of the Renaissance and of social contract Britain of the seventeenth century that did most to create the scientific discoveries,

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which generated the later Industrial Revolution and the prosperity of the modern epoch. Equally, the creative genius of inventors, from Leonardo da Vinci to today’s innovators of Silicon Valley, is best fostered in talented, tolerant and open-­ minded societies that can attract lateral thinkers and promote the exchange of ideas and skills (Florida 2005). These close relations between liberty, prosperity and justice are demonstrated in the Bills, Charters and Declarations of Rights that have provided the milestones of social progress since the signing of England’s Magna Carta in 1215. Reading the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, one is struck by how many of its 30 articles concern equality of rights for ‘everyone’. Article 2, for instance, opens: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political of other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (United Nations General Assembly, 2008) No fewer than 23 of the 30 articles commence with the words ‘Everyone’ or ‘All’. The strong reciprocal links between liberty and social justice focus on the bonds of reciprocity that hold communities together, frequently aiming to overcome or balance the strains of competition, intolerance, suspicion and free-­floating anger to which they have often been prone. The relations between liberty and sustainability are more complex. When matched with social justice, there is a positive three-­way balance among equal liberties, sustainable resources and just distributions, in which one person’s liberty to acquire and consume is constrained by prudent overall use and conservation of resources to ensure a like liberty for others in the same and subsequent generations. Purposive legislation limiting the freedom of individuals to extract water or pollute watercourses, for instance, is widely regarded as compatible with human rights. Where this has not been adequately enforced, as in the case of Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin throughout the first two decades of this century, disaster is ensuing, episode by episode. Allowing extreme libertarians and individualists to seize claimed rights to do as they wish, irrespective of impacts on others or on the shared environment of this and future generations thus risks promoting a ‘race to the bottom’, in which neither society nor its natural environment

would be long sustained. Once again, there is a clear need to weigh and balance the compatibility of one value with another to achieve prudent and sustainable outcomes.

Social justice impacts The values of social justice enliven the Charters, Bills of Rights and legislative controls that safeguard equal liberties and provide protection against the dangers that excessive liberties of one person may erode the liberties of others. Mill’s criterion of whether a matter is primarily self-­affecting or other-­affecting, provides a useful practical test to distinguish personal freedoms from excessive license. Positive opportunities result from combining social justice and personal liberty, contributing to the long-­term and sustainable creation of social wealth (Hutchinson 2004; Putnam et al. 2004). The ‘associational economics’ that flexibly combines the skills of many small producers to generate new products has highlighted the importance of social inclusion in economic performance in times of rapidly changing demands. For instance, such sociable activities as communal singing and dancing have played an important role in maintaining the economic vitality of the ‘Third Italy’ of Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Umbria and Veneto (Putnam et al. 1993; Cooke and Morgan 1998), suggesting that ‘a community that plays together stays together’ and learns how to prosper through collaboration. Sustainability is therefore a principle that harmonises well with social justice. Communities of people as well as those of plant and animal species are best maintained within an ecological framework that maintains balance by avoiding excessive dominance of any one element that might take the whole system to a ‘tipping point’ where massive dislocation would result  –  unfortunately a characteristic of unregulated economies. The social justice principles of community planning, on the other hand, can reinforce the sustainability that any society needs, to maintain environmental and social systems for the benefit of all in both current and future generations.

The demands for sustainability Sustainability provides the long-­ term underpinning for prosperity, securing the future resources of natural and environmental capital, prompting conservative use of natural products, such as bamboo, hemp and timber and encouraging development



of such renewable energy sources as tidal, solar, wind, geothermal and wave power. The prudent strategies of demand management, reducing individual consumption of water, energy, road space and building land, originate in people’s recognition of the need to conserve scarce resources. Jared Diamond (2005) reminds us that sustainability is not ‘a once and for all’ set of principles, but demands constant scanning of the changing physical, economic and social environments to respond to new threats and unintended consequences. The contributions of sustainability to social justice are equally fundamental. Recognising and conserving common resources, rights and shared culture will require collaborative planning, now and in the future, to conserve natural resources of air, water, soil, species and habitats for the prudent enjoyment  of all. The precautionary principle of avoiding actions that may have harmful long-­term consequences links the two values of sustainability and social justice. Like landscapes, communities evolve over time and develop strengths through building symbiotic relationships and capacities for mutual aid, and like landscapes they may be easily eroded. Also like landscapes, they depend on sustainable systems, services and networks to maintain their resources. Their conservation requires negotiation, regulation and personal self-­control and involves the avoidance or control of greed. Social justice provisions of mutual caring, communication and reciprocity reinforce the principles of sustainability.

Conclusions: how values can combine to solve problems and shape creative plans Human wants and values emerge as the pulse and breath from which community planning draws its energy. Basic human needs for sustenance, health, shelter and exercise are universal concerns that provide firm starting points. They provide the impulses for each of the successive phases of discussion, directions, policies, proposals and evaluation leading to commitment. Competing prioritises to be ascribed to such values as liberty, justice, knowledge, mutual aid and personal choice can then be clarified by productive debate among participants to determine specific proposals. Many different elements must be balanced to hold each other in place. Too much freedom for one individual or group may destroy social justice

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and eventually threaten the well-­being and even survival of another, and therefore the harmony on which the well-­being of the whole community depends. One notorious example of this was the extremism of the Khmer Rouge, pursuing their future-­ orientated vision of environmental and political purity by emptying the towns of Cambodia and instituting a process of extermination of people labelled as supporters of western materialism or bourgeois progress (Pilger  1992). Instead of following such a narrowing path, many values can be identified, acknowledged and unfolded, so that their implications can be understood and compared and their eventual resolution negotiated through responsive debate. This is why Habermas (1987) and Honneth (2022) propose that the mutual recognition and communicative action involved in direct discussion should become pervasive principles and routine methods of community conduct and social decision. The four values discussed in this chapter evoke and support many others as indicated in Figure  4.1. This chapter has offered models of how we can relate these values and priorities to each other to achieve compatibility through cycles of mutual adjustment and reconciliation. Apparent conflicts can give rise to constructive solutions that in turn generate feasible policies, in characteristic cycles of the upward spiral of progressive problem-­ solving (­Popper 1972). For instance, recognition of the problems of climate change and  associated ­ tensions between prosperity and sustainability can prompt proposals and e­ ncourage invention and adop­tion of such new methods of generation and production, as renewable forms of solar, wind and tidal energy that conserve finite natural resources. These will often incorporate many of the 7 ‘Rs’ of re-­ use, recycling, reclaiming, rehabilitation, rationing, reservation and regulation, discussed earlier in this chapter. Similarly, the potentially conflicting claims of individual liberty and social justice can be reconciled in policies of practical collaboration, applying powers of human agency to the planning of whole communities, in activities extending, for example, from neighbourhood community gardens through city parks and regional recreation systems to the National Park systems of whole nations and even beyond to World Conservation Areas like the Great Barrier Reef and the Yosemite National Park. In the field of work, local incubator sites and microcredit systems can be matched by regional networks of associational production and global agreements on Fair Trade and exchange. Potentially beneficial

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collaborative achievements may result, such as global systems of satellite communication, rapid tsunami warnings and worldwide post-­disaster aid in such situations as the international responses to earthquakes, tsunamis and pandemics. The ongoing operations of the World Health Organisation in conquering Cholera, combating Malaria and coordinating responses to the scourges of global pandemics provide current examples. Further cases of such enlightened self-­interest are provided by the 2021 donation of tens of millions of vaccine doses by the USA and Republic of China to assist developing nations in combatting the initially devastating effects of the Covid-­19 pandemic. Subsequent discussions can be shaped according to well-­established processes of consultation over agenda setting and successive phases of conflict resolution, evaluation and policy development. These  thrive on the familiar challenges of systematic problem solving, described in Chapter  5 Ways and Means and often result in the most highly constrained situations and most difficult problems giving rise to the most original and beneficial planning and design solutions. One celebrated example of this problem-­solving, multiple criteria process transcending local constraints and contexts, is the design by the Danish architect, Jorn Utzon of the Sydney Opera House, successfully combining values of environment, aesthetics, metropolitan focus, national and international culture, performance requirements and entertainment quality (Britannica 2022). In a similar way, but at a much greater scale (earlier examined in Box 1.4), the values of liberty, justice and sustainability have been combined in pursuit of prosperity for impoverished rural women and their families in contemporary Bangladesh in the highly creative policy of microcredit (Yunus  1998,  2008). Such wide ranges of values, even where they may appear to compete, are not necessarily obstacles to successful community planning. Constructively approached, they may be brought together to act as springboards for important innovations. Such methods can combine contributions from many ways of thinking and knowing to help invent better solutions to satisfy our values, in line with Hume’s aphorism with which this chapter opened, that Reason is, and should only be, the slave of the passions – or the servant of our values. These valued ends and reasoned methods will include ones drawn from art, science and craft, which are discussed in the next chapter, Ways and Means.

Endnotes i A values-­ based approach to planning proposes that activities have been developed to satisfy basic human needs, wants and values, and that structures are built to accommodate such resulting activities as residence, work, play and movement, because of their essential survival value. Work activities, for example, may be performed in pursuit of a number of values, including sustenance to maintain life for ourselves and our families, expression of our natural creativity, and the achievement of prosperity, power, status and self-­ esteem. Play similarly expresses not only its own activities, but also those of skills development and therefore, indirectly, sustenance. Similarly, movement may be sought for reasons of choice, recreation, productivity or autonomy. The implications of these considerations are explored in more detail in the next chapter, Ways and Means. ii Gordon Childe (1976) describes how the first development of stable settled societies during the Neolithic times of the fifth and sixth millennia BCE coincided with the widespread transmission of technical skills of pottery, metallurgy and wheel use, favouring the further transmission of such skills. iii They must also have assisted the species in surviving the dramatic changes of climate associated with the arrival and passing of the ice ages. There is likewise an impressive array of signs of choice and freedom in the evidence of productivity and nurturing of the Neolithic villages of 10,000 years ago assembled by Peter Kropotkin in his monumental work Mutual Aid (1939). The skills of the epoch’s characteristic activities of weaving, spinning, pottery, crop breeding, harvesting and fashioning of flint tools must have relied on individual initiative, cultural transmission and cooperative effort more than mass regulation. This freedom-­based interpretation is supported by Childe (1976), who comments that it is impossible ‘to detect any indications of chieftainship in a [typical] Danubian Village’ of this Neolithic period. The extensive trading patterns, which distributed products across and between continents, also indicate notable individual enterprise and personal initiative to undertake the many confronting journeys involved in these often-­hazardous sequences of exchange. Though constrained by the new dominance of military and religious elites, the celebration of the spirit of personal liberty still shines through the earliest written records of four thousand years ago, in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh . This records the emergence of urban life from the merging of the traditions of hunting and gathering with those of agriculture, from the standpoint of Gilgamesh, an heroic individual ruler of Uruk, who makes dangerous journeys to the mountain forests to secure



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cedar timber for his temples and befriends Enkidu, the wild hunter, who originally proclaims: ‘I am the strongest here, I have come to change the old order, I am he who was born in the hills, I am he who is strongest of all!’ before agreeing to collaborate peacefully and joyfully with Gilgamesh (Sandars  1972). Equally assertive impulses towards initiative and self-­expression are demonstrated in the Greek and Phoenician establishment of colonies around the shores of the Mediterranean. Independent and aggressive values are vividly illustrated in the epic sagas of the Trojan War, with the brittle heroics of Achilles and the wily resilience of Odysseus’ exploits in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. A similar creative self-­ confidence and spirit of self-­expression is expressed in the grandeur of the Parthenon and surrounding temples of Athens’ Acropolis and the carvings, statues and ornamental pottery of the city’s classical and Hellenistic periods. Distilled into the social philosophy of Plato’s Symposium and his presentation of Socrates’ Apology, they still inspire contemporary social theorists with the resilient spirit of liberty that proclaims the inherent right to question the policies and practices of the state and to debate with one’s fellow citizens. iv When city life re-­emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries AD in Western and Northern Europe, serfs who were able to remain absent for a year from their feudal demesnes became free citizens and the ideal that ‘it is city air which makes men free’ became a commonplace. Kropotkin (1939) notes that throughout the tenth to twelfth centuries: Thousands of fortified centres were built by the energies of the village communities, and once they had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in this new sanctuary  –  the town walls  –  they now understood that they could resist the encroachment of their internal enemies, the lords, as well as invasions of foreigners. A new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures. The medieval city was born. For Kropotkin, it was liberty that shaped modern community life and these links between community life and liberty were strengthened through their productive invention of craft guilds, frequently combining to create city governments in progressive steps towards local democracy. Citizens’ rights were also to shape the continued social evolution of the great trading cities of the Renaissance – the North European Hanseatic League and the international trading centres of Amsterdam, Haarlem, Antwerp, London, Hamburg and Venice, recorded in the individualistic elegance and opulence of such painters as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Veronese and Canaletto. Similar Renaissance values of individualism and originality were expressed in the experiments of artists and engineers such as

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Leonardo da Vinci, with his inventions of flying machines, submarines and siege machines and the haunting psychological interpretations of canvas and mural paintings, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper proclaiming the triumphs and tribulations of personal freedom and unfettered mental inquiry (Rizzati  1968). Those scientists, including Galileo and Isaac Newton, who transformed human understanding of the world, also made good use of their liberty to question and reinterpret both received truths and the evidence of their own senses. Newton benefited from the relative freedom of life in seventeenth-­century Cambridge and Galileo successfully stepped a perilous path between religious observance and independent thought to help lay the foundations for modern science. iv Shakespeare’s Hamlet captures the heroic agony of such personal responsibility and choice when he asks himself in his celebrated soliloquy: To be or not to be: That is the question; Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take action against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them? v Dostoevsky’s novels Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler, The Idiot and many others contain such wonderful insights into human nature and motivation that they should be prescribed reading for any course or program of conflict resolution. vi In England, these can be traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215, declaring rights of justice and equality before the law, trial by jury and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The scope of human rights has been continually advanced over the centuries. The 1628 Declaration of Rights extended the rights of the feudal lords of Magna Carta to include elected parliaments (Robertson 1999). The 1689 Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech and writing, prompted the publication in the following year of John Locke’s long contemplated Two Treatises of Government and Letters concerning Toleration (1978), creating the effective foundations for the contractarian doctrine, which now provides a bridge between the values of human liberty and social justice, basing the scope of government on a notional contract, whereby individuals sacrifice some degree of personal freedom in return for protection of life and property by the state. vii Nietzsche himself, though a powerful enthusiast for such ‘Man and Superman’ theories, acknowledged the limitations of the ideas of such self-­proclaimed leaders on those subjected to their control, when he exclaims: ‘What? A great man-­I see only the actor of his own ideal!’ A later philosophical commentator, Dave Robinson, writes:

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It is however not clear whether (Nietzsche’s) Overman is an ideal, a recommended attitude of mind, a realistic future philosophy or a Darwinian inevitability. As a philosophical idea, its influence has been huge in both literature and life. The frequent misinterpretations and political applications of the doctrine have not always been benign (Robinson 1999, p. 76). viii These ideas were reflected in the libertarian views of Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley in her explorations of human choice and agency in the novel Frankenstein and of Godwin’s son in law, the visionary poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose life and writings were dedicated to the ideal of the freedom of the human spirit. ix Mill was the godfather and a major influence on Bertrand Russell, who was to become one of the twentieth century’s strongest voices proclaiming the rational rights of individual liberty (Russell 1988a,b,c). x Australia’s religious education controversy of the 1950s was resolved when the Commonwealth Government decided to fund minority groups’ own education systems. This is a good illustration of the application of both liberal and Fabian principles in combining individual and group initiatives to deliver nationally guaranteed services. After a long and divisive dispute in the Australian Labor Party between two polarised wings consisting of a substantial minority of Roman Catholic members and a non-­sectarian majority, whom the Catholics suspected of Marxist sympathies, the party finally accepted the Liberal government’s funding model for education. This allocated generous support for all sectarian and religious schools to provide their own federally monitored education, as regulated by government appointed inspectors. This has now worked well with bipartisan support for more than half a century and religious education is no longer a contentious issue in Australian politics. Despite recent wobbles, overall, the nation performs well in terms of literacy, numeracy and scientific and technological innovation. xi The most recent revision of the UK’s planning legislation, the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development Order) of 2015 (Legislation Gov UK  2015), maintains the 75 year old requirements for approval for development, which obtrudes into the public realm or would impact directly on neighbours, before work can be undertaken. Specific requirements are that new building should be behind the front building line; less than 4 m in height; less than 3 or 4 m from the neighbouring buildings on either side (depending upon whether they are one or two storeys high); and project no more than 4 m to the rear. xii If individual liberties of powerful or privileged people are allowed free rein, they may result, for instance, in the telling phrase of the historian of England’s nineteenth century, David Thompson (1978), in ‘the free rights of Englishmen to make life a hell on earth

for themselves and for their neighbours’. The turbulent course of the twentieth century provides even more disastrous global examples where painstakingly created social progress has been devastated by explosions or episodes of unconstrained competition, ethnic antagonism or demonic energy, such as occurred in Nazi Germany, the Serbian occupation of Bosnia, the Hutu slaughter of Tutsi minorities in Ruanda, and the unprovoked 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Such excesses need to be identified early and adequately controlled by economic and cultural sanctions or legal force. xiii Reverence for human unity with nature and respect for its conservation can be found in the ideas of a wide range of religious and practical leaders and thinkers across all continents and many millennia. Gautama Buddha meditated on the sacredness of life. The teachings of the Chinese mystic, Lao Tze identified the self-­ rewarding virtues of harmony (Power of Positivity  2022). The words and actions of the Christian Saint Francis of Assisi proclaimed the joyful responsibilities of universal nurture. The message ascribed to the American Indian, Chief Seattle on the imperishability of nature demanded: How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? (Buerge  1992). The more contemporary ecologist, Suzuki and McConnell (1998), argues for the inter-­relatedness of all matter while the scientific theorists, Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock, identify the importance of the spirit of Gaia, capable of adjusting, if not over-­burdened by the pace of change, the many elements of life to each other. The entire life work and passionate advocacy of the eminent naturalist, David Attenborough, has resulted in a continually expanding treasury of numerous books and television programs over seven decades (Attenborough  1979,  2011,  2021; Lovelock  1988; Suzuki and McConnell 1998). xiv It is interesting here to note Karl Popper’s definition of ‘life’ as ‘negative entropy’. Entropy is what makes things fly apart. Harmony is what makes them hold together. The Gaia Hypothesis is a global expression of this coherence of negative entropy. xv The gifts were passed in opposite directions from individual to individual in the many villages of the Trobriand Islands, the Amphletts and the neighbouring mainland of New Guinea, uniting communities that are now separated under different national regimes of New Guinea and Solomon Islands, and riven with civil wars related to complex competing claims to control the copper mines of Pangui. The eminent anthropologist C. Daryll Forde, writing in 1934, described a practice that was contributing to peaceful community life throughout the first half of the twentieth century as follows: ‘The red shell necklaces always move clockwise and the armlets anticlockwise, so that an individual participating in the exchange receives a necklace from one side and repays it with an



armlet received from the other. The objects themselves are valuable ornaments only shown at festivals.  .  . Each journey of a Kula trader is also the occasion for extensive transactions of a more commercial character of food products and utensils. But even here the barter has the nature of an exchange of presents.  .  . The bigger journeys are events prepared long in advance and enjoyed by the whole community. The Kula maintains friendly intercourse between distant areas and gives a stability to economic relations which is lacking in most parts of Melanesia’ (Forde 1957, p. 204). xvi There are many good reasons for working hard to achieve sustainability. One is the brittleness of recourse to Louis XIV’s dictum that ‘After me, the deluge!’ because in this millennium of punctuated equilibrium, the floodwaters may  not be so long delayed. Then, there is the natural love that binds one generation to the next and that makes us want to bequeath a livable world to our children (Rawls  1971). Most people prefer the prospect of progress and productivity to that of dissolution and disaster. Finally, one of the most compelling justifications for living is the continuation of life itself, the whole project of species survival and evolution, both of our own kind and then of the larger biosphere. Whether one subscribes to Dawkins’ ‘Selfish Gene’ (1976, 2016), Kropotkin’s ‘Sociable Species’ (1939) or Singer’s ‘Moral Being’ (1982, 2012), there is no lasting satisfaction in creating devastation. The thrills of destruction are momentary, the joys of continuity are more lasting. xvii This association extends back in time over two and half millennia to ancient Greece. Plato’s Symposium vividly depicts a society where leisured aristocrats – whether ones of the of the blood like Alcibiades or of the mind like Socrates – could formulate ideas of freedom that they could later enact, choosing to support or defy the conventional wisdom of their day. Abundance gave rise to freedom of thought and encouraged freedom of speech. Although ancient Athens’ particular balance of simple needs and ample resources underlaid the wide-­ranging thought that was the basis of the city’s democratic phase, it must be acknowledged that this was also a slave and sexist society. Two and a half millennia later, we should be able to do better to empower wider communities, with the resources to participate in free societies. xviii As of October, 2021, the Grameen Bank had 9.44  million members, 97% of whom are women. With 2568 branches, the bank provided services in 81,678 villages, covering more than 93% of all villages in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank 2021). xix This celebrated quotation comes from Keynes’ General Theory of Money (1964). During the  Great Depression, the prevailing economic orthodoxy was the view of classical economists that markets would rectify disequilibrium without government intervention. Therefore, when the Great Depression occurred in 1930, the classical response was to do

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nothing – because in the long run the markets would solve the problem (real wages would fall, people would return to work and the economy would return to full employment). However, Keynes regarded this as folly. In the depth of a recession, why not try to rectify the situation, rather than leave the solution to market forces and time? Although the recession might end in the long run, that might be when ‘we are all dead’. Keynes wanted to try to solve the depression then rather than wait for however long the ’long run’ might prove to be (Economic Essays 2010).

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5

Ways and Means

Introduction: the roles of art, science and craft in community planning To succeed in integrating the rich variety of scales and activities of contemporary life, community planning requires methods capable of integrating the many ways that people live, think and work. To reflect and capture this rounded nature, planning methods need to draw on each of art, science, craft and governance. They must be creative when they draw together ideas and materials to help shape new events and places. They must be scientific when they test options and proposals against available information and projections. They must also become a craft: an acquired skill, communicated through actions, words and drawings that can be repeatedly applied to new situations. Finally, as a public activity, they must be part of the political arena of representative governance and informed by community participation. Accordingly, the chapter is organised into the following sections: 1. Art and creativity in planning 2. Planning as a craft 3. Science, knowledge and planning method 4. Political control and community participation 5. Conclusions: values based methods for value fulfilment.

Art and creativity in planning To think about the future at all requires imagination. To think about improving the quality of human living conditions, as community planning is committed to do, involves practical social commitment. Since what is cannot be seen as a reliable guide to what should be, planning must concern itself with more than mere description and projection (Schurz  1997). Like art, it involves not only sensing and interpreting but also re-­creating the observed world in forms, words, spaces and Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

structures. Creative planning interprets information to understand and improve activities by searching out causes and effects in similar ways to those by which art combines feelings and ideas to create its own original presentations. Current patterns and their effects are analysed to identify ways to propose better ones. For those interested in the history of ideas, the following section traces the roots of this impulse to understand and shape the world around us, back to its early expressions in archaeological evidence and historical examples. Others may prefer to proceed direct to the more practical discussions of the next section on ‘The invention of forms’. evidence of  early creative interpretation in  rock art and cave paintings

Evidence that such creative impulses are deeply embedded in the human psyche is confirmed by some of the earliest archaeological records. The creations of Australian Aboriginal art going back as far as 30,000 years are pervaded by spiritual significance. Stylised rock drawings depict the pantheistic Rainbow Serpent, the creation spirit of the world, and the numerous other animal ancestor spirits who were believed to have given rise to the lands and the people who continue to inhabit them to this day. In the oldest paintings, hand stencils literally put people’s marks upon the rocks while abstract networks of criss-­cross lines proclaim the whole tribe’s occupation of the land. In the middle period, stick figures celebrate human existence and activities of hunting, fishing and dancing. Later, so-­called X-­ray pictures are both analytical and creative, searching out the inner essence of the creatures they depict. Their combination of elements transcends mere observation and aspires to capture and celebrate the spirits of place and people, and the values that pervade the life and occupancy of both the land and of those who continue to feel the responsibilities of custodianship to this day. In Europe too, depictions of a similar range of people’s lives and environment date back tens of millennia to include the astounding cave paintings



of the Cro Magnon people who inhabited Europe from 28,000 to 12,000 years ago. Amongst the most dramatic examples are those of the Lascaux caves, depicting the huge bison, mammoths, deer and horses that the Cro Magnons hunted. Expert interpretation suggests that the artists were not only imitating life but also attempting to control it by sympathetic magic, capturing symbolically the spirit of their prey (Campbell  1985). In this way, these Palaeolithic cave paintings can be read as an early form of planning for the future hunting activities and daily lives of their communities.i Such bold visions can trigger whole trains of personal interpretation and identification so that the creative impulse becomes a mainspring of both art and planning, inspiring viewers with powerful convictions and motivation in ways that have continued to the present.ii Vivid examples of human capacities to develop overall visions spanning time and place are provided by the ways that Australian Aboriginal art continues to thrive and evolve into new combinations of traditional elements and symbolic depictions. One such case is the work of Emily Kngwarreye, who experienced an extraordinary flowering of creativity in the last eight years of her life from 1988 to 1996 (Neale  1998), painting many hundreds of canvases in a remarkable range of styles, using dots, nodes, stripes derived from body painting and startlingly beautiful Monet-­like areas of rich primary colours, mainly blues, green, reds and ochres. Many of the later works are so large that a small machine had to be constructed

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to wind the canvases forward as her work went on at a rapid but steady pace. When asked to explain what her paintings depicted she replied: My dreaming, pencil yam, mountain devil lizard, grass seed, Dreamtime pup, emu, emu food plant, green bean and yam seed. That’s what I paint: whole lot (Hodges, in Neale (Ed.) 1998, p. 33). Put simply, Emily was creating and sharing a comprehensive vision to capture and protect the spirit of her land. By recognising, singing and painting the whole landscape, she was maintaining a tradition by which its essence could be understood and continued. A community planner aiming to develop an inclusive and fruitful community appraisal can aim to gain inspiration from a similar range of holistic observations, interpretations translations and communications. the invention of  forms

Planning, like art, also aims to transform and infuse ideas, values and intentions into communicable forms. Bold schemes and proposals can evoke whole trains of personal association and affiliation in the minds of viewers. This commonality of creative impulse  –  one that unifies planning, art, design and science – is well demonstrated in the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). His paintings, which include The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are all masterpieces of interpretation. In science, his work extends across

Figure 5.1  David Hockney’s The Diver, painted in California in 1978. Source: Reproduced with permission of David Hockney’s The Diver, painted in California in 1978.

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mechanics, hydraulics, anatomy, human flight, flying machines, submarines and anticipated technological development by more than four hundred years. In physical planning, his designs for fortified towns and ducal palaces combine elegance and efficiency (Mannering  1981, pp.  30–33). Extracts from his sketch books, vividly displayed in the Museo della Scienza in Milan, show him starting with a basic idea; working it through a series of detailed tests for feasibility of individual parts; and making amendments until he is satisfied that it will work  –  an early and productive version of problem-­solving planning. His sketches for paintings show the same exploratory sequence. The reason that the resulting works such as the Mona Lisa, the Annunciation and the Last Supper possess such a marvellous coherence is that they flow from an original unifying idea. Then, awareness is giving rise to understanding and interpretation, which in turn shape design, presenting an early and effective model of planning method. Throughout the work of Leonardo’s contemporary, Michelangelo, there is evidence of the same drive to embed the intuition or idea of the artist into solid reality. The gigantic fresco with which he decorated the barrel vault of the Sistine Chapel and the 12 window lunettes and intervening panels in St Peter’s cathedral in Rome illustrates the entire biblical story of God’s creation of the sun, moon, earth and humanity and the origin of sin and its consequences. The charge of current that seems to flow from the outstretched finger of God to enliven the awakening Adam could be seen as symbolising in one gesture the extraordinary creative energies of the entire age.iii In many ways, the tasks being undertaken in shaping or reshaping whole communities to reflect the interests and hopes of their many thousands of members is no less challenging and will demand a similarly broad vision and universal span of attention. In planning method, as in art, ideas play a driving role. Painters have often supplied the emblems and symbols to communicate the rich variety of human experience and community life even more vividly and directly than words can, whether it is the vision of cooperative and harmonious communities of farmers and craftsmen sharing the common religious faith of Lorenzetti’s ‘Visions of Good and Bad Government’ of Siena in 1337– 1339 (Figure  1.1), or the wonderful vitality of David Hockney’s ‘The Diver’, capturing the more existential cultural climate of California in 1978 (Figure 5.2).

(a) Practice

1

2

3

Action

Reflection

Process (b)

Reflection

Practice

Evaluation

Action

Process

Figure 5.2  Evaluation in the action – reflection spiral. (a) Review in the action-­reflection spiral. (b) Evaluation in the action-­reflection process.

The creative roles of the written word The written word can also convey the uniquely powerful capacity of imagination to transform life. Written records provide the cornerstones for civilization, enabling knowledge to be developed and stored and ideas and agreements to be exchanged among people across distances of both space and time. As well as being essential tools of method, they are also the best possible ways to develop and depict what constitutes a good society. Over the centuries, Plato’s Republic (1998, originally written in 385 BC), the celebrated prayers of the thirteenth century St Francis of Assisi, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, 1983), and J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1861,  1983) have all contributed basic ideas that continue to justify and enliven community planning. More recently, authors and novelists such as Margaret Attwood (2004), A.S Byatt (1990, 1996), J. M. Coetzee (2004), Doris Lessing (2007) and Nadine Gordimer (1985) have all contributed ideas and warnings of dystopias that can also help to shape



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the goals and drive the processes that community life should be designed to achieve.iv Others again, including advocates of conservation like Barry Commoner (1972) and David Suzuki (2009) are more positive in their world views, aiming to solve problems and celebrate wholeness and interdependence. The English poet William Wordsworth (2010, p. 269) memorably caught this spirit of unity between place and people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century when he exclaimed over the beauty of Thames-­side London in the early morning and produced a vision of integration between humanity and nature that transcended the excesses of the then prevailing industrial revolution. This sense of harmony timelessly celebrates the life of the metropolis, as it balances and integrates the many thousands of places and hundreds of thousands of human energies that interact to form and sustain the life of the great city: Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will; Dear God! The very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still. Viewed in this way, the forces of community life appear as powerful and accessible as those of nature, where forces of universal attraction and expansion hold together the pulsing enigma of the physical universe.

Creating wholeness within new and existing communities Just as artistic impulses prompt individuals to imagine and create new ideas and objects, community planning aims to devise policies and plans that can enhance the activities of many thousands of individuals. New spatial forms will often be required. Howard’s ideas of Garden Cities interacting within the regional network of the Social City offer an early example of this. He aimed to merge the values of rural space, peace and resources with those of urban intensity and productive capacity to create communities, both bounded and energetic, which would combine the virtues of inner-­ city intensity and productivity with rural peace (Hall  1986,  2002). Contemporary regional planning, discussed later in Chapter  9, Places, Spaces and Community Design, often reflects and updates such ideas, aiming to focus metropolitan growth in

integrated clusters of activity centres or ‘secondary cities’ linked by rapid transit (Roberts 2014).

The contributions of Christopher Alexander (1936–2022) Over the last 60 years, the mathematician, architect and planner, Christopher Alexander, has explored and promoted this kind of synthesis to conserve, create and recreate harmony and wholeness in existing and new settlements. A series of books (some written collaboratively with colleagues in the Berkeley, California Center for Environmental Studies) has successively unfolded these ideas further, starting with Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1963), continuing through A Timeless Way of Building (1977), A Pattern Language (1979), the Oregon Experiment (1981) and A New Theory of Urban Design (1989) to his more recent definitive set of four volumes making up The Nature of Order (2002–2006). Alexander combines a number of elements  –  systems and set theory, scientific observations of pattern repetition at different levels of scale, and architectural theories of elimination of misfit between form and context – to create a general field theory of ‘a timeless way of building’ and place-­making. The intention of these approaches is to express values and accommodate activities more aptly than do current practices, often influenced by trend planning, technological determinism or architectural fashion. His starting point is the observation that much of the inherited pre-­ industrial shapes of towns and countryside demonstrate an almost perfect fit between successive new features and their existing contexts. Examples that spring to mind include the countryside villages and small country towns of the English Cotswolds, Yorkshire Dales and Italy’s Tuscany and Umbria, perfectly settling into the contours, field patterns and woodlands of their surrounding landscape, so that viewed from a distance their honey or grey coloured stone structures seem to represent a thickening and knotting together of the nets of roads, walls and scattered farmhouses of their surroundings, rather than separate features. By contrast, much elaborate and systematically designed modern urban development can appear jarring and repressive and is often actively disliked by many of its thousands and millions of daily users. Such developments, he observes, have been planned and designed with a kind of contempt for the complex evolved pattern of the existing world into which they should

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fit, and equally damaging, in ignorance or lack of respect for the preferences and needs of the people who will use them (1964, pp. 38–45). Alexander’s explanation of this contrast in quality is that in traditional societies both technologies and social organization are stable, so that design is able to evolve through cycles of trial and error over long periods of time to allow successive adaptations to adjust to a limited number of other factors to achieve new self-­ sustaining balances. Where mistakes are made, there is no barrier between the recognition of a failure and the remedial action to resolve it. Misfit and correction can go hand in hand and repercussions throughout the system can be readily adopted (1964, p.  50). Alexander deduces that this results from the stable social conditions in such times of largely static technology and materials. Thus, an owner or builder might erect a structure whose failings would soon become apparent and be corrected, continuing in a process of progressive problem-­solving and error elimination until he had improved the quality of his design in much the same way that Darwin argued evolution improved the capacity for survival of a species by natural selection. Even if the original builder didn’t achieve complete success, the chances were that his children would continue in the family craft and would soon resolve the old man’s errors, as has been the delight of young people throughout the ages. In the same way, whole settlements evolved to reflect the lives and needs of their citizens, leading to the near-­perfect relationships with their settings that can be observed today in such areas of regional continuity as Tuscany, North Yorkshire and parts of USA’s New England. However, in dynamic contemporary societies, shaped by the scientific, industrial and information revolutions, few of the former conditions that encouraged this natural process for eliminating misfits, have time to apply. Design aims constantly change; materials supersede each other before we can explore their natural characteristics and limitations. Our best approach, therefore, is to shape a design process that intentionally replicates the winnowing effects of the passage of time in more stable cultures, to eliminate misfits between different elements and proposals. Early in his career, Alexander applied these ideas of synthesis through systematic and cumulative problem-­ solving while working as a consultant on village planning for the government of Gujerat in north west India. His exemplary Indian Village study is reported in detail in Appendix 1 to his Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1979a) and a summary is attached as Appendix  5.A to this

chapter: Christopher Alexander’s Indian Village Design Case Study. Taking as axiomatic that the aim of planning is to fulfil agreed intentions, he identifies an array of 141 objectives, drawn from three sources:

• Values and needs expressed by villagers them-

selves during a period of six months of continuous contact with village life; • Goals and objectives drawn from the national and regional economic and social policies; • Preservation of values that he observed was already implicit in existing village life and form. Using set theory and mathematical modelling of the relationships between these objectives, he identified, grouped and resolved solutions to the 141 objectives in a process of successive problem-­ solving, solution development and mutual reconciliation detailed in Appendix 5.A to this chapter. Fifty years later, in an interesting case of parallel creativity, similar methods for developing and evaluating designs and proposals were produced for squatter and spontaneous settlements in the adjacent region of the Kutch in north western India by the Indian Architect–Planner, Neha Goel. In a paper entitled Squatter Settlements-­the Urban Vernacular, delivered to the 2010 Conference of the International Planning History Society in Istanbul she develops a methodology to understand the needs and shape proposals to enhance and expand squatter and self-­help settlements in north India. Although not previously familiar with the work of Alexander, Goel adopted a similar method of deriving design criteria for the future development of the squatter settlement of Biodada Village in the Kutch and the self-­help one of Khichripur in Delhi, from the cultural, social and physical values of those settlements and their people. Her functional and physical proposals for the sensitive development of the settlements were based on the observed and recorded needs and existing success stories of the area’s residents and traditional building styles and materials. Specific attention was given to each of the necessary residential functions of sleeping, cooking, washing, eating, procurement of water, family and social interaction and conducive conditions for the performance of chores. The arrangement of public space reflects natural patterns of centrality and assembly in the small square and triangular areas where pathways meet. The interest of Alexander’s and Goel’s proposals lies not only in their respectful and consultative methods but also in the brilliantly inventive solutions that they were able to produce, meeting objectives of cultural conservation, high residential



density, responsive mixed uses, economic viability, social integration and community empowerment, in ways that empower existing communities and allow them to continue to develop where they have grown up and developed attachments to people and places. Neha Goel’s ideas also reflect many of the principles of good design discussed in Chapter 9 of this book. They resonate with the case study, which is recounted there of the upgrading of the Kolkata inner city Bustees, in the period 1974–1986 by cooperation between the then Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority and the local communities, which achieved spectacularly successful improvement of living conditions at costs of land, labour and capital that were much more affordable than those originally proposed by more conventional proposals to clear and replace these extensive areas  –  accommodating almost two million of Kolkata’s population (Heywood  1987). Similar approaches have the potential to achieve successful results for Delhi and for many other great and rapidly expanding Asian cities. Moreover, these methods of successive problem-­ solving are also applicable elsewhere in dynamic contemporary societies, wherever the many rapid changes of the scientific and information revolutions have transformed the stable conditions that previously fostered progressive elimination of misfits by repeated ripples of change. In city centres and transportation hubs, for instance, design challenges constantly change: materials supersede each other before their inherent characteristics and limitations can be explored. The ‘multiple criteria’ design processes employed by Alexander and Goel offer highly appropriate methods to eliminate conflict between such different objectives and to establish harmony with their wider environments by simulating in design models the systematic resolution of conflicts between form and context. By such means, we may avoid creating more of what Peter Hall (1980) has called ‘Great Planning Disasters’ such as freeways carving up living cities and tower blocks separating young mothers from their children’s play spaces. Alexander is at pains to point out in The Process of Creating Life (Volume Two of The Nature of Order) that this search to recognize, maintain and create wholeness is an inherently creative and craftsman-­like activity, leading him to demonstrate its workings by illustrations of classical Persian and Turkish carpets, in which each diverse feature is related harmoniously to the overall design. He is not seeking to use abstract analysis to displace creativity, but rather to maximise creative energy by concentrating attention on solving each of a comprehensive succession

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of specific problems, one at a time. Later stages then apply similar progressive problem-­ solving to reconcile proposed solutions from the bottom up in a process of progressive invention to create an effective integrated design solution. Not only does Alexander employ both scientific and artistic means, but he is also laying the basis for planning as a practical and identifiable craft.

Planning as a craft craftsmanship

As a craft to be regularly applied in practice, community planning has much in common with other activities such as carpentry, weaving and computer programming. Such similarities have been interestingly explored by Richard Sennett (2008) when he argues that all creativity is more the mental coordination of hand and eye in practical problem-­solving than the outcome of abstract mental pattern-­making. Sennett goes on to offer explanations and illustrations of how this mainspring of problem-­solving contributes to human progress. Having developed, he argues, within the brain circuits that connect mind, hand and eye, this associational capacity generates skills that can be applied in quite different fields, and can then be refined by repeated practical application to become both relevant and reliable.v Sennett argues that practitioners, whether they are musicians, carpenters, computer programmers or community planners, need to master specific detailed operations and to practice long and purposively. To do this, they must be able to understand and master all the component practices, each a kind of invention, that go to make up their crafts, such as chiselling mortise joints, fingering a violin string, elaborating a ‘Linux’ program, or designing an engaging and relevant community survey. This sequence of improvement is illustrated in the following diagram of the action–practice–reflection process cycle or spiral. Figure 5.2,  Evaluation in the Action  Reflection  Spiral in the  earlier section on  the Invention of Forms  is designed to show how people’s instinctive responses to everyday needs for action naturally develop into established problem-­solving practices. Refined by stored experience and ideas, responses are organised into processes that can, in turn, amend and improve the next cycle of actions and reactions. This creates an upward spiral of problem-­solving, capable of adjusting actions and activities to match and manage – to plan – the constant and inescapable changes in physical and human life.

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The four phases of planning This four-­phase cycle involves a number of more specific stages, indicated in Figure  5.6, Generalised Planning Process. In the first phase, spontaneous appraisal will be triggered by the awareness, which gives rise to the original intention to plan. The second phase of understanding includes both the interpretation and projection of information about current and future situations and available resources, often involving some form of modelling (discussed in Chapter 6). The third step, the development and evaluation of options will involve both integrating information and reflection on results. The fourth phase, refining these outcomes into proposals for new ways of doing things, will lead to both plans and programs for implementation and monitoring. This simple four-­phase process should both reassure and empower practitioners. Each phase can be applied at different levels of intensity, depending upon the scale and complexity of the planning situation. These can vary from the back-­of-­an-­envelope record of existing knowledge and summary of intentions before briefing a Council committee or a community group, to a major one or two-­year program of search conferences and research investigations required for a major community planning strategy for a sizeable city or region. In summary, planners, like any other practitioners, need to have a series of steps that they can apply, with sensible adaptations, to handle all the situations that may confront them. Like craftsmen, who have acquired a working knowledge of each stage of their process, they will frequently find it possible to self-­consciously cut corners, merge stages, and improve the quality of work by thinking ahead. In so doing, the best craftsmen (say a Chippendale, a William Morris or a Stradivarius) may infuse a deeply satisfying unity into their work, achieving a rewarding harmony among the different components of information, consultation and policy options to reflect and amplify the original objectives. For example, an action research project (which might normally occur towards the end of the process) may be brought forward because a particular small-­scale scheme can test and amplify ways to satisfy some particular objectives, at the same time as involving significant stakeholders at an early enough stage to gain insight into their knowledge and objectives and secure their engagement and support for subsequent overall implementation. Equally, intuitive solutions that may have flashed or filtered into the mind at the outset of a planning scheme should not be puritanically excluded, but instead recorded for discussion,

review and further development to help generate creative options. science, knowledge and planning method

Universal Methods In all fields, methods need to be carefully shaped so that they can both reflect values and intentions and transform goals into activities and actions. The distinguished theorist of scientific method, Karl Popper (1902–1998) identifies a universal sequence that he argues is common to art, craft and science and even extends to include evolution (1959, 1972,  1989). He develops the analogy and hypothesis of the first development of sentient life of several billions of years ago, proposing that the first protozoa forming in the cooling oceans of that time achieved survival by being drawn to float upwards to gain enlivening access to sunlight and that this innate problem-­solving drive is more basic than Darwinian survival of the fittest or Huxley’s extrapolation of mutual extermination as the mainsprings of evolution. He proposes that: The method of trial and error is applied not only by Einstein but in a more dogmatic fashion by the amoeba also (Popper, 1989, p. 68). The resulting sequence of universal method can be summarised as: Original intentions > situation review >  problem-­solving and tentative solutions >  testing and error elimination > proposed applications > implementation > situation review and renewed intentions > These claims for the universality of method raise the question: ‘Science, though, is surely different from art and design: is it not the realm of objective observation, classification, logical deduction and precise measurement?’ Scientific Method as Measurement These questions are of great importance to all methods, including that of community planning, because the methods that are widely believed to be those of scientific inquiry often set standards of objectivity aspired to by practitioners in other activities, including planning, policy science and international relations. A prominent example is the frequent demand for ‘evidence based’ (rather than ‘evidence tested)’ policies. It is therefore significant that, as Popper argues, there may be fundamental flaws in the rationale that scientific methods should be grounded in



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Categorisation

Observations and records (Survey)

Experiments

Theories

(Analysis)

(Plan)

Figure 5.3  Traditional (Baconian) view of scientific method (1616–1932).

initial observation and measurement. Summarised in Figure 5.3, Tradtional (Baconian) view of scientific method this view held sway for three centuries from its development in the early 1600s to its first challenges in the early twentieth century. However, this process begs numerous questions. How will the categories for observation be decided if not on the basis of some pre-­existing theories? How will experiments be devised to explore the nature of the phenomena? In short, how will methods and their underlying theories be invented? David Hume, writing in the eighteenth century, raised related early doubts in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1990) questioning the logical basis of prediction. A century later, in order to protect the empirical approach based on systematic observations, J.S. Mill tried to make sense of Bacon’s model by accepting the idea of induction, drawing inferences from experience (Passmore 1980, pp. 19–20). This would allow the human mind to deduce general patterns from a limited amount of evidence, rather like someone connecting up points in a ‘dot to dot’ puzzle to make up a pattern or a picture. Despite the apparent common sense of this idea, the stubborn problem remains that though phenomena or events may have been associated with each other in particular ways in the past (the pattern of dots), this does not prove that there will be similar links in the future. This is particularly true in an age of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and rapidly mutating changes like our own. Not all weather patterns are constant. Not all swans are white: Australian ones are black. Not all bread nourishes: bad wheat germ leads to ergotism and madness. In other words, causality is, in the words of Karl Popper, a probability hypothesis rather than a ‘scientific’ certainty (1989, pp. 58–59). Scientific theories themselves, therefore, become hypotheses that have been imagined, tested and not yet disproved rather than unalterable truths that have been discovered and verified. Nevertheless, the fiction of Inductive Logic is so convenient, with its encouragement of the ‘good habits’ of careful observation and systematic recording that it remained largely unchallenged for nearly ninety years after its adoption by Mill and remains the

scarcely questioned view of some science teachers even today.

The logic of scientific discovery The first steps towards new thinking on scientific method were taken early in the mid-­ twentieth century with the 1935 publication in Vienna of Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, re-­directing attention to the question of how scientists actually develop new ideas and theories. Popper’s argument (1959,  1972) that science could not rely on inductive logic, asserted that facts do not speak for themselves but can only be interpreted in the light of the intuitive or developed ideas of their interpreters. This is well summarised by Bryan Magee when, explaining Popper’s and Einstein’s views, he writes: There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas.  .  .every discovery contains an irrational element or ‘a creative intuition’.  .  . In a similar way Einstein speaks of the “search for these highly universal laws. . . from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. ‘There is no logical path’ he says ‘leading to these. . .laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like intellectual love of the objects of experience’ (Magee 1973, p. 32). Popper’s views are constructive and inclusive. He argues that imaginative conjectures produce new hypotheses that can then be modified or refuted if they fail to explain observed facts or generate accurate predictions. Those that succeed become the best available truths given existing limitations of ideas and information. He envisages an upward spiral in the evolution of knowledge but rejects the possibility of finite human intelligence ever discovering total truth, which being infinite, would require infinite intelligence and infinite command of information to comprehend. Instead,

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All organisms are constantly, day and night, engaged in problem solving, and so are all evolutionary sequences of organisms (Popper 1989, p. 242). Natural selection is interpreted as a form of error correction, through the elimination of organisms that fail to make necessary changes and the success of those that generate controls to eliminate evolutionary errors (Popper 1989, pp. 272–278). Reliance on this capacity for problem-­solving causes critical rationalists to welcome an abundant flow of innovations that can each be tested in the objective conditions of the real world: Life is problem solving and discovery  –  the discovery of new facts, new possibilities – by way of trying out possibilities conceived in our imagination. This is . . .trying to get nearer to the truth, to a fuller, a more complete, a more interesting, logically stronger and more relevant truth – to a truth relevant to our problems (Popper 1989, p. 148). This all-­embracing view of the role of problem solving in the evolution of life provides a model for the thought experiments which Popper advocates to speed up the evolution of knowledge: While animal and pre-­ scientific knowledge grow mainly through the elimination of those holding the unfit hypotheses, scientific criticism often makes our theories perish in our stead, eliminating our mistaken beliefs before such beliefs lead to our own elimination (1989, p. 261). The relevance of this to planning is very clear: it becomes a prime means to recognize and solve problems posed by existing conditions, to identify, test and modify new arrangements better able to match the nature and meet the needs of individuals and communities. Popper’s tests, in other ways similar to Baconian experiments, also involve rigorous attempts to disprove each new theory or proposal, which may result in its being adopted, falsified, discarded or re-­formulated, thus adding to the store of our objective knowledge.vi In order to clarify this process of developing valid ideas, Popper refers to ‘3 Worlds of Knowledge’, each of equal validity and each supporting the others. World I is the observed world of external matter, existing more or less as recorded by the senses, and corroborated by a high level of successful use in everyday life and scientific

predictions. In planning terms, it is the world recorded by census statistics and flood maps. His World 2 consists of intelligent consciousness, typified in Descartes’ celebrated aphorism ‘I think, therefore I am’. It is the world inside our own heads that each of us knows best and with which we are continuously familiar. This is the world of personal and social objectives and of ideas and ideals. His World 3 combines Worlds I and 2 – the observed world and the world of ideas  –  to create an independent sphere of objective knowledge and theory, taking the form of scientific theories and recorded truths. Though produced by the interaction of matter and consciousness, it has its own independent existence, in books, films and disks. If such symbols of knowledge were to be despatched into space, and the world destroyed by a calamity, some non-­terrestrial intelligence could re-­create an understanding of the nature of our world through interpreting these symbols, indicating the reality of the objective knowledge of World 3 (Popper 1989). It is as though Popper were anticipating the impending arrival of the ‘cyber’ world of the new millennium, indisputably real, but totally dependent on the operations of human minds and consciousness, ‘a natural product of the human animal, comparable to a spider’s web’. Plans, as well as theories and works of art, are special cases of these ‘Third World’ entities. (Popper 1989, p. 112). In an interesting variant, both very recent and as old as humanity itself, the Australian Indigenous academic, Yunkaporta (2019) frames Aboriginal concepts of the Dreamtime, as being the basis for constant renewal. He interprets these concepts as deep unifying truths underlying what we experience in our everyday lives in the world around us. Thus, the ‘Dreamtime’ or Renewal can be interpreted as celebrating a very ancient understanding stored in spaces of consciousness similar to Popper’s World 3 and Chief Seattle’s natural world. Yunkaporta advocates freeing our mental capacities (Popper’s World 2) to achieve the original understandings of World 3 in order to acknowledge, interpret and optimise the observed realties (World I) in which we live out our daily lives. In a similar way, Emily Kngwarreye’s painting Earth’s Creation fuses together timeless patterns of creation, details of daily observation and brilliant artistic interpretation to create what she explicitly terms ‘My dreaming, pencil yam, mountain devil lizard, grass seed, Dreamtime pup, emu, emu food plant, green bean and yam seed. That’s what I paint: whole lot’. (Hodges, in Neale (Ed.)  1998, p.  33). There could be no better summary of the inclusive character of community planning. The



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creative scope and interpretations of these Dreamtime imaginings can evolve and expand as new discoveries of art, science and archaeology add fresh evidence to unearth new inspirations (Yunkaporta 2019).

Mistakes, problem-­solving and human and social progress In these ways, the creative contents of Popper’s World 3 of speculation and science continually expand, responding to the scope of developing theories and explanations. While Bacon’s Empiricism abhors and tries at all costs to avoid mistakes, Popper’s Critical Rationalism and Yunkaportu’s Renewal can embrace them, shifting the focus of good method from justifying favoured solutions to exploring and reformulating new and original answers to important new questions. The brain is no longer expected to impartially collect and sift all available information to produce explanatory theories, but to act as it has evolved to be best at, winnowing out the information most relevant to our values, interests and intentions. Thus, it is basic human problem-­solving and idea-­forming, not mere observation and accumulation of facts, that form the foundations of knowledge creation, artistic endeavour, and other purposeful human activities, including planning. Ideas and intentions should guide information collection, which will then allow the ideas themselves to be improved. In the contemporary world of increasing specialisation, this is an empowering perspective, encouraging us to develop wide-­ranging and radical new ideas and proposals, capable of responding to the rapidly expanding challenges of the new millennium, energised by the empowering view that, as individuals and societies, we have the problem-­ solving and communication skills to continually reshape our changing world. The result should be to free people, especially when planning or taking decisions, from the impossible but self-­ imposed burden of know-­all, pretending that professional training by itself can give us the ability to know all the questions or have all the answers.

Critical rationalist approach to planning The basic beliefs of critical rationalists can now be summarised:

• Intellectual progress depends upon conjecture,

attempted refutation and reformulation of ideas;

• Criticism

is potentially constructive and provides the best path to valid knowledge; • The value and ‘truth content’ of statements increases with their audacity or originality while a trite or obvious truth adds little or nothing to human knowledge. One of the interests of Popper’s ideas is that they extend beyond the range of any one activity  –  even one as wide-­ ranging as community planning – to include explanations of all ecological and human evolution. Not surprisingly, these theories are often open-­textured and leave space for new explorations, conjectures and refutations. As a result, such critical rationalism offers a coherent and encouraging context to understand and interpret existing conditions and to develop better options. It supports a perspective of planning and policy-­ making as successive and open-­ minded conjectures that can welcome and incorporate new thinking rather than being driven to reject or suppress dissent or criticism. For example, planning systems that invite objections to all substantial new proposals, before decisions are taken to adopt them, are examples of the virtues of this approach. Such views can make planning and design more imaginative and open-­ended activities, rather than rule-­bound, closed and cautious specialisms. They encourage anticipations of the future to pursue ambitious goals, make use of small steps, and benefit from the most unlikely criticisms. Proposals need not be limited to existing patterns, as if these represented the only possible form of reality, but can range widely to achieve imaginative applications of new resources such as renewable energy and recycled materials. Bold and inclusive objectives can be adopted, incorporating contributions from all quarters. Public participation, too, will become much easier to design and more attractive to conduct once we have accepted that all competent thinkers have innate capacities to recognise and solve problems. Such transformative and responsive planning can reflect the dynamic patterns of life, well expressed in Lavoisier’s aphorism, quoted in the last chapter that ‘Nothing is lost; nothing is created: everything is transformed’ The resulting values-­based planning will then be more realistic than the assiduous pursuit of the trend or the meticulous collation of statistics, hoping that out of them will emerge a useful idea when in reality it is only useful ideas that will be able to identify, interpret and breathe meaning into the most conscientious of observations and statistics.

108 Planning for Community

Common ground between scientific and planning method In summary, both Science and Planning can be seen as problem-­solving activities, involving cyclic processes, which aim to:

• Scan the environment to sense aims, potentiali-

ties, problems and information needs; • Produce well-­focussed accounts of relevant information; • Develop hypotheses and options; • Test and evaluate theories or options in the light of facts and values; • Refine hypotheses or options to form viable theories or feasible solutions; • Monitor the performance of the theories or plans until anomalies or new problems arise to generate a further cycle of the theory or plan-­ building process. Figure  5.4 relates planning methods to scientific ones. Both originate in the first phase when attention is directed to a situation or problem, resulting in interpretations, intuitions, and recognition of information needs. This gives rise to a second phase, collecting relevant information from direct or recorded observations. A third phase, combining the outcomes of the first two is then well-­ positioned to produce revised hypotheses and options. In science, this may involve resolving the mismatch between intuitions, expectations and evidence to stimulate an explanation of why observations are surprising or not as anticipated, such as the following notional syllogism:

• Initial hypothesis: the sun rises in the same place

each day, but the planets appear in different places each night, therefore either they are travelling round the sky, or the earth is moving relative to them. • Collection of evidence: observations of eclipses and of changing positions of the planets suggest that they are all moving in different paths around the sun. • Analysis and refined hypotheses and options: since time is divided into day and night, either the sun is moving round the earth each day, or the earth is rotating on an axis every day. • Evaluation and proposed solution: evidence that one or the other of the earth or the sun orbit round each other each year and that the duration of day and night constantly changes suggests that the phenomena of day and night must result from the rotation of the earth on its own angled axis while orbiting the sun. Such conclusions can then be tested in operation, by predicting and measuring future effects. In a similar way, more normative planning proposals can be produced and tested such as:

• Initial

hypothesis: congestion and atmospheric pollution in great metropolitan cities are becoming unsustainable threats to human health and global climate. • Collection of evidence: the 5000 tons of carbon dioxide being deposited in the atmosphere of typical Western cities of 1 million people every day by vehicular emissions on the journey to work are having devastating effects on health and climate.

Scientific method Mind

Matter Observation Problem

Hypothesis

Experiment

Theory Re-hypothesise

or prototype

Analysis

Theory Application Practice

Planning method Consciousness

Environment Survey of problem

Problem

Objectives

Experiment Resource analysis

Figure 5.4  Models of scientific and planning method.

Policies

Proposals

Action research projects

and

Implementation

plans

Planning programme



Ways and Means 109

• Analysis

and refined hypotheses and options: if pollution rates are to be reduced in line with required reductions in carbon emissions, the proportion of journeys to work in the city centre taken by private cars needs to be greatly reduced; or the proportion of electric vehicles needs to be radically increased to replace internal combustion ones; or location of workplaces at or near people’s homes needs to be increased; or a combination of these policies need to be adopted. • Evaluation and proposed solution: These necessary outcomes can be accomplished by reducing city centre car parking spaces, proportionately increasing provision of public and active transport; and/or incorporating modern transport and communications technology to relocate people’s work places within walking or cycling distance of their homes; or some combination of these policies.

peoples’ values and intentions are confronted by the constraints posed by their current environments. They experience these frustrations as problems, which can therefore be analysed to help identify their motivating goals and generate objectives.vii Although planning and science can be seen to share a strong commitment to creative problem-­ solving and objective-­ based explanations, they differ in that science seeks to establish universal laws, while planning is always returning to the particularities of place and people. Planning also needs to have ready measures constantly available to shape events and resources to meet specific requirements. This requires a robust and widely applicable process that can be extrapolated from the logic of Figure 5.5 as:

Cities will thus define themselves either by old thinking of building more freeways to meet the projected travel demands of commuters or by developing new problem-­solving plans to reduce carbon footprints while embracing liveable and sustainable future form and character. Figure  5.5 illustrates the logic by which creative problem-­solving can contribute to species and social progress. Innate drives to understand, interpret and predict events give rise to identification of both social and scientific problems, arising when

Planning as craft and applied science

Physical environment

Human consciousness

Values, drives and goals WHY?

Physical and economic constraints

PLANNING PROBLEM (AN OBJECTIVE IN CONFLICT WITH A CONSTRAINT)

WHAT?

REASONS FACTS

Figure 5.5  Generation of planning problems and objectives.

Awareness > Understanding > Options and Evaluation > Outcomes.

ten planning stages

Within the general framework of these four phases, a 10-­stage process can be identified, as shown in Figure  5.6. Each stage constitutes an important step in the overall journey from identified values through social, economic and physical facts to community plans. Whether plans are concerned with health, work, recreation, transport, housing or land use, these same four major phases and recreation, transport or housing, these same four major phases and their related stages can be applied to provide a reliable and direct path to reflect the values, experiences and needs of the communities who will use and infuse life into the proposals. At each stage, methods should also be open to external contribution and scrutiny from allied professionals and political leaders. By providing an open-­edged and collaborative process, they can support mutual recognition and understanding among people from a wide range of backgrounds and interests. In order to clarify the roles and relations of each of these stages, Table 5.1 presents a simple description of the 10 stages of this values-­based approach to planning as a practical craft, illustrating its simple logic by equating each stage with that which a skilled cabinet maker, similarly concerned to meet the demands of a large and diverse community market, might be drawn to adopt.

110 Planning for Community

P O L I TI C A L

PARTICIPA TION

AWARENESS

UNDERSTANDING

OPTIONS AND EVALUATION

Sensations, responses and ideas

Collecting and interpreting

Synthesis

1. Appraisal of problems and prospects

2. Aims and objectives

3. Information collection analysis and projection

4. Resource analysis

5. Action research

6. Policies to fulfill objectives

7. Alternative strategies and evaluation

OUTCOMES Proposals 8. Costed and phased proposals

9. Implementation schemes

10. Monitoring and review of new problems

COMMUNITY P A R T I C I PA T I O N Figure 5.6  Generalised planning process.

Stage 1: Appraisal of character, problems and prospects The Uses of the Appraisal Like people’s innate capacity to create and communicate meaning through language, our powers of exploratory appraisal have become instinctive. This initial phase involves open-­minded and open-­ spirited inquiry that combines senses, sympathies, chance contacts and previous experiences. The resulting process can aptly be described as planning with our whole bodies and minds. Soaking the senses in the characteristics of place, problems and patterns can prompt creative responses that will help shape later proposals. Methods that capture the widest possible range of insights and perceptions of community members and groups can promote a range of objectives to provide initial direction and lay the basis for later collaboration. This early contact with local people and

stakeholders can prepare the ground for regular consultation that can build trust and avoid the devastating effects of the siege mentality that can all too easily develop in situations where there are high stakes of money and impacts on people’s lives. Box  5.1, The Appraisal, therefore emphasises both its subjective and intersubjective nature. Stage 2: Aims and initial objectives The appraisal role of Stage 1 also plays an important part in laying the basis for identifying draft objectives. This may surprise some open-­minded people whose first feeling might be that such an important matter as planning objectives should not be approached until careful research has been completed. There are two reasons why this is only partially true. First, in planning as in life, nothing comes out of nothing, and one must be clear on general intentions at the very outset of an activity,



Ways and Means 111

Table 5.1  Comparison of phases of cabinet making and planning processes. Phase

Cabinet making

Physical planning

Appraisal

People’s use and views of current products and their strengths and failings. Requirements of clients, markets and aims of producer. The function of the required product and the likely volume of demand. Available materials and their capabilities, limitations and attractions. Combination of resources and materials to meet requirements and alternative styles for shaping the product. Making of a working model to test strengths and weaknesses.

Characteristics, problems and views of the community, area and people involved. Needs, problems and potentialities of the area and its current and future users. The nature and extent of existing provisions and deficiencies, and their effects and causes. Resource availability – particularly land, finances, skills, powers and incentives. Policies to combine available resources to meet identified objectives and alternative physical strategies to locate policies. Small-­scale implementation of key elements with local groups firms or council departments, Costs and benefits of different strategies weighed against identified objectives and ways of combining best features. A drawn and written statement, including vision, policies for each activity, performance indicators, location maps and agreements required between cooperating partners. Development of specific costed programs for identified agencies and departments and an infrastructure plan and program. Performance observation and measurement; public attitude surveys; review of objectives and adjustment of planning scheme.

Objectives Information collection and analysis Resource analysis Alternative options and forms Action research Evaluation

The costs and benefits of different styles in meeting evolving aims.

Costed and phased proposals

A blueprint for production, assembly and distribution of components.

Implementation

Assembling of materials, labour and finance leading to commencement of production.

Monitoring and review

Performance observation market research and design adjustment to meet market needs.

Box 5.1  The Appraisal Aims

• To establish the scope, range, initial aims and approximate boundaries of the plan; • To establish an initial sense of direction: “What really matters here and now?” • To establish contacts in the study area; • To get a feel for the area, its people and their problems and hopes from both the inside and the outside.

Means This stage involves personal evaluation based upon observation and reflection, which can be assisted in a number of ways:

• By briefing from members of residents and other local interest groups and stakeholders,

including staff and students of the local school  (For  an example of this, see Norman Creek case study in Chapter 3). • Participating and observing activities in local centres like shopping areas, parks, playing fields, school playgrounds and other community spaces. • Exploring the study area in a random way with and without notebook and camera. • Research from published local histories, fiction and poems; studies and policy statements; and notice boards and newspapers; • Team discussions to promote exchange of ideas and perceptions.

Outputs • Information and questions for a Consultation Kit. • Contacts with groups and individuals.

112 Planning for Community

• Personal understanding of some of the main local concerns. • A report summarising the context, character, main activities, problems and potentialities of the area, which can be used to brief other team members and people becoming involved in the project. • Provisional draft objectives. Form Words, sketches, photographs, maps, diagrams, tables and collages. Style Holistic; subjective; exploratory; imaginative; interpretive and qualitative rather than quantitative.

in order to avoid becoming a mere commentator or pawn of present pressures. This early direction setting, often involving personal reflection and group discussion on values, wants and needs, will not preclude later expansion, amendment and refinement, but may rather provide the basis on which such changes can be explicitly made. This will involve the kind of ‘mixed scanning’ discussed in Chapter  3, generating sequences of comparison between immediate wants and long-­term goals and between local problems and city-­wide priorities. A second advantage of early discussion of community concerns is the opportunity to gather and discuss at the very outset a wide range of community objectives that might otherwise tend to be influenced, by default, by the subconscious values, social assumptions, personal experiences or professionalised goals of the planning team. A third reason is that effective and informed investigation of facts itself requires research questions on which to focus inquiry. Logically then, research should not precede identification of objectives. Only a clear direction from explicit objectives will allow the investigator to steer a purposive path through this potentially bewildering landscape of information. The Aladdin’s Cave of modern information and its many sources ranges from the wealth of online national data such as that provided by regular 5 and 10-­yearly censuses, through the rich array of information assembled by promotional and interest groups concerned with such systems as housing, environment, transport and employment, to instant access to much of the information collected by research organisations and the networks of human cooperation involved in Wikipedia. Only clear guidance from explicit initial objectives will allow the investigator to steer a purposive path through this potentially confusing landscape. Of course, these objectives should  be  neither set in stone nor abandoned along the route but should be maintained and continually reshaped

throughout the journey to provide constant reminders to consider what most matters here and now. Although related consultations should play large parts in appraisal and initial objective setting, it is important to emphasise that no phase should be regarded as ‘The Consultation Stage’. As indicated in Figures 5.5 and 5.6, dialogue needs to be developed early and become a unifying theme of all stages. Once broadly sketched, objectives need to be progressively and systematically developed, analysed and applied. Continuing to evolve throughout the process, they will form a valuable springboard for each successive phase until they finally provide the basis for review and a further cycle of planning. Their roles include:

• Direction: Objectives define what a project aims

to achieve, and thus its likely ultimate effects, providing answers to  such key questions as ‘Whose interests?’ and ‘What activities?’ • Consultation: Objectives form ideal themes for consultations, which can be used as identifiable and influential inputs to help shape proposals. In this sense, they provide useful means of keeping planners honest. • Information requirements: Clear objectives indicate the kind of information about activities and resources that will need to be collected and analysed; without this focus, the tendency for facts to be gathered mainly because they are available may cause planning to be buried under loads of irrelevant data resulting in ‘analysis paralysis’. • Action research: Objectives may prompt  action research projects, which can increase understanding about feasibility, unintended consequences and implementation issues public participation and political support. • Structure and content: By indicating the range and relationships of concerns, a set of validated



objectives can create a framework for the pattern, scope  and priorities of the plan, so that its content and preparation can be organized, understood and improved. • Evaluation: Objectives provide valid criteria to judge alternative plans and compose best possible composite proposals. They will indicate the fields requiring Performance Standards so that proposals can be evaluated against the plan’s intentions. • Review: They form the logical basis from which to monitor the performance of the plan, and to identify deficiencies that need correction. It is clear that objectives should permeate all phases of planning. The entire process could be viewed as their definition, refinement, enrichment and synthesis through cycles of information collection, analysis, synthesis and evaluation until they emerge as integrated, action-­orientated and fully developed proposals. Objectives thus form the unifying themes. An image that captures well this role is the performance of the trumpeter, with objectives being the original energising breath that gives birth and impulse to the instrument’s inspiring call. Controlled by the its valves, tuned by its keys and shaped by the ideas and skills of the performer, the originating breath can be transformed into a clarion call to redress existing reality into an inspiration to concerted action  by whole communities. Stage 3: Information collection, analysis and projection Possibilities suggested by the objectives will lack precision, detail and implementable actions. Effective solutions and policies will require the collection and integration of information on matters such as scale, frequency, inter-­relations, intensity and, indeed, projections. Analysis may involve searching out causes by observing how relationships between factors have changed over time. Projection through modelling is a particularly interesting issue, both for what it can and cannot do. In the mid-­sixties of the last century, projection was often equated with the whole planning process. Early system planners argued that the main purpose of planning was to identify the various activity systems, project their future states, and then provide land and investment to accommodate their growth (McLoughlin  1969; Chadwick 1972). There were a number of problems with this Trend Planning approach. The direction in which events are currently moving may be problematic

Ways and Means 113

or undesirable so that to follow the trend might not be helpful. Also, it is not possible to know for certain what new events the future may bring, so that projections could prove to be very misleading. Human history may not be a smoothly unfolding process but one of punctuated equilibrium, and current times may well be ones of rapidly accelerated and unpredictable change (Gould 1987). The act of projection itself involves a number of value assumptions, and it is much better to acknowledge these rather than to pretend they don’t exist. Finally, planning is the very attempt to control the future to accord with specified objectives rather than to accept the unmodified outcome of current social conditions and distributions of economic and other forms of power. However, during the first two decades of this century, Trend Planning (the reliance on projections to decide implicit directions and objectives for future plans) had never been more popular among business and associated planning research bodies, partly because pursuit of the trend conformed with prevailing growth assumptions of consumption-­ driven economies. However, in order to make useful contributions, projections need to be used prudently and conditionally. Forecasts may be useful to indicate the potentialities that present or emerging trends – such as the increasing interest in electric-­powered and autonomous private vehicles – can have to fulfil widely held objectives. Projections can also be powerful tools for indicating what might happen without intervention. In this way, impact assessments and ‘Doomwatch’ approaches are particularly useful forms of planning projection, warning of what pressures should be resisted and what dangers need to be avoided. Stage 4: Resource analysis The resources available to individuals are not only their time, skills, land and money but also their powers of motivation, influence and collaboration. Similarly, those available to governments and communities are their human resources of skills, physical supplies of land, water and atmosphere  –  the so called ‘factors of production’  –  as well as the finances, powers of enforcement and incentives to induce action. Each of these needs to be assessed to estimate a community’s ability to fulfil a plan’s objectives.

• Human Resources will pose the question: ‘Who will do this?’

• Finance demands: ‘With what funds?

114 Planning for Community

• Land

and Water Resources demand: ‘Where and How?’ and • Powers and Incentives prompt: ‘By what means?’ Management, economics, land evaluation and legal and administrative studies will all be required. Analyses of land potential in particular have over many decades been developed into sophisticated systems of evaluation, appropriately linked to their underlying objectives as far back as Forbes (1969); Lichfield (1976); and Kaiser et al. (1995, pp.  428–437). The Land development impact measures of Kaiser et  al provide clear systematic approaches to evaluate the land resources, which play an important basic role in delivering community planning. Resource analysis should also benefit from the deep and wide knowledge that other professionals have of their own fields of activity and their frequent willingness to share this with others. The rapidly expanding fields of information and communications technology of the last two decades can also produce valuable harvests from well-­ directed inquiries. As a result, resource analysis can become a fertile source of good ideas for policy development and implementation. Early involvement of stakeholders and activists (in collaborative objective setting and dialogue) can result in productive partnerships with such providers and policy-­makers in identifying resources available to achieve objectives and improve plan performance in their own fields. Models of such activity systems, discussed in the next chapter, Activities and their Analysis, can play useful roles in achieving effective resource analysis and allocation.

span housing improvement schemes, area management proposals, pedestrianisation of streets, industrial training initiatives, social centre provisions, and public transport improvements. For example, a newly elected local council might be interested in introducing positive, promotional and dispersed planning throughout its area. A local resident’s action group in one particular neighbourhood may have already developed area improvement proposals for a creek corridor scheme, assisted by a local university Department of Planning, and could therefore be encouraged to participate in applying such an approach to their own area with small-­scale Council support. If it works, it can then be applied more widely in a streamlined version elsewhere, with considerable confidence, in creek corridors throughout the council area. A number of advantages will have accrued. The participating departments and agencies will have gained experience of this kind of work. They will have learned to work together. They will have confidence in forecasting costs, and thus in giving Council the estimates it needs to launch programmes. Public support can be marshalled on the basis of proven achievements to date. The local community will be energized by their high-­profile role, and by the benefits that have flowed from the trial scheme. Finally, flaws and omissions in the original proposals can be identified and rectified at the small scale of a single locality or scheme before expensive and highly visible calamities can occur. Out of such action research projects, accurately funded and integrated implementation programmes can be developed on a more comprehensive scale.

Stage 5: Action research

Stage 6: Policy development – applying resources to meet objectives

It may be  unwise (and unconvincing) to launch directly into policy development for massive spending on untried and essentially hypothetical proposals. There are legions of examples of such schemes devised and launched over great distances from remote and powerful centres in Moscow, London and Canberra that failed to achieve their radical intentions and often created very damaging outcomes, such as Soviet Russia’s massive Virgin Lands Scheme of the 1950s and 1960s (Cole 1959; Ridley 1996); Britain’s notorious Ground Nut Scheme of the 1940s (Wood 1951); and Australia’s Ord River Development Scheme of the 1960s (Walker 1992, pp. 192–202). The alternative is to test them first by carefully selected Action Research projects. Suitable trials can

Developing policies is as creative a stage in planning as shaping a design is for the craftsman. It is relevant that Ebenezer Howard always regarded his proposal for Garden Cities to replace the wasteful combination of crowded industrial metropolises and deserted countryside, as an ‘invention’ rather than a mere proposal. By the start of the policy stage, all the necessary components should  have been identified. We can picture the carpenter or planning team of Table  5.1, seated at or  around the kitchen or office table. The list of objectives is in front of them; beside it, is a slim pile of succinct reports or notes giving necessary details and statistics describing the systems involved; a third pile contains information about the materials or resources available. The objectives list will provide



the framework of what needs to be done. The information pile will describe what circumstances, opportunities and constraints will be involved. The resources pile will then tell them about the available physical, financial, and human resources and incentives to get the design or plan into production. The resultant proposals should then be able to indicate what should be done, how it can be accomplished, by whom, using what finances and powers, and over what period of time. Standards may often be necessary to ensure that policies are adequate and stipulate what levels of performance are intended, derived from combining material drawn from the objectives pile  with that contained in the information and resource analysis ones. These standards, for instance, may take the form of a requirement that there be no through traffic in residential streets, that an adequate proportion of newdwellins will  be required  to be affordable  or that all new dwellings should have a local play space no more than half a kilometre away. Such intended outcomes and their indicators can help to shape effective policies and provide an important test in evaluating how well they are actually achieved. Stage 7: Alternative strategies and evaluation The same policies can be combined in very different spatial strategies. Proposals can be based on different degrees of concentration or dispersion; on theories of settlement form; or overall views of the future of settlements and societies. In order to help decide what, where and how development should be undertaken and phased they can employ different methods, ranging from the successive rounds of error elimination and synthesis (developed by Christopher Alexander et al. in A Pattern Language (1977), discussed earlier in this chapter) to ideas of settlement form developed by theorists such as Kevin Lynch (1984, 1981) and Randolph Hester (2010), discussed in Chapters 1, Promises and Problems of Community Life and 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design. Different strategies may be based on varying  spatial patterns of concentration to balance scale of facilities and services with accessibility to users. Linear, grid, circular, stellar and dispersed patterns, discussed in the final section of Chapter  9, will all offer varying costs and benefits to different groups. In making choices between these alternatives, there are also numerous useful evaluation systems to help. Cost-­ effectiveness, cost-­ benefit analysis, threshold analysis, planning balance sheets and

Ways and Means 115

ends-­means analysis can all contribute to this process of judging and identifying elements that can be recombined to shape a new optimal and preferred strategy (Lichfield 1976; Kaiser et al. 1995). The purpose of evaluation is not to select the single best strategy and discard all the others, but rather to see which elements of each are most suitable for different groups and then to re-­combine them into an optimum strategy bearing in mind the classical questions of ‘Who pays and who benefits?’ Because each option should represent an alternative way of achieving the same objectives and policies a unified evaluation system should  work well. Two basic and separate questions must be considered: How good are the proposals (in terms of achieving the objectives)? What are the costs of implementation (in terms of money)? It is best to treat these two considerations separately so that the result of an evaluation will be in the form of a combination of outcomes and costs, producing answers such as: ‘This strategy provides these levels of benefits for those levels of cost’. Combining them into a single cost-­benefit analysis would involve the false assumption that it is possible to measure all benefits in precise monetary terms. This would lead to misleadingly precise calculations, including such imponderables as the value of a human life (which depends upon such unmeasurable matters as love and uncertainties such as psychological effects); time savings (the value of which will vary between the attitudes of individuals and the opportunity costs available to them); and community welfare and cohesion (the value of which goes beyond monetary estimations). Peter Hall memorably deconstructed totally quantified  approaches in his discussion of the cost-­ benefit analysis conducted in the early 1970s to select a site for a Third London Airport in his book Great Planning Disasters (1980), reaching the conclusion that such processes represented a twentieth-­century reversion to  Jeremy Bentham’s dismissal of ‘Nonsense on Stilts’. The lesson is that evaluation should aim to clarify, but not necessarily to monetise benefits because its aims are social rather than financial. For instance, the imperative to end future residential development in increasingly flood-­prone areas, in current times of rapid climate change, is an essential reminder of one such demanding imperative that should transcend attempts to subject it to comparative development costs.

116 Planning for Community

Stage 8: Phased, costed and integrated proposals Implementation and funding bodies will include the policy and coordination committees of both  local and national governments and voluntary agencies and developer firms. Following suitable action research projects, they should be in positions to recommend programs for inclusion in annual operational plans and budgets. In major schemes, this will justify formation of inter-­ departmental or inter-­organisational project teams, which would certainly be the case in developments such as building a new city, implementing large-­ scale coastal reclamation or preparing and planning for occasions such as the Olympic Games and other major events in host cities such as Paris (2024), Los Angeles (2028) and Brisbane (2032) (Queensland Government  2022). Not only are facilities and accommodation required, but major potentialities of long-­term re-­use of the facilities, as well as challenges of traffic management, environmental presentation and protection, which should be involved if major disasters are to be avoided and full benefits derived (Wainwright 2022). In more everyday schemes, coordination can employ well-­developed coordinating systems such as the annual cycle of the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS), which can encourage  the common sense liaison of individuals in different departments and organizations at middle and junior officer levels. Thus, it is important that all participating departments and agencies have clear and concise summaries of their own and others’ contributions to the overall scheme. Integrated critical path diagrams will prove useful, and they can easily be distributed electronically to all the participating agencies and community groups involved in the plan. Community planners, who depend so significantly on good communication to identify and solve problem sequences, have much to gain from such democratic methods. Rapid checking of possible impacts and benefits of proposed initiatives across wider spaces and broader administrations will improve efficiency and help avoid many unnecessary delays and mistakes. Stage 9: Coordinated and funded implementation Management theorists have increasingly reached the conclusion that successful corporate management is first an attitude before it becomes a process (Drucker  2002). At any level from foreman to director, the personnel of different departments

involved in a single scheme may choose to work together, or  to operate in parallel, despite personal antagonism, or even to ignore each other’s roles and contributions. Acknowledgement of the imperative for good inter-­personal relations has led to development of team-­building approaches to implement many high-­profile cross-­cutting community programs. Certainly, project team implementation, like project team plan preparation, is an excellent framework for inculcating ideas of cooperation and team spirit to ensure that project personnel identify with the success of the community plan. The method normally consists of individuals being seconded from each of the collaborating departments for the duration of the project, and being allocated clear roles and responsibilities for its successful implementation. Where the time scale of the exercise is short enough and its priority high enough, this secondment is likely to be an appropriate approach. In other cases, similar cooperation will require longer-­term convening of regular meetings of representatives of all the government and community agencies involved to learn about each others’ work and identify how they can collaborate to achieve the best possible shared outcomes. In this age of routine Zoom Conferences, there is no reason for decision-­makers and takers to operate in isolated silos. Coordinated implementation can benefit greatly from combining these powerful new information and communications technologies with the time-­honoured techniques of good personal communication and mutual recognition and acknowledgement, where all participants are encouraged to contribute ideas and discuss their concerns. Stage 10: Monitoring and reappraisal of new problems and aims Once the proposed initiatives have been introduced, planning is nearing completion of a cycle, and it is time to start testing performance. Consultation with the consumers and local population, as well as the agencies involved, can help indicate successes, failures and unintended consequences. Performance indicators based on original objectives can be used to test effectiveness, providing a potent way of guiding the evolution of the planning system into increasingly effective channels. Thorough, rapid and regular ways of monitoring should include annual reviews of outcomes to assist preparation of the organisation’s next annual planning and budgeting program. Fresh problems will suggest new objectives and the next cycle of the process can be started. Major reviews



of adopted plans should be mandated in planning legislation and take place every three to five years, to correct unintended consequences, adjust policies to changed conditions and confirm plan ownership and commitment by both communities and their political representatives. The next cycle of appraisal, review and re-­formulation of objectives can then start.

Political control and community participation political control

Community planning can usefully be envisaged as flowing in three parallel streams of social, political and technical processes, as shown in Figure  5.7. The diagram should be regarded as a cylinder, also bringing together community and political strands, rather than as a sheet, separating social and political processes: exchange of ideas between the community members and their political representatives should be as continuous as that with the planners and service providers. The very decision to prepare plans for an area is a political one, and politicians will also receive the most effective feedback in the form of continuous support and votes  –  or their withdrawal  –  at weekly ‘clinics’ in their ward offices and during recurrent election campaigns. Action research projects identified by local communities will require their support if they are to be funded and implemented. It is they who must adopt and stand by the policies prepared with the planners. They must therefore have a significant voice and transparent role in the selection of alternative strategies. Any general community planning scheme must receive their formal support, and be adopted by Council. Funding for proposals must be found out of the annual budget, which it is one of their major responsibilities to oversee. For all these reasons, planners must ensure that they maintain close, respectful and collaborative working relations with politicians and boards of directors of social and private enterprise bodies for whom they are working. It is common sense to listen carefully to the views of people whose support is crucial to the success of one’s work. Equally important, the ethics and political validity of community planning as a public activity in representative democracies mean that planning processes and outcomes must involve and be endorsed and approved by elected representatives. Planning not only opens up common opportunities but may

Ways and Means 117

also limit the freedom of people to take actions that might impinge harmfully on others so that it is important that individual citizens and voters have a clear and current means of redress in the voting booth against perceived infringements of their rights. Positive advantages will also accrue: well-­ briefed and motivated politicians will be far more likely to make well-­informed and wise decisions than ones who have been intentionally kept in the dark or disregarded as insufficiently knowledgeable to be treated as intellectual equals. Planners must remember that an academic degree is not sufficient to guarantee good practical  decisions. Finally, politicians may benefit from ascertaining public interests and gain popularity, therefore becoming more supportive of planning which they may come to see as effective and productive. Planning will thereby receive a powerful impetus on its upward spiral towards social improvement, and both representative and participatory democracy will benefit from this kind of constructive partnership. the place of  community participation

In healthy democracies, dialogue among politicians, local communities, progress associations and developers should occur continuously, across the table, via local media and in community halls. Where this rapport has yet to be established, local consultation with residents and other interested parties at the outset of a planning scheme can provide an invaluable starting point to establish overdue links. Such relations will certainly make the subsequent planning processes easier and more effective and can form part of a continuous dialogue among council planners, local communities and their elected representatives. This will have wider political significance for the relations between representative and elective democracy, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation. Such measures are mandated in the first of Oregon’s legislated State Planning Goals, Citizen Participation, which for the last 50 years has required the establishment of Citizen Involvement Committees with statutory rights of consultation, information, funding, and policy involvement wherever local governments are proposing to prepare a planning scheme (Oregon Department of Land Conservation & Development 2020). Parallel concern in the UK to promote public participation in planning likewise goes all the way back to the 1960s, resulting in the commissioning

118 Planning for Community

Social process Engagement with communities and interest groups

Technical process

Political process Discussion and review of goals

Appraisal and attitude surveys

Focus and mixed group discussions

Commitment to act and goal setting Initial objectives

Consultation with interest groups and stakeholders

Consultation with promotional and pressure groups

Participation and review of findings Information collection, analysis and projection

Resource analysis with specialist departments and agencies

Discussion and partnership in trial schemes

Liaison over resource management and policy priorities

Local priorities from political process Action research

Discussions with community and interest groups

Discussion with and between policy committees Policy development

Media publicity and debate over options and impacts

Political debate over options and impacts Alternative strategies and evaluation

Review and proposed alterations Phased and costed proposals Partnership and participation

Testing, amendment and adoption of programme funding

Oversight and budget management Funded implementation

Dialogue on new issues objectives and priorities

Figure 5.7  Community planning process.

Vision review and renewal Monitoring and reappraisal



of the Skeffington Report (Skefifngton 1969, Heywood 1974) with its emphasis on participation at the formative stages of plan preparation. Parker (2014) identifies three later episodes of community-­led planning in England since the 1990s. The first from 1995 to 2001 consisted mainly of seeking to include local knowledge in plan preparation. The second phase from 2001 to 2010 involved the development of ‘Parish Planning’ involving the most local form of administrative unit in both rural and urban areas and resulting in very large numbers of such parish plans, estimates varying from 4000 to more than 8000 (SQW  2007). Towards the end of this phase, the then opposition Conservative Party picked up the theme and made a strong commitment in their 2010 Open Source Planning Green Paper to develop  and make a truly local plan, built out of a process of collaborative democracy the centrepiece of the local planning system (Conservatives 2010, pp. 8, 13). The Green Paper also included the option for local people wanting to undertake householder developments to consult with their neighbours and attain their assent as an alternative to having to seek local government approval. Developers would also be encouraged to pay impact costs direct to those affected in order to avoid having to seek local government approval. Returned to government, the party has made good on some of these promises, especially as affecting the widely shared concerns for rural and green belt preservation and open space conservation. Neighbourhood communities have been mandated to prepare and adopt Neighbourhood Plans for their areas, one typical example being the local plan maintaining Green Belt designations, prepared by the Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Plan Forum Committee (2022) drawn from local residents. Although these plans cannot over-­ride proposals that the District Council might make, they are very influential in contributing to the preparation, review and administration of such plans. The Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Plan, for instance, for a locality in the north western sector of London’s Green Belt, provides local planning policy guidance, to inform and accompany the legally binding provisions of the local Enfield Plan, Enfield’s Planning Policies, The London Plan and national legislation. Individual developments will continue to require specific planning applications, and the authority to approve or refuse will remain with Enfield Council. Nevertheless, such Neighbourhood Plans will add significant weight to those policies that are of greatest importance to the local community, in this case, to help maintain the Green Belt. The Independent Examiner of Enfield Council’s draft Local

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Plan will have to attach great weight to the Neighbourhood Plan’s proposals, including its explicit policy to protect the Green Belt and associated open spaces. Such reforms respond to widespread recognition of the importance of tempering central control by local participation in decisions over development. A strongly flowing tide is clearly in evidence in England in favour of both participation and community planning, irrespective of political party affiliation. If they are to become fully effective, next steps should include the sharing of responsibility by local council planning committees and staff with such Neighbourhood Forums for the preparation of legally binding local plans. These collaborative approaches to Community Planning have clear political and ethical advantages. They can also be very useful technically, because local people usually know their own areas even better than professional planners, who are often drawn from a wide range of origins and homes. In many cases, energetic community involvement can also produce critically important qualitative information such as where flooding is most acute, and when a particular non-­ conforming use first started operation or is likely to cease. Invariably, key issues and problem areas that require further survey and analysis will be identified. In some areas, local organisations will be keen to cooperate with planners in helping to compile community profiles through self-­survey. Members collecting attitudinal information will develop skills that can add to the accumulated social capital of their communities. Action research projects carried out with local residents and groups can also help build trust. Involving local people in the evaluation of policies and strategies is right ethically, on the basis that people’s voices should be heard in their own cases. It is also politically helpful to secure the support of local communities before proposals are finalised. Collaboration can maximise political advantages for politicians whose support the plan will need. Good publicity and enthusiastic community support are both therefore important. Community participation can also assist implementation. Because people’s perceptions of buildings and built environments are significantly influenced by the richness and quality of their details and user characteristics, public involvement is by far the best way to ensure detailed relevance and useability. This may take the form of deciding the location and materials of street tree planting or street furniture in a new pedestrian mall or old person’s incidental seating area, or the location of bus stops in a new suburb, right up to

120 Planning for Community

region-­wide priority accorded to preservation of wetlands and creek corridors. Meetings with local groups will improve not only planning quality and acceptability, but also the community’s image and sense of ownership of the planning agency. When monitoring plan performance, self-­ survey carried out by local groups independently or in conjunction with council planners and local schools and universities is one highly effective way of identifying successes and deficiencies. Another way is through workshops convened jointly by the council and local residents’ associations or similar bodies. Local authorities can also conduct regular public attitude surveys, either in conjunction with notifications of local property rates or by follow-­up surveys in areas where schemes have been recently completed. In each of these situations, opportunities can also be taken to identify new objectives that can lend direction to the next cycle of the planning process. Today’s radical advances in information and communication technologies are rapidly promoting the ideal of continuous dialogue between elected authorities and their community members. The challenge is to avoid the tyranny of the template and preserve the directness and immediacy of personal choices in creating opportunities for universal inclusion that preserves the authenticity of individual voices.

Conclusions: values-­based methods for value fulfilment At each stage, planning can provide vital links between governments and the communities they represent, through processes that are sensitive to the needs and hopes of both local and wider communities. Planning methods at each stage can link governments and the communities they represent through processes that accurately capture their values and needs. One of the advantages of this values-­driven approach is its capacity to link the contributions of the many activities and actors that combine to create community life. Proposals that consciously and verifiably mirror the experiences of the people concerned can help to replace the jarring cacophony of conflicting departmental agendas and proposals, with shared and integrated programs to combine the many fields of practice that must be involved to secure the best possible future lives and human development of those communities. Later chapters apply this common understanding to a number of fields that together constitute community life.

Planning methods can thus be built on the foundations of mutual respect for the contributions of other practitioners as well as plans’ intended beneficiaries. Practitioners within the fields of health, education, economy, environment, communications and transport can then communicate within their own communities of concern and with each other in continuing and inclusive discussions. These can enhance skills of understanding and negotiation necessary to deal productively with colleagues and the wider community. Adjusting focus from scale to scale and activity to activity, we can all widen our perspectives to view each situation, not only through the prism of our own values, wants and professional commitments, but also through the eyes of others, both service providers and community members, who may be even more directly affected, to achieve collaborative action. Later chapters apply this common understanding to a number of the actual activities that harmonise – or conflict – to compose community life.

Endnotes i In a similar way, Upper Palaeolithic figurines of stylised human forms of 20,000 to 25,000 years ago – particularly female ones  –  seem to be searching for the very essence of human fertility. Unlike the little models of animals which may have been made to assist hunting, they are not naturalistic but almost surreal. They have a wide distribution in Upper Palaeolithic sites over much of Europe and eastward as far as Ukraine and Western Siberia. Although they vary a good deal, Campbell (1985) observes that they have some significant things in common. Arms, legs and heads are extremely small in proportion to the torso, and in some cases are merely suggested. All the emphasis is on the bodies, with their female characteristics  –  breasts, belly and buttocks  –  greatly exaggerated in size. They look like tiny earth goddesses or fertility figures, and that is probably what they were. The early artists were doing much more than mere recording  –  they were interpreting, celebrating and proclaiming their values and beliefs. ii This ultimate reliance on creative insight and intuition unifies art, science and planning. The impressionist painters of the nineteenth century, for instance, created very beautiful new patterns of light and colour by moving their focus of interest from the objects themselves to the pattern of light that they refract. Stimulated by new ideas about the nature of light and perception, painters such as Monet, Seurat and Pissarro explored how to capture and communicate the momentary perceptions that imprint themselves so vividly on our minds. For Monet, this concept of focussing on the light itself rather than the object that



was refracting it unifies all his work, including series of the face of Chartres Cathedral, the Gare du Nord railway station and the bridge over the waterlily basin at Pont du Neuf. They celebrate the dazzling richness of the colours by which we are all constantly confronted and are among the best loved paintings in western culture. Deeper and more lasting patterns are being evoked by means of imagination and distillation of the essential. iii Renaissance art often expresses timeless and universal ideas of great originality. Michelangelo (1475–1574), infuses this poetic vision into all his work. The gigantic fresco with which he decorated the barrel vault of the Sistine Chapel and the 12  window lunettes and intervening panels in St Peter’s cathedral in Rome extends over an area 132 ft long and 45 ft wide and took four years to complete (Chastel 1972, p. 232). iv In both Babel Tower (1996) and Possession (1990), A.S. Byatt has writes a series of parables in the form of stories within stories to explore the psychological and economic roots of totalitarianism and human choice. In her mid-­ career, Doris Lessing wrote a series of novels transcending the boundary between science fiction and imaginative parables to discuss gender, class and human relations, and her later The Good Terrorist returns to conventional storytelling (2007, first published 1985) to explore the nature and causes of good and evil societies. Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Craik (2004) and several of her other novels place this moral exploration in the immediate future. Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee locate their explorations of good and bad forms of community in the recent past or present. Coetzee resurrects the literary form of the sermon in his Elizabeth Costello (2004) in the guise of a series of lectures and letters arguing the importance of environmental concerns in community planning, and Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1985) describes and transcends the injustices of 1970s South Africa to point the way to a better future; it is significant that she subsequently accepted appointment to serve on Nelson Mandela’s Constitutional Committee to develop a more equitable government system for the newly democratic country. v Sennett (2008) traces the development of the warp and woof of weaving through the mortise and tenon of ship building in the first millennium BC to standard use in cabinet-­making  –  and thence to town planning  –  in the interlocking grid form of the Sicilian colony of Selinous and Hippocrates’ ideas for ideal settlement patterns. vi The most celebrated example of this upward spiral of conjecture and refutation is the radical modification of Newton’s laws of physics, mechanics and optics by Einstein’s theories of relativity. After two and a half centuries of success in explaining, predicting and exploiting the physical environment (embracing both the microcosm of the atom and the macrocosm of

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the universe) Newton’s laws helped to produce sufficient new knowledge to necessitate their revision. Einstein’s conjecture that Newton’s clockwork logic broke down in situations of high scale and volatility when energy, speed, and matter all become relative to each other was confirmed by new observations. For good or ill, it was an understanding of the relativity of energy and motion which conferred the ability to split the atom. vii The development of an alternative more positivist but complementary approach to generating objectives is associated with ‘appreciative inquiry’ (Hammond and Royal 1998; Ludema et al. 2006). Such ‘strengths based’ social planning (Cuers and Hewston  2007), has widened attention to include methods based on identifying people’s natural strengths and capacities. Successes using these approaches suggest that they can also provide useful and compatible paths to develop objectives for future actions and developments. It will be seen from Figure  5.4 that this is moving the focus of analysis further back from the experience of problems to the underlying values from which they originated. In effect, the similar problem-­ solving cycles of action, reaction and environmental modification are involved, but there are real advantages in also incorporating these more positive approaches of Appreciative Inquiry.

References Alexander, C. (1964, reprinted 1979). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., and Silverstein, M. (1977). A Pattern Language. New York: OUP. Alexander, C. (1979). A Timeless Way of Building. New York: OUP. Attwood, M. (2004). Oryx & Craik. London: Virago. Burns, R. (1964). ‘To a Mouse’ in Robert Burns, Concise Oxford Book of Quotations. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Byatt, A. (1996). Babel Tower. London: Chatto & Windus. Byatt, A. (1990). Possession. London: Vintage. Campbell, B. (1985). Humankind Emerging. Boston: Little Brown. Chastel, A. (1956). Italian Art. London: Faber. Clark, K. (1956). Landscape into Art. London: Penguin. Coetzee, J. (2004). Elizabeth Costello. Sydney: Random House. Commoner, B. (1972). The Closing Circle. London: Jonathon Cape. Conservatives, 2010, Open Source Planning Green Paper. https://issuu.com/conservatives/docs/opensource planning (accessed 19 September 2022). Cuers, S. and Hewston, J. (2007). The Strong Communities Handbook. Brisbane: Community Practice Unit, Queensland University of Technology. Desroche-­Noblecoiurt, C. (1976). Tutankhamen. New York: The New York Graphic Society.

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Drucker, P. (2002). Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Oxford: Elsevier. Forbes, J. (1969). A map analysis of potentially developable land. Regional Studies 3 (2): 179–195. Gould, J. (1987). Times Arrow, Times Cycle. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Gordimer, N. (1985). Burger’s Daughter, Harmondsworth, Penguin (first published 1979). London: Jonathon Cape. Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Planning Forum Committee, 2022, Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Plan. https://www.hadleywoodnp.co.uk/ (accessed 28 August 2022). Hall, P. (1980). Great Planning Disasters. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hall, P. (1986). Urban & Regional Planning. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, P. (2002, (Revised edition)). Cities of Tomorrow. Oxford: Blackwell. Hammond, S. and Royal, C. (1998). Lessons from the Field. Plano, TX: Practical Press. Hester, R. (2010). Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heywood, P. (1974). Planning & Human Need. Devon, UK: David & Charles. Hodges, C. (1998). Alhalkere. In: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Paintings from Utopia (ed. Neale). Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery. Hume, D. (1990). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In:  (ed. S. Cahn). Kaiser, E., Godschalk, D., and Chapin, F. (1995). Urban Land Use Planning, 4e. Urana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Koestler, A. (1989). The Act of Creation. London: Arkana. Lessing, D. (2007). The Good Terrorist. London: Harper. Lichfield, N. (1976). Evaluation in Planning. Oxford: Pergamon. Lynch, K. (1984, 1987). Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ludema, J., Cooperrider, L., and Barrett, F.J. (2006). Appreciative Inquiry: the power of the Unconditional Positive Question. In: Handbook of Action Research (ed. P. Reason and H. Bradbury). London: Sage. Magee, B. (1973). Popper, London, Fontana Masters series. Mannering, D. (1981). The Art of Leonardo da Vinci. London: Hamlyn. Metropolitan Service District of Greater Portland (Metro Portland) 2003, Metro 2040 Vision, Portland (OR) Author, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/2040-­growth-­ concept (accessed 30 January 2023). Mill, J. (1983 , (First published 1861)). On Liberty, Utilitarianism & Other Essays. London: Dent. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History, its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects. New  York: Harcourt World & Brace. Neale, M. (1998). Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Paintings from Utopia. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery. Oregon Department of Land Conservation & Development (2020). Statewide Planning Goals. https://www .oregon.gov/lcd/OP/Pages/Goal-­1.aspx (accessed 16 October 2021). Parker, G. (2014, 2014). Engaging neighbourhoods: experiences of transactive planning with communities in England.

In: Community Action and Planning (ed. Gallent and Ciaffi). Bristol: Policy Planning. Passmore, J. (1980). A Hundred Years of Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3rd rev ed., 1972 ( first published in Vienna in 1935 as Logik der Forschung). London: Hutcheson. Popper, K. (1972 (originally published 1963)). Conjectures and Refutations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, K. (1989 (revised edition, 5th printing – originally published 1972)). Objective Knowledge, An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon. Popper, K. and Eccles, J. (1984). The Self and its Brain. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Putnam, R. (with Rafaelli, N)(1993). Making Democracy Work. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Queensland Government  (2022). Brisbane 2032 planning and investment underway. https://statements.qld.gov .au/statements/95465 (accessed 21 January 2023). Queensland Government Office of Urban Management (2005a). South East Queensland Regional Plan. Brisbane: Author. Queensland Government Office of Urban Management (2005b, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009). SEQ Infrastructure Plans & Programs. Brisbane: Author. Roberts, B. (2014) Managing Systems of Secondary Cities: Policy Responses in International Development, Cities Alliance, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 273442050_Managing_Systems_of_Secondary_Cities_ Policy_Responses_in_International_Development (accessed 9 April 2022). Schurz, G. (1997). The is-­ought problem. An Investigation in Philosophical Logic. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London: Penguin. Skeffington, A. (1969). ‘People and Planning’ Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning. London: HMSO. Stretton, H. (1989). Ideas for Australian Cities, 2e. Melbourne: Transit. SQW (2007). Integration of Parish Plans into wider systems of government; Report to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. London: DEFRA. Suzuki, D. (2009). The Sacred Balance, 2e. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Wainwright (2022). Olympic Legacy Betrayed, https:// www.theguardian.com/uk-­n ews/2022/jun/30/a-­massive-­betrayal-­how-­londons-­olympic-­legacy-­was-­ sold-­out (accessed 19 January 2023). Walker, K. (1992). The neglect of ecology: the case of the ord river scheme. In: Australia Environmental Policy (ed. Walker). Sydney New South Wales University Press. Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne, New South. Heywood, P. 1987. Felda and Bustee, the management of population growth in town and country, Unpublished paper available from author, Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology. McLoughlin, B. (1969). Urban and Regional Planning, A Systems Approach. London: Faber & Faber. Cole, J. (1959). A Geography of World Affairs. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Ridley, M. (1996). The Origins of Virtue. London: Viking.



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Wood, A. (1951). The Ground Nut Affair. London: Bodley Head. Lynch, K. (1981). Good City Form. Cambridge: Mass, MIT Press.

Appendix 1:  Christopher Alexander’s Indian village design case study Alexander identified 141 objectives, collected from the villagers or derived from observing their behaviour and the current form and life of the village as well as prevailing national and regional policies. He sorted them, on the basis of their inter-­relationships, into the following four major arenas and twelve major issues requiring attention. A. 1. 2. 3.

CATTLE Cattle grazing Cattle care, stalling Cattle security, access

C. SOCIAL LIFE 1. Commercial life and organisation 2. Social and community development

B. LAND 1. Cash cropping 2. Agricultural organisation 3. Operational efficiency 4. Landownership, conservation and development D. FAMILY LIFE 1. Domestic organisation 2. Family life 3. Traditional and religious customs

Alexander’s method focuses on producing solutions, one by one, to each of these 12 sets of objectives, before proceeding in cycles of progressive adjustment to tackle any conflicts and embrace any synergies between them. For example, the land ownership and conservation proposals including soil and forest conservation of slopes lying

above the village’s cultivated fields interact with the needs for agricultural organization to include family ownership of land and rights to water for irrigation. Relating and reconciling these two concerns produces proposals for water collection in reafforested and orchard production areas separated from the arable fields below by a bund of raised land, along which can run the spinal road of the village. Wells for water extraction are placed immediately below the bund and linked by distribution canals to the land holdings of each family, laid out in ridge and furrow form to assist the process of water distribution, with meters to record consumption. By such means of cumulative problem solving and adjustment, Alexander creates a unified plan that integrates physical, social, economic and cultural concerns to meet all of the plan’s 141 objectives, at the same time as respecting the existing values, traditions and forms of the settlement. Five themes can be discerned in the resulting village plan:

• Respect

for traditional materials and settlement forms, and their integration within new development. • Reliance on local vernacular design based on established cultural values. • Integrated design through careful adjustment and reconciliation of related elements. • Use of traditional values and forms to identify appropriate activities and guide the invention of new forms. • Local design that reflects universal principles of spatial organization (which he develops further in his later “pattern language”) (1977).

6

Activities and Actions

Introduction: the organisation of the chapter This chapter discusses the roles of human activities in community life and how they can best be planned. Four related themes are explored:

• The

relations among values, activities and land uses • The roles of models in understanding and analysing activities • The contributions of systems thinking in managing activities • Activity systems analysis in practice The chapter concludes with a consideration of the roles of activity systems in community planning.

The relations among values, activities and land uses Much of our society’s busy life is taken up with organised activities of work, play, home and travel and it is easy to lose sight of the underlying values, which these are intended to achieve. As a perceptive poet observed in the high tide of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, Little there is in nature which is ours (Wordsworth 1807, 1946). The important roles that such natural values can and should play in shaping our activities and spaces have been emphasised in Chapter 4, Human Values and Community Goals. Nevertheless, activities are important in themselves and  this chapter now proceeds to consider the planning of these activities in more detail. The attractions of convenience and

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

continuity have sometimes prompted approaches that simply extrapolate existing arrangements and then identify the land, capital and labour to roll these forward, unchanged or amplified, into the future, without reference to the current problems or frustrated values of affected communities. Some twentieth-­century commentators have identified such trend planning attitudes as foundational assumptions underlying many planning, zoning and subdivision regulations (Delafons 1962, 1969, 2003). This was certainly how countless trend planning schemes in the United States came to produce the tower blocks, urban freeways, out-­of-­town shopping centres and single-­class suburbs that marked much urban development throughout the mid-­twentieth century in both North America and Western Europe (Heywood  1974; Hall  1980; Delafons, 2003). It also formed the basis for the criticisms and challenges posed by Paul and Linda Davidoff and Newton Gold, discussed in Chapter 1 Promises and Problems of Community Life, to the zoning regulations that were keeping many low-­income people penned into overcrowded, under-­serviced and decaying inner-­ city locations throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century (Davidoff and Gold 1970). Ignoring underlying values in this way in order to promote currently favoured or profitable activities may seem to make community planning much simpler. However, it is also prone to produce wasteful and sometimes tragic outcomes that may ignore many people’s priorities and violate their human rights. Injustices may be perpetuated that promote continued unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, resulting in toxic longer-­term social, environmental and political consequences. The alternative approach of shaping activities to reflect authentic and ascertained values, such as social justice and environmental sustainability, can instead channel existing and new technological opportunities to help achieve better, happier and more durable communities. definitions and interpretations of  activities

As used by such pioneering  social and planning theorists as Le Play (Fletcher  1969, pp.  55–58)



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Geddes, (Mairet  1957) and Foley (1968), the term ‘activity’ indicates continuing and purposive actions to meet lasting needs and wants. This suggests that an early stage of planning for activities should be the identification of the human needs to which they respond. A range of suitable activities and land uses can then be proposed, analysed and evaluated to form the basis for appropriate policies. Examples can be observed all around us. Lynch (1981) writes perceptively on how: the various technical functions, activities and social and natural processes occurring within the settlement. . ..convey a ‘sense of life’ and. . . are the direct perceptual basis for deeper meanings. (He concludes:) Functions presented immediately to our senses help us to understand the world (Lynch 1981, pp. 138–139). Other insightful commentators, such as Donald Foley, whose ideas are discussed in more detail later in this section, also recognise that individuals, immersed in the flux of daily living, develop their own spontaneous awareness from personal experiences. Our earliest childhood awareness of travel and transport, for instance, may be drawn from our daily journeys to local playgrounds or to a school in a nearby suburb, giving us experience of various types of movement – by foot, cycle, scooter, car, bus, train or possibly ferry – that allow us to fulfil our intentions. Embryonically, the foundations of the whole complex pattern of organised urban transport and movement start to form in our minds as the basis for an early and simple form of planning. After some time, reflexive review may lead us to recognise the underlying intentions, wants and values that are driving our movements and those of others, so that we can mentally organise our understanding of the system to shape movements that fulfil our needs and desires better. By adding intention to observation and analysis we are taking early steps along a pathway to purposive planning. In so doing, we have also developed a simplified and effective model of the transport system, that can be applied in other situations. This process, illustrated in Figure  6.1, suggests that the ways that we observe land uses and perceive current problems is the mirror image of the actual sequence in which they were generated. The figure indicates how interpretation can trace back immediate observations of physical objects  –  in this case, the movement of bicycles, buses and trains – through the activities of various forms of riding that generated, the causal wants and values that gave rise to the whole process.

Land uses

Activities

Values

Problems/ solutions

Policies

Goals

Perception

Causation

Analysis

Planning

Figure 6.1  Perceptions, analysis and causation in planning.

In effect this process forms a design ‘W’, resting on its side. Perception is traced back from its starting point in awareness of land uses, through recognition of activities – what is going on there – to origins in values. Reflection can create a fuller understanding of the meaning and implications of these values. Expressed as goals, they can then provide direction for policies to resolve the initial observed problems. A useful analogy for this process is provided by the flow of electric current, which results when opposite polarisation of ions occurs simultaneously in both directions. problems as  windows on  values

There are dangers in short-­circuiting this process and charging straight down the land use channel, towards a favourite or preconceived solution, without searching out underlying causes or alternative activities. Unintended consequences and better approaches may both be overlooked. Such unreflecting responses may respond directly to disliked conditions by attempting to remove obvious obstructions, but this may also divert attention from underlying causes, resulting in long-­term failure to fulfil people’s values. For example, routine solutions like post-­ World War Two ‘slum clearance’ schemes (Jacobs  1961; Anderson  1964) or demolition of low-­cost dwellings in shanty towns in developing countries (Turner 1976; Faseki 1981) may ignore necessary activities like affordable inner-­ city accommodation and disregard deeper

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values and needs of residents and users, such as social justice, urban economy and personal autonomy. This temptation to adopt standardised or universal solutions, like those of Le Corbusier in Europe or Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, has often exerted damaging effects on local communities, economies and capacities to create and maintain social life (Heywood  1974,  1987; Hall  1980). Values have been ignored under the influence of technological determinism. A typical example could be found in a situation where planning is being undertaken to tackle the problems of rush hour traffic flowing through a residential area. Residents may be concerned about problems of danger, noise, road congestion, and atmospheric pollution, giving rise to calls for street closure and removal of all through traffic. Investigations may establish that the causes of these traffic flows lie in the combination of activities of city and district centre employment with outer metropolitan living areas and people’s choice of means of journeys to work. On reflection, therefore, this traffic may be found to express underlying primary needs for work, shelter and movement, each with its own associated objectives, and many alternative ways of being tackled. Further analysis may indicate that the problematic traffic conditions may be resolved by a combination of means, which will be far more effective than simply closing roads to through traffic and thereby diverting flows onto other nearby streets. For instance, parking and congestion charges in the city centre may divert people

onto public transport, including use of the higher capacity railway and bus  systems. Relocation of traffic-­generating industries to new planned industrial estates – perhaps on disused marshalling yards adjacent to rail lines – may reduce offensive heavy traffic. The designation of a heavy vehicle route system, accompanied by time-­based access licensing, should further improve conditions. The introduction of a ‘slow-­way’, with linked traffic lights set to keep rush hour traffic flowing at a steady 20–30 km/ hr could reduce drivers’ expectations and improve safety. The further we trace the activities that underlie land uses back towards their causal values, the more we shall open up such possibilities for solving associated problems in ways that truly reflect people’s needs and avoid mere displacement of difficulties from one, more vocal or well-­organized group, activity or location, to others. the features and failings of  impulsive planning

Impulsive planning, which merely seeks to relocate land uses, without careful regard to underlying activities and human values, has produced some spectacular disasters (Hall  1980). One of those, which imprinted itself early and indelibly upon my own mind occurred in the mid-­twentieth century, in the great port city of Lagos, which was then also the capital of Africa’s most populous nation of Nigeria.  Box  6.1 describes this example, dating from the early years of the country’s independence in 1963–1964, together with another

Box 6.1  Contravention in Lagos and Akure The Case of Lagos’ Ebutte Mette Lagos is the chief port and was the first national capital of the newly independent state of Nigeria. The city occupies a magnificent location astride the coastal lagoon that formed the original port and now spreads out across a number of islands to include new deep water docks on the Bight of Benin. One of these islands, Ebutte Mette, which is joined to the mainland by a bridge, has always been a busy and crowded centre of market activity, with a lively mix of traditional trading, modern commerce, and heavy traffic flows. In the first flush of post-­colonial energy, the new government resolved to clean up this confusion by removing the market stalls and the stall holders’ traditional mud brick and palm thatch dwellings. They planned to relocate the occupants to a garden suburb on the northern fringes of the city at Surulere. Despite vigorous protests, the structures were cleared and the land prepared for new government and commercial offices. However, within weeks, amid the rubble of the old trading stalls of the market, the former residents re-­appeared to build new shanty structures where they could sleep and trade because they could not afford to live in their new, expensive rental dwellings, where they had no local means of livelihood and were separated from the city centre by slow, erratic and expensive public transport. Equally, the city centre workers missed their cheap and convenient sources of consumer goods and traditional food. Very quickly the old patterns of roadside market stalls and informal housing re-­asserted themselves through a mixture of necessity and the powerful drives of deep-­seated human values of sustenance and sociability  to find expression in sympathetic activities, land uses and places.



Activities and Actions 127

Box 6.2  Contravention in Akure (Faseki,1981) Fifteen years later, a study by Oluwabi Faseki investigated a similar failure of physicalist planning to control productive activities or respect established values. Faseki established that nearly one in five of all new developments in the bustling West Nigerian town of Akure, capital of Ondo Province, contravened the pattern book town planning scheme prepared by expatriate-­trained town planners. Between 1973 and 1979, no fewer than 1536 contraventions were recorded, few of which subsequently either complied  with regulations or were closed. In 1979 alone, there were 291 recorded contraventions, of which 200 were ignored, 24 subsequently complied and 67  were demolished. Faseki investigated the reasons for the very high rate of informal building and very low rates of subsequent enforcement. General public respondents indicated that non-­involvement of the public in planning and corruption of public officials were believed to be the most significant causes of contravention. Even more important, respondents identified key cultural reasons, which included:

• The cultural need to find spaces within compounds for new dwellings for each of a number of wives in the traditionally polygamous Yoruba society conflicted with imported colonial patterns of residential planning; • People already caught up in long-­running disputes over land ownership were unwilling to become involved in further slow and legalistic planning processes.

While officials believed that the major causes of contravention were poor literacy, building and design skills, inadequate finances, widespread poverty and undue political influences, the general public was more convinced that employment and shelter needs forced people to use any available land they could to house their families and ply their trades. They had to rely on available materials and to do so as quickly as opportunities arose or could be created.

case, involving a similarly over-­optimistic belief in the power of purely physical controls, which occurred fifteen years later in the provincial capital of Akure, 250 km to the north-­east, which has been documented by Faseki (1981), who was working in the provincial planning office at that time.i However, early and intuitive personal insights into possible  solutions can usefully be  regarded as bright ideas needing to be carefully stored and evaluated later in the process for relevance and unintended consequences. Then they can play useful roles in identifying both implicit objectives and possible options. For people with an intuitive cast of mind, they can provide convenient entry points to a coherent planning process, as long as they scan back to evaluate how well or poorly such proposals reflect underlying values and desired activities. Such intuitions can then be tested for relevance and unintended consequences, along with other possible solutions, instead of being uncritically championed. The fact that preconceived solutions may have to be discarded because of adverse impacts, or failure to achieve the actual objectives of the scheme, will not then saddle society with crippling encumbrances like public housing piled into high-­rise towers and decks or concrete spaghetti arrays of urban motorway interchanges

where previously there was intense inner city life. As with Popper’s celebration of the value of mistakes, discussed in the previous chapter, the value of such flashes of blinding inspiration is that, once re-­evaluated, they may prompt better and more carefully developed solutions. Concerns for not only logic but also social justice and sustainability, may prompt us to look behind existing everyday activities to discern the values they are intended to serve, for two reasons:

• Logically, there may be better and more effec-

tive ways to fulfill these values than by maintaining existing activities and trends, and good methods should encourage, rather than preclude the search for alternatives. • People may not  be acting as they do, solely because they want to; they may instead have been coerced into that pattern of behaviour by existing power relationships and conditions. Their objectives and values may currently be frustrated, but nonetheless available through the questioning methods of consultation and participation. In searching to understand the ways that land uses and activities are shaped and may be more effectively re-­ shaped, the American planning

128 Planning for Community

elements, maintenance of health promotion of nurture and transmission of culture. Reading across from cell 1A to cell 1B, the concept of shelter can give rise to different forms of temporary or permanent, individual or shared shelters, and new or adapted structures. Following the alternative, conceptual route by moving into the functional stage of cell 2A, shelter can be expressed in spatial activities such as either settled or nomadic habitation. These in turn will generate more functional spatial outcomes expressed in cell 2B as land ownership, tenure and use rights. These 2B spatial activities can then be used to create the physical and spatial outcomes of cell 3B in the form of housing estates, blocks of flats, caravan parks, and other forms of habitation which we encounter continuously in our daily lives. It is clear that one may proceed through this diagrammatic field from the pure concept of shelter to the reality of residential accommodation by a number of differing routes. Starting points may

theorist, Donald Foley, developed a useful diagrammatic framework that he termed Metropolitan Spatial Structure (1968). Foley argued that although cities are at one level very physical artefacts of bricks, mortar, steel and bitumen, their primary purposes are to accommodate and promote activities such as production, exchange, play, administration, security and communal living, which have in turn been developed to satisfy the deeper human needs and values of prosperity, sustenance, creativity, choice and contact.ii He sees planning as a process that applies understanding in order to transform existing conditions for the better. Figure 6.2, based on this approach, can itself be seen as a ‘thinking device’ into which different values, activities or land uses can be inserted in order to determine whether better ways can be identified to fulfil identified basic needs and wants. Figure  6.2 makes use of the example of shelter, exploring the significance of the other basic human concerns of housing – notably protection from the

Realm

Conceptual expressions

Spatial expressions

1A

Physical structures, temporary or permanent; individual or shared; and built or adapted

1B

Normative

Functional

Physical

Shelter for protection, health and nurture

2A

2B

Settled or nomadic habitations

Land ownership, tenure and use rights

3A Occupancy patterns Densities Social mix Invasion and succession, Gentrification, etc

3B Housing estates, blocks of flats, caravan parks, suburban character and diversity

Figure 6.2  Relations between Realms in Metropolitan Spatial Structure – the example of Shelter.   Source: Adapted from Foley (1968).



Activities and Actions 129

also be variable. It is not necessary to always start from pure conceptual ideals and proceed to the world of pragmatic physical outcomes. Any entry point will provide an effective start to explore the set of relationships, which constitutes the greatest value of this ‘thinking machine’. To take well-­ informed choices, we need to explore carefully the links between ideas, actions and spaces as well as the fields of values, activities and physical forms. Foley’s framework is thus an encouragement to explore and translate, rather than an instruction to follow, a rigid sequence of method. This perspective has many practical benefits including:

• Focusing

attention on the causes and relationships of existing and proposed land uses and activities; • Providing stimuli to recognise or invent more appropriate alternatives; • Developing capacity to trace impacts of changes through the whole system and to search for unintended consequences

Figure  6.3 applies this model to the landscape design of a small garden, in order to demonstrate the approach’s relevance to an issue with which many people are familiar in their everyday lives. This figure illustrates in a simplified way how values-­based planning can be used to identify the activities, land uses and features that users will want to include and experience in their garden designs. Early discussions can initiate the practical dialogue and consultation that should continue throughout the design process. In this case, the main interests are identified as satisfaction of the senses; contemplation; and plant and food cultivation. These take on the spatial forms of blossom, foliage, stones, water, fruit and root crops, with the precise list being amplified by direct discussion with the users, in this case, the occupants of the house and garden. Activities including observing, touching, smelling, tasting and moving take on the physical forms of pre-­breakfast walking, family relaxation and games, informal eating, contemplation and

Human process conceptual Values

Activities

Land Uses

Planning and design process

Spatial

1A Sensory pleasure Food supply Cultivation

1B Blossom, stones, water, foliage, fruit, vegetables

2A Observing Touching Smelling Soil sustenance

2B Pre-breakfast walking Relaxation Informal eating Sunbathing Reflection Entertaining Digging and mulching

3A Cultivation Rock arrangement Water storage Recirculation

3B Shrubs, flower and vegetable seedbeds, planted trees, rock assemblies, ponds and fountains

Figure 6.3  A model of garden design.

Objectives

Policies and proposals

Plans and designs

1C To achieve sensory pleasure, cultivation and food supply through provision of accessible trees, shrubs, flower, blossom, foliage and attractive stones and suitable controlled water. 2C Detailed statement of activities and provisions selected to achieve objectives including actions, agencies, timing and funding (what, who, when and how)

3C Scale diagrams and drawings showing located elements detailed enough for implementation

130 Planning for Community

personal reflection, entertaining, and general gardening. These activities, in turn generate specific land uses and structures that go to make up the elements of the garden design. Together, the values and activities may suggest such generic land uses as flower and vegetable cultivation; rock arrangement; water storage and recirculation; and movement systems. These in turn will take the form of physical features: shrub, flower, seed and vegetable beds; pathways; planted trees; rock assemblies; ponds and fountains. Depending upon the values and preferred activities of the users, a garden pond and other water features may or may not be included. A family whose values strongly incline them to exercising a pet dog, for instance, will want a clear space for running, catching and performing. In parallel with recognising how the physical garden should reflect the personal values of its users, responsive planning can start to explore the meaning of these values as applied to the character of the site. Lists of aims can be developed, which will suggest what site characteristics and capacities need to be studied and analysed in more detail, and what materials and resources should be researched to draw together objectives and information to create general options. These will combine different activities, such as movement, cultivation and observation to form physical designs of attractive features and patterns. The methods of synthesis developed by Christopher Alexander (1964, pp. 136–173) and outlined earlier in the second section of Chapter 5, Ways and Means, on planning as a craft, can provide useful prompts for this process.iii The logic, originally developed by Foley to explain and assist the planning of metropolitan activities and spaces, emerges from its application to the much finer grain of the design of a single garden, as being no less effective at very local scales. Later, in his work on the production and interpretation of space, Henri Lefebvre (1991) argues that space is a social construct built on values that shape our perceptions and practices. He proposes a transformational process applying to an even wider range of applications that similarly relate lived experiences to underlying values and perceptions. Such patterns signpost a robust design path that can take us from what we want, through how we can achieve it, to the creation of physical plans for desired outcomes and liveable spaces. the roles of  models in  understanding and analysing activities

In order to gain a fuller understanding of these possibilities, this process is now applied to the

major activity system of shelter, across a number of scales. Few human values are more essential to personal fulfilment than shelter. A secure and safe home means that people can maintain health, learn and develop skills, obtain and retain work, and develop self-­esteem. They can contribute to community life, which can in turn generate healthy human development and sustain social institutions. Shelter is thus both a prime value in itself and a cradle for many of our other values. Our awareness of housing issues often starts with confronting problems such as people having to sleep rough, in overcrowded rooms, at excessive densities, in mismatches between household and dwelling sizes, or in poorly located and constructed new housing estates, as was indicated earlier in Figure 6.2, Relations between realms in metropolitan spatial structure. Related to these physical land uses and structures are such factors as homelessness, inadequate or inappropriate housing stock, and prevailing processes of housing demand and home building. Impacting activities may include boarding house living and conversion, public and private housing investment, land use planning systems, and of course, processes of household formation. These in turn, relate to such underlying values as shelter, personal health, urban amenity, economic use of scarce resources and community life. Effective planning will mirror these patterns, starting from objectives, expressing these  values in specific contexts. As in the example of garden design, these objectives will provide the themes and identify the issues including resources, opportunities and constraints that require analysis, before being combined to create actionable plans. Finally, physical proposals will both reflect the original values and aims, and make the best possible use of available resources. The process is thus driven by values, shaped by functional information and expressed in located proposals for physical provisions. Figure 6.4 takes the process a stage further to show how conceptual norms of land ownership, family life and social composition express themselves in such settlement activities as land supply, the housing market, gentrification and supportive infrastructure systems that can then give rise to occupancy patterns, housing actions plans and systems of housing tenure. At each stage, these norms, activities and networks are paralleled by spatial systems such as residential densities, housing mix and design types, which will shape built environments through such instruments as land titles, building regulations and processes of construction and conversion. Together, these combine to create the physical reality of the living suburbs,



Activities and Actions 131

VALUES

ACTIVITIES

LAND USES AND STRUCTURES

1A SHELTER

2A SETTLEMENT PROCESSES

3A OCCUPANCY PATTERNS

Land ownership

Land supply, development and tenure

Residential planning strategies

Family life

Household formation

Total housing stock in different tenures

Personal providence

House purchase, sale and rental

Housing Action Plans and Standards

Individual agency

Public participation

Community meeting places

Social Organisation

Housing finance, investment and building

Private and public investment and mixed

CONCEPTUAL Amenity; Cultural heritage (ASPATIAL) Aesthetics

Community planning processes Gentrification; dwelling adaptation and

Plans, new urbanism and responsive

Security

maintenance

Health and convenience

Community organisation and policing

Social mix

Water sanitation and power services

Health and comfort

Active and passive recreation

Self-expression and play Access

ventures Community networks, Integrated Local Area

environments Invasion and succession Family, single, emergency, cooperative, sheltered and mobile accommodation Service networks

Movement systems

Open space systems Integrated movement networks

Spatial

1B RESIDENTIAL SPACES

2B BUILDING CONSTRUCTION

3B SERVICED SUBURBS, ESTATES AND STREETS

Developable land

Land title

New Towns, Town Expansion Schemes and

Personal refuge

Land subdivision, purchase and leasing

Transit Orientated Developments

Settlement form

House building and purchase

Community spaces and buildings

Spatial and density patterns

Residents Associations

Housing estates, apartment blocks, mixed

Design choices and principles

Building regulations

use developments, gated developments, infill

Conservation areas and

Design and density controls

housing, women’s and youth refuges,

heritage housing

Construction and conversion standards

boarding houses, retirement villages,

Housing mix

Housing conversion and demolition controls

sheltered housing

Service channels

Play spaces

Heritage housing

Open space

Water sanitation and power networks

Service trenches, pipes and cables

Transport networks and systems

Parks and gardens

Movement networks

Roads and paths

Figure 6.4  Values, activities and land uses in the creation of shelter.   Source: Adapted from ‘An Approach to Metropolitan Spatial Structure’ (Foley 1968).

new towns, housing estates, community spaces and physical services of roads, drains and water supplies that provide the settings  for our daily lives. Tracing out the relational and causal links in this way provides a far richer understanding of the wide-­ranging and complex field and its available choices, bringing users’ values and objectives

into interplay with such functional and physical concerns as resources, technology, structures and spaces. These can then be harnessed to create innovative plans. Such a planning process reflects the conclusions of the previous chapter that we should study, interpret and re-­order the world to fulfil our deepest values.

132 Planning for Community

The contributions of systems thinking in managing activities This chapter has so far been exploring how the daily activities of individual and  community life are generated and how perceptive planning can use this understanding to ensure that planned developments actually achieve what people most want and value. The chapter now proceeds to explore ways in which planning models for a number of specific activities can be optimised making use of analytical processes that describe, reshape and re-­ organise the relevant activity systems to replace inappropriate or superseded arrangements with new ones, better aligned with people’s wants, needs and values. This approach moves us from identifying objectives, through observation, data collection, interpretation and development of options to taking choices – that most characteristic of all human activities. The systems theory involved emerged in the course of the twentieth century from the fusion of the work of biologists seeking to understand the complex behaviour of organisms and of ‘Operations Research’ specialists aiming to improve outputs from the organisational systems of production processes (Ashby 1969). Models linking Inputs through Processes to Outputs were developed to identify and organise relationships among component elements. For these purposes, systems could be regarded as sets of related elements, changes to one part of which will result in significant changes throughout other parts and elements. Making use of original means of systems analysis, new and improved ways can then be identified to harness technological and social changes to produce innovative activities and satisfy deep-­ seated values and intentions. Systems thinkers also recognized that full and accurate understanding required the acceptance that each system was linked upwards to the wider environment from which it received inputs and into which its outputs flowed, as well as downwards to its own contributory subsystems. This approach was, and still is, well suited to the many-­layered scope of community planning, through recognition that each category of system also contains a number of constituent subsystems, which must in turn be identified and understood if control processes are to be fully effective. This framework can powerfully assist understanding and improvement of complex systems like community life and planning.iv

Activity systems analysis in practice Section One of this chapter examined the role of activities in organised societies and settlements;

Section Two reviewed their relations with both values and land uses; and applied findings to propose logical, planning methods, using garden design and regional housing provision as contrasting examples. Section Three discussed in more detail the role and uses of systems theory in these processes. This section now proceeds to apply the use of system models in evaluating projected trends and generating options. Three examples are used. One, concerned with housing, is based in Greater Brisbane. Two more general ones, analysing transport systems and the human use of natural resources, are designed to relate to wider scales. housing in  greater brisbane

The model is based on three simple concepts: 1. Households will require types of accommodation related to their size and composition. 2. Dwellings will require different types and areas of land depending on whether they are intended for: • detached family structures (separate family housing) • medium density low rise (‘town houses’) • medium density medium rise attached dwellings (‘apartment blocks’) or density, high-­ rise apartment blocks • high-­ (high-­rise flats) 3. Changes among different types of dwelling can be analysed into the categories of: • Lone person households • couple families without children • couple families and one parent families with children, • other families and share • group households (largely student-­ households) The official forecasts for these households have been calculated by the Queensland Government Population Information and Forecasting Unit (PIFU) based on population forecasts interpreted in the light of current demographic patterns. The model makes use of these forecasts to project future household demands for accommodation in the region. These demands are then weighed against estimated supplies of housing land, both within and beyond existing bult up areas (greenfield land on sites outside the existing built-­up area and brownfield land on sites of superseded or obsolescent uses. Figures of available housing land are compared with those from 10 years earlier to determine if increased provision has kept pace with rapid rates of growth of household formation. This land supply has been categorised according to its suitability for the four predominant



types to indicate how existing provisions could be expected to fare in meeting trend forecasts of housing demands of detached low-­density family housing; town houses; apartment blocks; and high-­rise flats. To indicate how existing provisions could be expected to fare in meeting trend forecasts of housing demand, the model distributes the projected population, including the increase in households, among these four dwelling types, in line with projections based on existing behavioural patterns and assumptions developed from consultation, publications and informed review. This approach can also be expanded to incorporate preference patterns based on surveys of each groups’ own intentions and preferences, amplified by consultation with market suppliers and advocacy groups concerned with shelter. Demand factors Housing demand, estimated from projections of future population and household size, is affected by factors such as ageing, reproduction rates, migration balance and projected income levels. Locational preference will be influenced by family size, life cycle phase, cultural norms and senses of social affiliation. Demand is then capable of refinement into different categories of dwelling size, tenure types and locational characteristics. Supply factors Housing land supply includes not only green field sites at and beyond the city edge but also brown field ones throughout the city’s developed areas, which may take any of several different forms:

• Areas

for densification or redevelopment around designated activity centres linked to transit-­orientated development • Areas included in metropolitan corridors of densification adjacent to existing major communication channels (Adams 2009) • Areas in inner cities regarded as ‘ripe for clearance and redevelopment’ • Lands becoming available through demographic change (such as school sites where populations of whole suburbs has aged) or land use change, resulting from the closure or movement of obsolete activities such as inner city rail marshalling yards or port areas, which have moved downstream to deeper water locations. Significant barriers to land release include administrative, financial and physical constraints, which must be identified and resolved. Periodic regulatory review can ensure that unnecessary

Activities and Actions 133

bureaucratic rigidities do not stand in the way of prompt decisions on land release and development approvals. Shortages of investment funds can be eased by government loan guarantees and participation in development schemes. For instance, requirements for superannuation funds to invest a certain proportion of their funds in housing provision could assist both long-­term housing supply and the security of the funds in investment ‘as safe as houses’. The planning and sequencing of Infrastructure is also essential to help coordinate land release, housing construction and community building to meet anticipated demands. Governments clearly have key roles to play and the ways that such coordinated infrastructure development can help to shape future developments is well illustrated in the state of Oregon where it is mandated by Oregon’s Planning Goal 11: Public Facilities and Services, which requires state as well as local government councils to stipulate and deliver coordinated physical infrastructure in line with published plans (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2020) In Australia, a number of such collaborative approaches are explored in the 2022 report, Give Me Shelter which advocates systematic cooperation between public and private sectors to achieve decade-­ long coordinated provision of millions of units of affordable housing across a number of tenures (Spiller, Gibbons, Swann [SGS]  2022). In South East Queensland, this is also being promoted through a series of Infrastructure Plans and Programs produced by the State Government. The latest, for the period 2019–2036, aims to respond to the radical population increases of nearly 800,000 households that are projected for the next 25 years in the SEQ Regional Plan Shaping SEQ. Government, having promoted the ends, is accepting that it must provide the means in terms of physical and social infrastructure. identification of  locations to  meet projected demands

Projected new households can be allocated to different categories of locations, such as ‘broad hectares’, ‘centres’, ‘corridors’ and ‘inner area redevelopment’ locations, which can in turn indicate how well existing provisions can be expected to perform in meeting overall projected housing demand. Finally, these demand forecasts can be related to specific designations of land zoned for housing in local and neighbourhood plans, to achieve objectives of purposive community building and provision of coordinated and timely physical, social and environmental infrastructure. Both over-­ supply and deficiencies of housing land would produce

134 Planning for Community

unwelcome outcomes, on the one hand of ‘city cramming’ of favoured locations being ‘loved to death’ and on the other of housing shortages and escalating prices. As it stands, the model produces some interesting results:

• In

2006 the existing ‘land bank’ of 628,216 dwelling sites had not only succeeded in matching the demand of the previous 10 years but had also achieved a slight growth in available sites to meet the anticipated demands of the new decade. • The projected increase of 406,236 dwelling sites was nearly double the total forecast housing demand of an extra 229,490 households needing accommodation. • Three quarters of the new housing land provision was in locations suited to low-­density separate dwellings whereas less than half the forecast household growth would be for  such families with children. The synthesis model showed that all categories of land provision were adequate with the exception of high-­rise flats, which were not well addressed in the state’s Broad Hectares Study that concentrated on undeveloped peripheral land. A ‘Brownfield Land’ availability study, therefore, needed to be undertaken in suitable sectors of Greater Brisbane. These would have included areas of such obsolescent uses as abandoned port sites and railway marshalling yards, areas of obsolete or inappropriately located slum industries, and districts within walking distance of major public transport nodes such as busway stops and railway stations. Although the total demand for high-­rise accommodation over the ten year period was projected to not exceed 50,000 units spread throughout all the available ‘brown field’ sites in the city region, existing high density, high rise Neighbourhood Plans would allow many times  that number in total in eight separate inner-­city Neighbourhood Plans. The model thus produced some significant results, suggesting that the policy challenges facing Brisbane City Council in producing housing land for the approaching decade were ones of selection and choice rather than radical intensification or drastic relaxation of regional policy directions. This was significant because housing industry lobbyists were simultaneously arguing both that there was a crisis looming in the provision of ‘green field’ housing sites, justifying dramatic relaxations of the ‘urban footprint’ or growth boundary, and also that height limitations on residential land in the inner areas be raised to 16 and 20 storeys - and

in 2023 to 90 storeys - capable of generating densities of between  200 dwellings and 500 persons to the hectare (the size of an average football field). Technical failings of analysis and projection were compounding the corrosive effects of political lobbying and unrestricted donations by property developers to both major political parties (Centre for Public Integrity  2021), as discussed in more detail in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation. Such rapidly adopted policies of massive inner city redevelopment to provide sites for often expensive high-­rise flats do not appear to be justified. In 2010, the State Government Department of Infrastructure and Planning approved the Brisbane City Council’s South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan that permitted construction of 8, 12 and 16 storey residential tower blocks in the inner city suburbs of West End and South Brisbane (which were also the focus of the city’s creative and cultural industry activities) and would increase its then population of less than 10,000 by more than five times to a potential total of over 50,000 (Brisbane City Council 2010, p. 143), on the basis that there was an urgent need for this kind of increase to take pressure off the outer suburbs. However, the Housing Activity System Model outlined above indicates that the two different parts of the city region cater for radically different types of housing demand, with the provisions for family housing in the middle and outer suburbs already being generously supplied in locations identified in the SEQ Regional Plan. Of the approximately 450,000 extra dwelling sites needed for the wider region in the period 2009–2031 only a third (158,000) were considered best located in Brisbane City, the other 300,000 being proposed for the outer suburbs of the city region in the separate local government areas of Moreton Bay Region and Redland, Ipswich and Logan cities. This analysis, therefore, shows that the kind of solution produced by Robert Adams (2009), advocating the concentration of medium-­rise residential development in corridors along major transport routes (discussed in more detail in the next chapter on Homes and Communities) also applies to Greater Brisbane. The sorts of dwellings that would be most needed to meet growth in demand would be town houses and medium-­density apartment blocks (the so-­ called ‘missing middle’), more appropriate to needs than high-­ rise flats which are more expensive to build, maintain and service, have very much higher carbon footprints and are much less flexible to meet changing preferences and demographic patterns. These town houses and medium-­rise apartments would be best located in



Activities and Actions 135

the ‘nodes and corridors’ locations, which are actually proposed in the Council’s City Shape, its own adopted (but largely ignored) strategy (Brisbane City Council  2006). However current actions are instead concentrating on incremental but radical extension of the city centre into inner suburbs for high-­rise accommodation, rather than distributing growth along public transport routes in the way proposed by Adams. In making possible this kind of evaluation and critique, it becomes apparent that activity system analysis has real advantages, not only in shaping current plans, but also in providing best available test beds for interpretation and projection of information, against which existing different policy options can be usefully and realistically evaluated, and new options generated. the transport system

The transport system may be best understood through its roles in connecting different places and activities.v The interpretative models below have been developed on this basis, expressed in the following two principles:

• Most journeys occur daily and start or finish in homes or workplaces.

• Total daily movements can be defined by the numbers of people involved, the origin and destination of their journeys and the forms of transport they use.

These principles are demonstrated in Figure 6.5. Quantifiable descriptive and prescriptive models similar to those discussed earlier for housing can be extrapolated from this conceptual model by inserting numbers of people undertaking journeys in each of the elements of home, work, shop, learn and play. Figures for ‘home’ will be based on the total numbers of people and households in

Work

Recreation

Home

Shop

School

Figure 6.5  Simplified model of transport system.

Train Car Home

Bus Bike Foot

Work

Ferry

Figure 6.6  The journey to work sub system.

the study region; work figures will be drawn from the employed labour total from the census; ‘shop’ figures can be based on estimates of total numbers of shopping trips made by each household (information which is usually available from transport planning colleagues who regularly conduct sample behavioural surveys). In the case of Brisbane, it is estimated at approximately three shopping visits a week or approximately 0.4 per day. Trips to learn are established by numbers of children and young adults in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Recreation trips will require a little more research and interpretation, but can normally be obtained from sample surveys conducted by government departments of sport and recreation; Sports Management courses at local universities may also have developed information on recreational patterns that can be extrapolated to provide indications of regular recreational movements. As a general guide, every person over the age of 5 years tends to also make approximately three recreational trips a week, or 0.4 per day. Not all trips go direct to one of these destinations from home. ‘Work–work’ trips, for instance are quite common, as are work–shop and work–­ recreation trips, particularly as part of return journeys from work to home. These variations amplify but do not distort the basic model so that a total pattern of daily movements can be readily developed for most great and small cities and city regions. This is invaluable for understanding and developing overall options for the movement system, especially the reduction of carbon emission from vehicles powered by internal combustion. Such a model does not, however, provide route-­ specific information required for operational system planning. Within this overall transport system, individual subsystems linking different pairings of origins and destinations may be particularly significant and will help to identify which traffic flows can be allocated to particular routes. Because they offer opportunities to consider and interpret these key flows better, they also promote understanding of the motivations of travellers, and should suggest methods of altering current patterns of movement

136 Planning for Community

having damaging consequences. Investment and program management Implications can be considered to encourage people to change transport modes, such as from private motor car use for the journey to work to others, such as bus, train, bike or ferry. Such journeys between home and work generally adopt one of these six main modes of travel (now joined by the rapidly expanding use of electric scooters), which are not difficult to quantify. Existing flows are normally well documented by Departments of Transport and Main roads as part of their work of monitoring and accommodating traffic movements. In many countries, this information is also available from quinquennial censuses. A clear understanding can then be gained of the existing ‘modal split’ between different methods of making the journey work. The effects of different distributions of total journeys between the various modes can be modelled and evaluated. This kind of modelling underlies the successful transport policies of cities such as Toronto, London, Stockholm, Portland (Oregon), Bogota and Curitiba in Brazil. Since the excessive use of the private motor vehicle for the journey to work is the largest single contributor to the carbon emissions that are contributing to global warming with its related problems of climatic volatility and rising sea levels, such descriptive, predictive and planning models have a very important place to play in community planning, at both local and global scales. Well-­constructed models of the journey-­to-­ work system can thus play indispensable roles in identifying and remedying this situation. Increased understanding and good communication are the surest paths to wise management and control. the human use of  natural resources

Community planning must work within the inescapable framework of the finite world of physical resources. Recalling Lavoisier’s dictum that ‘Nothing is lost; nothing is created; everything is transformed’, planners must be very concerned to ensure that the transformations for which they are responsible are beneficial or reversible. We have seen from Chapter  4, Figure  4.2, Cycle of Human Use of Natural Resources, that this understanding is firmly based on three propositions:

• Natural

ecological processes are constantly transforming matter between different states and re-­ integrating waste products back into sequences of sustainable change • Human uses of natural resources, resulting from the application of mind and values to transform

matter, create food supplies, raw materials and energy sources • Human use may reach a scale and intensity where the production of bio-­hostile matter accumulates in the form of production refuse and discarded items of consumption faster than they can be re-­integrated back into the natural environment by established ecological processes. Carbon pollution of the atmosphere and the resulting global warming is one such example. The model identifies inputs to this cycle of energy, raw materials and food sources, which span both natural and invented categories. Energy flows naturally from the sun, but humans have captured and concentrated it in the form of fossil fuels, fire and power generation to extend its use and effectiveness. Raw materials are freely available in the natural environment, but their potentialities have first to be recognized or invented. Food and water are freely available, but their current use depends upon people developing ways of amplifying and storing them to support a more bountiful existence and larger populations. Processes of human intention and understanding are thus required to transform the matter, which is presented for human use by natural ecological processes. However, these intentional processes have now reached a scale and intensity, which exceeds natural capacities for their re-­integration. Outputs now include not only items for human use but also increasingly large volumes of discarded matter in the forms of production waste, time-­expired items of consumption and accumulations of atmospheric carbon. This cycle of inputs, processes and outputs increasingly exceeds the capacity of natural ecological processes for self-­regulation. The resulting model is, like that for transport, capable of being amplified by similar ones relating to the subsystems of land, water, air and living matter, as well as to specific outcomes such as carbon production, water pollution and land contamination by toxic chemicals. Such models can be quantified and applied widely to determine outputs, which may include current and predicted carbon footprints and accumulations of solid waste or polluted water. Applied to regular ‘ecological audits’, they can help to indicate levels of sustainability, as well as anticipated origins, locations and amounts of projected waste production. Creatively interpreted, they may help to suggest options for programs of consumption and waste reduction and re-­integration, by means of recycling, reclamation and reformed production methods. Recycling can link the phases of technological transformation and human use by re-­processing such waste and



discarded materials as water, metal, paper, glass, sewerage, plastics and animal waste so that they will no longer accumulate in toxic concentrations, which threaten natural ecological processes. In addition, they may suggest how best to reduce by substitution demands for further consumption of natural resources such as timber for paper pulp, sand and gravel for roads and major construction works, including air and seaports. Proactive reclamation can bring back into productive use concentrations of potentially toxic or destructive waste, including mining spoil, chemical discharges, and derelict land (such as that which still pock mark the landscapes of pioneer industrial regions of parts of northern Britain and the mining regions of central Appalachia in the United States). Reclamation programs and grants and use of regulatory frameworks favouring new developments on brownfield sites can reduce the effective costs of using these kinds of resources to the levels where they become more attractive than consuming virgin resources. Other examples of such polices include recycling ‘grey water’ for appropriate re-­use and the redevelopment of disused quarrying and sand and gravel extraction sites for recreational uses for water sport, BMX tracks and motorsport. A third set of actions stemming from the urgent need to reduce global warming that is currently dominating international discussion and diplomacy aims to reform energy production and consumption (United Nations Climate Change  2022; Avaaz.org 2022). This will take a number of forms, including accelerated switching of investment from production of fossil fuels to solar, tidal, wind and other forms of renewable energy; the imposition of carbon taxes by national governments and the introduction of Emission Trading Schemes. Although worldwide introduction of renewable sources of energy is proceeding apace, governments like those of Australia, India and China are still seeking to protect existing lucrative fossil fuel industries in the face of mounting international criticism, although they have vast reserves of renewable solar, wind and tidal power. Carbon taxes have the great advantages of simplicity and ease of enforcement but are being resisted by confederations of industry and aligned political parties in developed nations as well as by governments of economically disadvantaged countries aiming to raise their people’s material standards of living as quickly as possible. Emissions Trading Schemes (ETSs) could create very large flows of funds to finance carbon reduction and forest preservation schemes in developing countries, but in the absence of international government with policing powers,

Activities and Actions 137

might be prone to evasion or minimisation by international conglomerates.vi As a result, combinations of such approaches offer the best possibilities of achieving sustainable futures. The model of the human use of natural resources not only alerts us to the imperatives of searching for paths towards environmentally sustainable policies in these ways, but also suggests means and types of  locations where such options may be found.

Conclusions: defining needs and exploring options for activity systems This chapter has focussed on the ways that activities can be understood, interpreted and optimised to reflect and promote widely held and  clearly identified values and achieve successful human outcomes for both individuals and the roles of activity systems in community planning. Techniques of activity systems analysis can produce reliable indicators and standards to test how well proposals, once developed, fulfill their original objectives and intentions. Inputs can be varied and new processes invented within exploratory models to produce more beneficial outcomes, more closely aligned to community values and objectives. Because human value systems may evolve over time, the dynamic role of intention must constantly be brought into play to optimise activity systems and meet new objectives. Thus, although systems analysis is neutral in itself, when linked to values-­based methods of planning, it can provide a powerful tool to understand and interpret current realities and achieve better outcomes. The next two chapters explore the ways in which this understanding can contribute, within the framework of values-­based planning, to achieve validated objectives in the four important fields of shelter, work, education and health.

Endnotes i This is a case where ‘checklist’ or ‘template’ planning borrowed from another culture, using alien controls, failed to acknowledge local values and needs. Time consuming and challenging as it might have been, the Ondo planners would have been better advised to go back to their own community’s values and needs and devise a planning system and objectives, that served the purposes of shelter improvement, job provision and traditional urban and compound form and organisation. ii Foley’s approach is neutral on the question of the durability of values. His argument does not depend

138 Planning for Community

on unchanging innate drives, but rather on acknowledging that the aims of plans and designs are to satisfy human wants, whether stable or evolving. Either way, proposals will ultimately have to take on physical forms, occupy identified spaces, and be integrated within ‘metropolitan spatial structures’. iii In summary, synthesis will involve the use and analysis of information, drawn from activity studies, to develop policies that satisfy the intentions of clusters of related objectives. These can be grouped to reflect their functional links. In this garden planning case, physical designs are based on designated activity nodes linked by discreet paths, using natural materials to meet the garden design objectives of access, maintenance, cultivation, construction and contemplation. (This is a small scale adaptation of the process worked out in practical detail by Christopher Alexander (1964, pp.  136–173) in his celebrated Indian Village case study, which has been summarised in Appendix 5A to Chapter 5, Ways and Means). iv Systems thinking allows complex situations to be studied and understood by identifying internal relations between components and external ones within wider contexts. For instance, viewed through the lens of systems thinking, because everything in the universe is related to everything else, we can identify a universal system with its own internal mechanisms of attraction, repulsion, space and time. Within that, scientists identify the solar system for purposes of studying day and night, and to provide the technology for measuring time and navigation. Geographers and geophysicists focus on the global system to explain meteorology and vulcanicity. Ecologists recognise the biosphere as a system, with very many levels of subsystem going down to and beyond the concept of photosynthesis. Human beings are themselves systems with many component subsystems  –  glandular, cardiac, nervous, respiratory and reproductive – each with its own stable pattern and predictable performance. Organisms are themselves complex systems with assemblages of matter, descending to the scale of atoms and molecules with component particles of electrons, neutrons, charm and quarks (Sheehy 2022). At each level, effective control and optimization depends upon accurate understanding of the composition of the system and the relationships of its elements. Systems theory, which is a way of viewing linked phenomena to aid understanding and assist control, can thus become an empowering way of managing the perceived world of sensations and information. It should also be born in mind that both Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the more recent recognition of constantly varying Fractal Patterns mean that the replication of systems is never totally pre-determined (Gleick 1987). v In the future, there may be a logical case for linking consideration of transport and communications systems, because the remarkable developments in the transmission of ideas and information of the last fifty years is reducing needs to move people and encouraging, for instance, increasing numbers of people to

‘work from home’. However, the organisation of the two activities of transporting people/goods and of information/ideas in many ways remain substantially distinct, so that it is, in practice, still helpful to analyse their inputs, processes and outputs as individual systems, while recognising the importance of their growing links. vi Those making the payments from within developed economies might have little interest in ensuring that the carbon reduction schemes negotiated for locations thousands of miles away were actually being fully implemented. Equally, those receiving the funds might have strong economic interests in evading the carbon reduction processes, once funds had been received. Such outcomes are not inevitable, but creation of a powerful international administrative agency would be necessary to prevent them. The danger of lack of real support from governments of developed nations to see slices of potential gross national product transferred overseas is also a live issue. Such analyses suggest a composite solution: national carbon tax systems that contribute a portion of their income to international funds to promote carbon mitigation and help combat the already acute impacts of climate change in many developing economies.

References Adams, R. 2009, Transforming Australian Cities for a more Financially Viable and Sustainable Future, Melbourne, City of Melbourne and Victorian Departments of Transport and Planning & Community Development. Alexander, C. (1964) (reprinted 1979). Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Anderson, M. (1964). The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1942-­1962. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ashby, W. (1969). Adaptation in the multistable system. In: Systems Thinking (ed. F. Emery), 230–240. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Avaaz.org (2022). Campaign on Climate Action Now. https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/climate_ action_now_loc/ (accessed 17/04/2022). Brisbane City Council (2006). City Shape. Brisbane, Author. https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-­a nd­building/planning-­guidelines-­and-­tools/neighbour hood-­planning-­and-­urban-­renewal/neighbourhood-­ planning-­a nd-­u rban-­r enewal-­p rocess/brisbane-­ cityshape-­2 026#:~:text=City%20Shape%20was%20 developed%20in%202006%2C%20as%20a,and%20 more%20infrastructure%20has%20been%20con structed%20or%20planned  (accessed 22 January 2023). Brisbane City Council (2010). South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan. Brisbane, Author. https://www .brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-­a nd-­b uilding/ planning-­g uidelines-­a nd-­t ools/neighbourhood-­ planning-­and-­urban-­renewal/neighbourhood-­plans-­ and-­other-­local-­planning-­projects (accessed 22 January 2023).



Centre for Public Integrity (2021). New calls for an overhaul of Australia’s political donation laws. https:// publicintegrity.org.au/new-­c alls-­f or-­a n-­o verhaul-­ of-­australias-­political-­donation-­laws-­amid-­concern-­ about-­influence/ (accessed 12 November 2022). Davidoff, P. and Gold, N. (1970). Suburban action: ‘Advocate Planning for an Open Society’. Journal of American Institute of Planners 36: 12–21. Delafons, J. (1969, 2003). Land-­use Controls in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Delafons, J. (2003, (originally published 1962)). Land-­Use Controls in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Emery, F. (ed.) (1969). Systems Thinking. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Emery, F. and Trist, E. (1969). Socio technical systems. In: Systems Thinking (ed. F. Emery), 241–258. Faseki, O. (1981). The Problem of Contravention: Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria, Research Study submitted towards the award of the B.A. In Town & Country Planning, Gloucestershire College of Arts & Design, Gloucester, UK. Fletcher, R. (1969). Frederic Le Play. In: Founding Fathers of Social Science (ed. T. Raison), 51–58. Harmondsworth: U.K. Penguin. Foley, D. (1968). Metropolitan spatial structure. In: Explorations into Urban Structure (ed. Webber), 21–78. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: The Making of a New Theory. USA: Viking Books. Hall, P. (1980). Great Planning Disasters. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Heywood, P. (1974). Planning and Human Need. Newton Abbott, David & Charles.

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Heywood, P. (1987). Felda & Bustee, The Management of Population Growth in Town & Country, Unpublished paper, Brisbane. Queensland University of Technology. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death & Life of Great American Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lynch, K. (1981). Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mairet, P. (1957). Pioneer of Sociology, The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes. London: Lund Humphries. Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (2020). Statewide Planning Goals and Guidelines. https://www.oregon.gov/lcd/OP/Pages/ Goals.aspx (accessed 23 September 2022). SGS, 2022, Give me shelter https://sgsep.com.au/ projects/give-­me-­shelter (accessed 3 April 2023). Sheehy, S. (2022). The Matter of Everything, Twelve Experiments that Changed the World. London: Bloomsbury. Turner, J. (1976). Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars. United Nations Climate Change (2022). What is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change?. https://unfccc.int/process-­a nd-­m eetings/the-­ convention/what-­is-­the-­united-­nations-­framework-­ convention-­on-­climate-­change (accessed 22 January 2023). Wordsworth, W. (1946). Poetical Works, Miscellaneous Sonnet XXX111. London: Oxford University Press (Poem first published, 1807).

7

Homes and Communities

The content and organisation of the chapter People’s needs for shelter and how and where they can best be met are the topics of this chapter. It is organised into the following six sections: 1. Introduction: the contributions of shelter to family and community life 2. Challenge of population change in meeting global and local needs for shelter 3. Impacts and contributions of changing technology 4. Funding shelter 5. Balancing demand with supply for shelter 6. Conclusions: future directions for shelter

Introduction: the contributions of shelter to family and community life Safe, healthy and supportive homes provide the conditions for many other attributes essential to successful lives to develop. Learning, for instance, is much assisted if children have space at home for study and undisturbed night-­time sleep. Social skills are best learned in happy and welcoming home environments. Habits of work and personal organisation and reflection acquired at home can build future individual capacity and community prosperity. Healthy communities also develop and flourish where hygienic homes discourage the spread of chronic and pandemic diseases and debilitation. Well-­ located and compact housing areas promote community contact because home is where most journeys start or finish. Personal independence is most secure where private space provides a refuge and base from which people can gain information, reflect and make daily choices about relations with the outside world. Equal access to safe and comfortable shelter therefore promotes social justice. Social cohesion, too, is enhanced by the stake in society that a secure home provides. Community concerns include the

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

powerful shaping that home life exerts upon each new generation. Because shelter is the building block of communities and the basis of personal independence and family life, its provision should bring together public, private and community contributions. Many of these housing outcomes are strongly influenced by decisions taken outside the home so that effective personal control and choice can only be achieved through active community involvement in planning of land uses, access systems, environmental standards and design controls. These public interests are particularly acute in developing countries, where population growth and movements are often most rapid, causing provision of shelter to present growing  challenges, as people born in the period of peak population growth of the last few decades start to form their own households and search for homes or move to rapidly growing cities in search of work. In developed countries, where the population is also being increasingly concentrated in major metropolitan regions, house prices have more or less doubled in the first two decades of this century and their elevated levels and reduced affordability continue to pose major challenges (Routley  2020). Meanwhile, the needs of an ageing population for growing numbers of smaller dwellings will have to be met in ways that are personally and psychologically acceptable to their occupants. Similar demands for more, and more habitable and appropriate, dwellings are destined  to remain insistent throughout the lives of current generations.

Challenges of population change in meeting global and local needs for shelter At the beginning of the 2020s, many cities through­ out the world face major challenges just to find adequate space and shelter for their growing populations. One cause of this pressure has been the tripling of global population from just over 2.5 billion in 1950 to more than 8 billion in 2023, encouraged by remarkable improvements in public health, reduced infant mortality, increased life



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expectancy and advances in preventative epidemiology. The effects of this growth have been further amplified by tides of rural–urban migration. Radical new developments in transport, promoting much increased physical mobility, have encouraged movements towards the cities, resulting in the urban proportion of the world’s total population more than doubling from under 30% in 1950 to over 67% in 2018 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs  2018a). In developed countries, significant overcrowding and homelessness have resulted. In many developing ones, in cities such as Lima, Kolkata and Mumbai, millions are being forced into crowded and often unhealthy dwellings in shanty towns, alongside major roads and in spontaneous settlements on city fringes. Accommodating these flows has been made more difficult by the high costs of land for housing in the competitive markets of many of the host cities. This has often been compounded, rather than resolved, by regulations that restrict people’s traditional rights to make use of whatever spaces and materials may be available to provide their own shelter (Turner  1976). These factors combine to create complex and uncertain conditions for humanity’s continuing ‘struggle for shelter in an urbanising world’ (Abrams 1964).

self-­limitation spreads to affect people in all continents, including those in Africa and Southern Asia, still experiencing high levels of population growth (Wikipedia  2023). China’s large population is forecast to peak and begin to decline as early as 2027 (Borgen Centre  2021). One reason for this decline, the country’s recently abandoned one-­child per family policy, has also resulted in China being the only country in the world with more men than women, due to families’ traditional desire to produce male heirs. The country’s former authoritarian population control policy proved, like many other such universal solutions, to be inappropriate and counter-­productive. Since the recent rapid growth in the world’s total population should not be expected to continue at anything approaching recent or even current rates, the actual challenge facing community planning is to meet and manage a major but measurable surge in housing and infrastructure demand over the next few decades. Rather than justifying despair, or resort to public interference with personal decisions, demographic data and projections can support and inform programs to re-­shape, intensify and judiciously plan managed growth of existing cities and their regional settlement patterns.i Within this general strategy of accommodating ‘Peak Population’, a number of very influential strands may be identified, including:

the creation of  new households

• mass urbanisation • population return and intensification in inner

Though very large, the challenges of population growth are not beyond effective management. Already, by the second half of the twentieth century, significant but uneven slowing of the high rates of global growth had already started, first in the most economically advanced countries of Western Europe, and then spreading to the newly developing countries of the global ‘East’, particularly China, Japan and the ‘Young Tiger’ economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. In the world’s previously most populous country, the People’s Republic of China, this decrease has now become so pronounced that the national government is taking energetic steps to encourage families to again have more children (CNN 2022). Two major causes of this reduction in total population growth are globally rising levels of female education and the increasing numbers of people in all continents gaining access to modern methods of birth control (Davis  1965; Salk and Salk  1981). As a result, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs forecast that the current world population of 8 billion will peak below 11 billion by 2080 as the trend to

cities

• smaller households • increased mobility and • ageing population profiles. The changing pattern and distribution of global population over the last century could well be described as ‘metropolitan nucleation and local dispersion’. Overall growth, originally concentrated within major cities, is  relocating to their fringes in search of adequate spaces and cheaper land for housing sites. Many such metropolitan regions more than doubled their populations in the course of the mid-­ twentieth century, with prominent examples being Los Angeles, Toronto and Sao Paulo in the Americas; Mumbai, Kolkata, Shanghai, Wuhan and Tokyo in Asia; Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia; London, Berlin and Milan in Europe; and Cairo, Nairobi and Lagos in Africa. These population increases, together with an approximate halving of average densities, have resulted in very rapid expansions of urbanised areas, often more than quadrupling consumption of large areas of formerly productive

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farm land and posing great problems for urban transport and accessibility (Newman and Kenworthy  1991). In turn, this has fuelled increased dependence on motor vehicles to circulate goods and people, resulting in further problems of urban pollution, respiratory health and serious additions to global carbon emissions and climate change. It is understandable that some environmentalists, such as Paul Ehrlich (1978), tended to attribute all of our environmental ills to population growth, while ignoring the wasteful consumption by each individual in consumer societies. This misinterpretation had the unfortunate tendency of diverting attention away from more critical and relevant planning responses. These should have included regulating technological impacts, developing behavioural incentives and constraints, improving social and economic organisation and increased sharing of space and means of transport. The evidence is that parallel improvements in education, family planning resources and personal autonomy result in people naturally adjusting family size towards replacement level. Top-­down decision-­making and unequal distribution of wealth, on the other hand, tend to produce the poor levels of public health and life expectancy, which encourage high birth rates in both the short and medium terms. This has continued to occur in India, even under the forcible population control experiments introduced by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, and is notably still occurring in many parts of Africa where families afflicted by life-­threatening problems of drought, floods, famine and AIDS still respond to prevailing high rates of infant mortality by having large numbers of children. Irrespective of low rates of natural population growth in developed countries and the anticipated reduced overall rates of population growth in developing ones, people will continue to be drawn towards the greater social and economic opportunities offered by major cities, encouraged by increased personal mobility and the spread of information and communication networks. This urban growth can be expected to be further accelerated by displacements resulting from the recurrent and increasingly frequent disasters of climate change, major famines and armed repression. As a result, while total world population is only expected to increase by 20% between 2020 and 2030, the United Nations United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) forecast that urban populations will grow at twice that rate – by about 40% (UNDESA 2018b, Tables A2-­ 4; United Nations  2021). Continued rapid growth in the demand for urban housing land and

dwellings can therefore be anticipated, maintaining current rates of up to 2% a year. These inflows will be compounded by increased mobility of both existing and new households, with more than half of all households already moving home every five years in some developed nations. However, numbers in each household and dwe­ lling can be expected to continue to trend downwards as falling birth rates and the general ageing of the population create needs for smaller and more specialized dwellings than the traditional detached family housing that characterised the house production of recent decades in developed countries. The associated increased densities and average heights of these smaller units will require more local public spaces and more intensive use of movement channels for journeys to work, school and play in the form of mass transit and active transport options. More emphasis on footpaths, cycle ways, busways and new, electronically guided forms of private transport, should provide opportunities to knit communities closer together, improving and re-­purposing the current cityscape, which is often badly dislocated by urban freeways, scything channels 30–50 m wide through the living spaces of inner and outer suburbs. summary of  population challenges

Summarising these trends, it appears that global population and total demand for new dwellings can be expected to peak by the middle of this century, and then remain stable around replacement level. Demands will continue to be concentrated in great cities and metropolitan regions of one or more million people. By 2018, more than half of the world’s population of nearly eight billion already lived in areas classified as urban – a proportion expected to increase to more than two-­ thirds by 2050 (UNDESA  2018a,b). Number of occupants per dwelling will go down. As a result, in the inner areas of the great cities of developed nations of the Global North, there are likely to be increasing proportions of one and two-­person households while family housing (typically accommodating two parents and two children) will still predominate in the middle and outer suburbs. In the developing nations of the global ‘South’ in Africa, South America and South Asia, family sizes, though much reduced from their current average levels of six persons, will still tend to be on average half as large again as those in the more developed nations of the ‘Global North’; and larger dwelling sizes and footprints should be planned accordingly.



Impacts and contributions of changing technology While new technologies of production and transport have contributed to transforming the size and scale of settlements, the interior design of domestic space has remained remarkably stable, based on human needs for rest, food and contact.ii At the larger scale of residential locations, however, there have been far more significant changes. Formerly compact cities such as Greater London, Greater New  York, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Milan and many others have leapt over Green Belts to spread along roads and railways into residential hinterlands extending over many thousands of square kilometres.iii Transport and production technologies, not least the dispersing effects of electric power, exert ever more powerful influences in shaping and decentralising the form, location and density of urban communities. As well as posing challenges of adequate services and organisation, these changes offer potential solutions, including the shift of emphasis of growth to secondary centres (­Roberts  2014) in a pattern that can be described as polycentric urban regions (Hall  2014). These changing impacts of various significant causal factors on urban form and land supply are discussed in the following sub sections. While they can contribute usefully to a rounded understanding of influences on residential location, readers of a more practical turn of mind may prefer to proceed direct to the following section, on Funding Shelter. roads, wheels, wagons and motor vehicles

The roads and wheeled vehicles that now exert major and compounding influences on the form and growth of contemporary cities also supported the development of the early urban civilisations of five and six thousand years ago. In today’s world, they continue to make possible the life and growth of contemporary megacities by accommodating increasing daily flows of workers between homes and workplaces, and of raw materials from sources to places of production. However, difficulties are increasing as growing urban scale elongates journeys and intensifies conflict among traffic flows. The cheap fossil fuel and free disposal of waste matter that fostered their earlier development, are already being reversed in the ‘Peak Oil’ era of necessary reduction of carbon emissions, and exhaustion of finite reserves. More emphasis on active transport, autonomous vehicles and mass transit initiatives will increasingly be required

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to encourage sharing of transport channels and reduction of land consumption and carbon emissions. These current and impending changes will favour smaller housing lots and denser, more locally clustered cities. rail locomotion

Railways are a good example of a technology that can  respond well to the social and economic needs of rapidly growing cities, because they are capable of moving large numbers of passengers over increasing distances to and from places of residence, manufacture, exchange and consumption. In the coming era of peak and scarce oil and more strictly controlled carbon emissions, the inherited suburban structure of many contemporary cities – clustered around central places located in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along rail and bus routes  –  offers a promising basis for sustainable future development. Because of their high-­volume capacity and unsurpassed ability to combine maximum shared use of space with minimum consumption of energy, fixed rail systems ranging from metropolitan trams and ‘metro’ lines to high-­ capacity express trains are destined to become even more significant ways to link future housing and work locations. elevators and tall buildings

Technical inventions have intensified the potential dominance of central nodes by expanding them upwards into air space. By freeing occupants of tall buildings from the demands of time and energy associated with climbing stairs, the invention of the mechanical elevator in New  York in the mid-­nineteenth century accelerated the growth of high-­rise apartment blocks. Together with the use of reinforced concrete and pre-­stressed panels, they assisted the birth of the towering city centres such as New  York and Chicago and the massive post-­war reconstruction of public housing in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Rotterdam, Moscow and Hamburg.iv High-­rise building of this sort, advocated by Le Corbusier in his influential City of Tomorrow (1970), increased potential densities but diminished the harmony between built structures and the natural environment. When planned with market feedback and careful resident and community consultation and balanced with generous open space and social services, such multi-­storey structures have offered another option to increase residential densities for more affluent demographic groups in the inner

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areas of such cities as New  York, Berlin and Singapore. Elsewhere, in the inner cities in places like London’s Thamesmead and Kensington Towers, with its fire-­prone Grenfell Tower, Sheffield’s Park Hill and Hyde Park, St Louis’ Pruitt Igoe, and the perfunctory and regimented Moscow apartment blocks of the 1950s and 1960s, they have been used for schemes that often resulted in unloved and unlovely ‘Concrete Jungles’ and slab blocks of low-­ quality public housing (Newman  1973; ­Heywood 1974; Bater 1979). tunnels and underground development

Building downwards has a less extensive, but more ancient history dating back over 2000 years to the catacombs, subterranean dwellings and churches in Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey. However, its most significant influence on today’s shelter lies in promoting underground transport, which can remove large volumes of traffic from the surface levels of cities into tunnels, often complete with concourses and shopping arcades, thus greatly improving the liveability and convenience of surface level housing in many such great cities as London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, Singapore and Kolkata, by relocating underground much of the traffic, which previously resulted in repeated traffic jams and smog.v Such underground rail systems continue to play significant roles in adapting growing metropolitan areas to absorb residential growth by concentrating and intensifying development around nodes along high and medium-­ density corridors served by underground public transport. Used judiciously, tunnels can replace the need for existing and proposed ground-­level freeways, and make possible convenient and accessible car-­free living in inner suburbs that would otherwise continue to be fragmented by urban freeways and polluted by exhaust emissions. power generation and transmission

Electric power, with its capacity for very rapid, cheap and efficient transmission over long distances has allowed settlements and workplaces to spread widely across growing urban regions like Greater London, the entire southern half of New  York State and the vast urban area of Los Angeles. By contrast, the stored energy of steam could only be transmitted over short distances and tended to concentrate employment and residence under pollution palls close to toxic discharges from chimney stacks, cooling ponds and spoil tips. Electric power

has not only freed the location of homes to include garden cities and suburbs but also endowed them with the convenience of power-­driven domestic appliances such as washing machines and electric irons and enlivened them with the electronic communications of radio, telephone, television and more recently, computers and cell phones linked into the world wide web of information exchange. All of this can be achieved without the need to be located near power sources.vi Electric power is thus providing more choices in the scale and location of settlements, though the use we make of these opportunities remains up to us.vii electronic communications

The impacts of modern electronic communications have rapidly expanded from the first invention of telegraphy and the magnetic telephone in the nineteenth century to become major influences shaping contemporary society, vividly demonstrated in the continually growing reach of the internet and satellite communications that spread access to knowledge and information so widely. Such distributive capacities can promote and support participation by individuals and communities in choosing where and how they will live and work, empowering greater choice in dwelling location by promoting working from home, making use of a wide range of ‘Zoom’ type communication options.viii The full impacts of electronic communications in promoting the decentralisation of cities still remain to be experienced. water supply, storage and recycling

As an essential and increasingly uncertain resource, it is important to manage carefully the use and re-­use of water in the planning of urban development, especially in developing countries. Open and inclusive governance and management are essential to regulate cycles of plan-­making, provision, distribution, charging and monitoring. The location of future residential areas needs to take careful account of access to secure water supplies. Elsewhere, recycling schemes that might support the growth of stable and self-­sustaining settlements and residential areas may encounter cultural rejection from communities with strong taboos about consumption of anything originating in human waste (Lacey and Heywood  2010). Community dialogue will be essential. Technologies of bulk water capture, storage and distribution have supported the growth of independent communities dating back to the eras of



early Nile Valley irrigation and Roman aqueducts, with trunk water mains and feeder systems helping to spread well-­ serviced settlements across wide regions. In contemporary times, in developing countries, the expansion of such systems can free people from the necessity of taxing daily trips to fetch water from the local stream or neighbourhood pump or well  –  falling most heavily on women, already burdened with child-­rearing, housework and cultivation of domestic gardens.ix However, massive dam-­building projects can also flood valleys displacing many tens of thousands of rural families, as occurred in China’s Three Gorges Project and the Narmada Valley scheme in central India, designed to supply power and water to the booming economy of Mumbai (Roy 1999). As the world faces mounting desiccation and water shortages, battles rage over access to water resources between rural farming and indigenous communities on the one hand and licensed extraction by highly capitalised irrigation-­ based commercial cultivators on the other. In Australia’s Murray ­Darling Basin, for instance, these have resulted in the Darling River ceasing to flow for months and even years on end, with mass death events of river fish and the threatened closure of whole rural communities. While local communities have rapidly declined, highly monetised rights of extraction have been linked to cases of criminal corruption involving large land-­ holding corporations and senior officials of public authorities (Simons 2020). Water policy is destined to become an increasingly important aspect of community planning in current times of rapid climate change.

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from the difficulties that they pose for established family life. New prefabricating technologies and mobile homes may well offer promising responses to meet growing needs caused by increasingly frequent emergencies and natural disasters, but their potential uses and likely impacts on future settlements and communities are not yet clear and need to be carefully evaluated. The lesson is that good residential planning and design develops not from seizing each new technical opportunity to meet immediate market preferences or social opportunities, but rather from careful evaluation of each new way of meeting people’s existing values and projected needs. summary of  technological impacts

In summary, we can anticipate that human ingenuity will continue to create new technologies and inventions in response to the changing demands for shelter triggered by social change and population growth. In the past, such capacities have flowed abundantly to produce new mass-­volume infrastructure systems and communications networks. Planners and designers can optimise such new technologies by carefully adapting and regulating them to fit with well-­tested and established patterns of community life and organisation. In this way, thoughtful planning can identify, monitor, predict and interpret changing opportunities to support community well-­ being and forestall harmful impacts.

Funding shelter construction technologies

More immediate impacts on the design and shape of people’s homes and residential communities are exerted by developments in construction technologies. The availability of cheap baked bricks and reinforced concrete, for instance, both contributed to the rapid construction that powered the spread of earlier compact settlements outwards to include extensive suburbs with their unintended consequences of increased personal isolation and resource consumption (Young and Willmott 1963). In city centres, composite pre-­ cast components and site assembly methods have extended development upwards in dense clusters of high-­ rise apartments and office towers rising to heights of up to 100 storeys and more than 300  meters. The fact that these high-­rise apartments are not always popular, as indicated earlier in this section, results

housing costs and funding

The political economy of housing can be seen as a chessboard, the squares of which offer different advantages to competing individual, community and commercial interests. Archaeological evidence suggests that housing was not originally a commodity to be bartered but rather an essential support to the prevailing economic system, whether that was collaborative subsistence farming and craftwork, as in Neolithic farming villages, or centralised feudal control and theocracy as in Pharaonic Egypt of a millennium later. It was only the unprecedented 19th century growth of towns in Europe and North America, resulting from the Industrial Revolution, that multiplied the variety of ways to meet and fund the demands for housing of rapidly growing urban populations to

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include large-­scale investment and construction. By the twentieth century, these methods had spread to many parts of Asia, South America and Australia. Capital investment in dwelling construction came to be regarded as being ‘as safe as houses’, though the quality of the resulting accommodation was often very poor and living conditions were frequently overcrowded.x An increasing proportion of the total housing stock was absorbed into the mainstream of the growing economy through regular rental or in-­kind payments required by empowered industrialists,  entrepreneurs and investors from necessitous tenants. For many of the labouring classes, their dwellings rapidly became costly commodities that they could seldom hope to own and which made them heavily dependent upon the interests of landlords (who were often also their employers), who could increase rents or evict them at will. Some enterprising workers responded to this dilemma through collaborative action to establish mutual finance organizations, which came to be called ‘Building Societies’, to fund home acquisition and ownership.xi As a long-­term result, by the mid-­twentieth century more than half of the populations of England and the United States came to own or be purchasing their own homes. Nevertheless, around a third of housing in most advanced countries continues to be commodified as rental accommodation, built or acquired by investors for financial return. On the one hand, this promotes freedom of movement and choice of workplace for people in mobile age groups. On the other, renters may face constant conditions of personal insecurity, economic exploitation and threats of arbitrary eviction, which have resulted in demands for government regulation of the housing market, and direct public participation in provision of affordable housing. Commodification of shelter thus emerges as a two-­sided page. On one side, in times of rapid growth and mobility, it can prove capable of enabling market economies to respond quickly to demographic and economic movements and changes; on the reverse side, overcrowding, economic exploitation and homelessness can result unless there is careful management, control and active participation from the public, voluntary and cooperative sectors. Both sides of this page must be read and acknowledged to achieve acceptable housing policies. Prudential regulation by governments is also required to control speculative lending by bonus-­ driven financial operators to ‘sub-­prime’ borrowers, who are seldom known to the original lenders and who may possess very little creditworthiness.

Lack of such regulation resulted in the cascading international financial crisis of 2008–2009 (Stiglitz  2010). To be fully effective, national and local housing policies require a mix of public, private and cooperative involvement to match the composite structure of contemporary societies and housing markets (Heywood  2016; Spiller, Gibbons, Swann (SGS) 2022). housing affordability

For housing affordability to be effective, not only the necessary volume and speed of construction of dwellings is required, but also an  appropriate variety of type, location and tenure of new homes. Neither exclusive reliance on the market nor state monopolies have proved fully successful in achieving these outcomes. For example, state monopoly in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe in the period 1945–1989 proved inflexible and unresponsive to people’s needs, though quite effective at mass production of sheer numbers of dwellings (Bater  1979).xii Market systems have generally produced higher-­quality dwellings, but have resulted in inadequate supply and recurrent crises of homelessness and affordability where public involvement has been weak or remote, as has often been the case in the United States and Australia. In the USA, spasms of expansion and contraction of lending and construction climaxed in the mortgage lending crisis of 2008–2009, in the course of which millions of less affluent home purchasers were forced to walk away from their dwellings, leaving them to be resumed by banks, who were, in turn, unable to dispose of them in a collapsed market. Few would now argue that exclusive reliance on an unregulated free market can finance, manage and construct a housing supply that is numerically adequate, let  alone affordable or socially just. By contrast, collaborative approaches are well suited to the mixed economy regimes that are increasingly common in all continents. Such approaches can effectively involve a variety of stakeholders including governments, investors, builders, voluntary agencies and consumers, and can weave together contributions from a number of different strands:

• ‘Social

Market’ housing policies that encourage commercial construction to meet public objectives • Government partnerships with voluntary agencies and social enterprises • Direct public provision of social housing.

social market housing policies

This approach of governments encouraging and steering market delivery to achieve social objectives was first developed in mid-­ twentieth century Western Europe to support rapid post-­ war reconstruction.xiii It involved providing tax concessions to developers and builders in return for construction of affordable and appropriate housing for sale or rent, in locations where it is needed. Widely advocated, variations were included in a number of the economic stimulus packages applied to steer western economies out of the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. affordable rent schemes

This public–private partnership approach drove Australia’s successful Nation Building Economic Stimulus Plan for 2008–2012 (Australian Government Department of Social Services  2009). Under this scheme, the Australian Government supplied funding of AUD$5.238  billion over 3.5  years from 2008 to 2012 for the construction of new social housing, which did much to encourage not-­ for-­ profit Housing Associations, Housing Companies and similar social enterprises to provide much needed social housing, while also helping to maintain full employment (Australian Government Department of Social Services  2009,  2021). Government-­issued financial incentives to housing organisations to provide people on low to moderate incomes with an opportunity to rent homes at below-­market levels. Under the scheme, investors gained a guaranteed annual rebate of $8600 per dwelling for developing and passing on to low-­income households at 20% less than market rates (Australian Government Department of Social Services  2021). Benefits were paid annually over a 10-­year period as long as rental levels and conditions continued to meet the terms of the initial agreement. There was no restriction on who could participate in this National Rent Affordability Scheme (NRAS) but voluntary organisations, charitable bodies and mixed enterprises, including government-­supported Housing Companies proved to be particularly well-­ situated and motivated to take advantage of the scheme because of their experience in the planning, building and management of affordable housing. Despite initial caution from the private sector, NRAS ensured that overall house building rates were maintained at around their previous levels throughout the global financial crisis. The scheme was specifically designed to assist low-­ income Australians, who were homeless or struggling in the private rental market and for more than

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a decade continued to make a big impact on the country’s housing affordability. Although it continued to provide a much-­needed boost to both private rental housing and that offered by the not-­for-­profit community sector, the then Liberal-­National Party Coalition Government of 2013–2022 decided in 2019 to close the scheme by 2025 (Australian Government Department of Social Services  2021) and this is now contributing to a new crisis of affordability and homelessness as more than 6600 homes across the country cease to be supported under the affordability scheme (Clun  2023). Nevertheless, this kind of partnership policy, bringing together the public, private and community housing sectors in productive and collaborative partnerships to meet very evident needs is highly suitable for adoption in other mixed economy societies, including those of North America, many of which are experiencing parallel crises of housing affordability and homelessness. public–private partnerships

Government agencies can also enter into direct partnerships with commercial and not-­ for-­ profit providers, to combine public powers of land designation and assembly with private sector skills in development, design and marketing, thus linking social benefits with commercial success. One particularly notable example is provided by the collaboration of the South Australian Urban Land Trust (now Renewal South Australia) and a large private developer, Delfin Developments, over the period 1983–2003 to build the community of Golden Grove in North Eastern Adelaide, which has now reached a population of nearly 10,000 residents.xiv The new neighbourhoods rapidly developed into an attractive suburb and in 1998, Golden Grove was awarded the Prix d’Excellence as the world’s Best Residential Development by the International Real Estate Federation (Financial Review 1998). Similar approaches were planned in the schemes developed for London’s 2012 Olympic Games, and the subsequent reuse of the sites, mainly located in the formerly partly derelict Lea Valley and the struggling working-­class suburb of Stratford. The regeneration strategy, launched by the London Development Agency and Thames Gateway Development Corporation, was intended to create 9000 new homes along with shops, community centres, schools, health facilities, and open spaces, harnessing the valley’s unique natural environment. A mixed public–private body, Leaside Regeneration, coordinated the overall development, entering into partnerships with developers (Leaside Regeneration  2022, London Legacy Corporation 2022). By

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2018 only a limited number of affordable dwellings had been completed and despite Mayor Sadiq announcing plans for construction of a further 3000 social housing dwellings on old Olympic sites (Mayor of London  2018) the proportion of affordable dwellings remains below that for the rest of the Borough and surrounding local government areas and the Greater London Council area as a whole. This fragility of good intentions and their vulnerability to takeovers by politically supported commercial interests has been vividly demonstrated by the Guardian journalist Oliver Wainwright (2022) in his detailed expose, A massive betrayal: How London’s Olympic legacy was sold out. Wainwright has unearthed how the intended focus on affordable housing and social integration has been subverted by deals done between the London Legacy Development Corporation and private developers, building lower proportions of affordable housing than are required elsewhere in the affected boroughs and the Greater London Council area as a whole. Wainwright’s summary, though balanced, is damning: Ten years on, the legacy has resulted in a nice park dotted with impressive sports venues and high-­end homes, with some cultural attractions on the way. But the poorest and most vulnerable, in what remains London’s most deprived boroughs, have lost out. In terms of social engineering, says one academic, it is now ‘a lovely place for those who can afford it, with people living in desperate poverty right outside it’. The lessons are clear: long-­term uses for Olympic and other international games schemes need to be subject to binding and publicised commitments agreed with local, city and state governments and development agencies. planning infrastructure, programs and subsidies

Affordable housing can also be promoted by governments planning and installing the necessary infrastructure, in return for commercial developers agreeing to include a proportion of affordable dwellings.xv One example of this capacity to achieve effective results comes from the successful trebling of the population of Greater Toronto in the period 1953–1983, under the guidance of the region-­wide Metro Council whose role was to supply wholesale services of water, power and transport, and to pass them on for retail distribution to the constituent local governments (Lemon 1985; Sewell  1993). Metro Toronto and Toronto City Councils undertook a series of planning agreements with large development companies to

provide tens of thousands of dwellings in agreed locations, to meet the very large population increases of migrants arriving from Europe and other parts of Canada to share in the success of the metropolitan economy (Sewell 1993).xvi Another sophisticated and successful example of how to manage housing provision by integrating planning with infrastructure supply comes from the state of Oregon in the north west of the United States, where the regional metropolitan government of Metro Portland has succeeded in shaping relatively high-­density development within a number of transit orientated developments, mostly located around stations of the publicly owned Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) light rail. Portland has succeeded in increasing its urban density, preserving green space beyond its urban growth boundary and diminishing its annual total of Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) by using planning powers conferred under the still current and widely celebrated 1973 Oregon Land Use Act. This also forms the basis for Metro Portland’s 2040 Growth Plan and Transportation Planning Rule that effectively concentrate new development in transit-­oriented developments clustered around public transport nodes, particularly those served by the four lines of the 120 km MAX system (­Portland  2023; Adler and Dill 2004). These successes, reinforced by the Regional Framework Plan (Metro Portland  2021) have been made possible because the State of Oregon’s statutory Planning Goals and Guidelines require compliance by State agencies once they have signed off on Regional and Local Plans.xvii As a result, developers can be confident when negotiating with Metro Portland that the locations they are proposing will be well served by transport, sewerage and other essential services, such as education and law enforcement. Such compliance requirements from government’s own departments and agencies are invaluable levers to achieve coordinated provision of infrastructure and to build lively, well-­serviced and socially integrated communities. As a result, a beautiful Green Belt has been maintained by means of a statutory Urban Growth Boundary while maintaining costs of market housing well below the typical home prices in several neighbouring cities in the Pacific Northwest that have not adopted such environmental protection policies (Bungalow 2022). inclusionary zoning

Inclusionary Zoning is increasingly widely used throughout the western world to ensure that as cities’ housing stocks increase, they retain a proportionate and adequate supply of affordable and social



housing. This has become the most effective tool to mitigate and manage the negative effects of gentrification, with its inherent tendency to dispossess the less affluent and produce single-­class communities. The approach entails attaching requirements to areas designated for housing to include a specified proportion of affordable dwellings – often 20%, but sometimes, as is currently the case throughout Greater London, as high as 30%. This can be secured through a number of mechanisms, including legal agreements with developers to themselves provide rental accommodation at rates maintained at agreed levels for a specified number of years, or for them to arrange for Not-­ for-­ profit providers, such as Community Development Corporations in the USA, Housing Associations in the UK, or Housing Trusts and Companies in Australia, to do so. Examples are New York’s Bedford Stuyveysant Restoration Corporation in New  York, Quadrant, London and Clarion Housing Associations in the UK and the Brisbane Housing Company (BHC) and Sydney’s Metro Housing in Australia. As of 2010, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation had constructed or rehabilitated 2200 housing units in its New York  neighbourhood, provided mortgage financing to nearly 1500 homeowners, brought $375 million in investments to the community and created over 20,000 jobs (Wikipedia 2022). Inclusionary zoning is clearly a powerful and positive tool to empower such bodies in their crucial roles of maintaining housing affordability and social mix in growing cities, reflecting the positive potentialities of mixed economies to combine appropriate roles for governments and commercial developers to harness market initiative to deliver the social requirements of democratically elected governments. government support for  social housing enterprises

Collaboration between governments and not-­for-­ profit Housing Associations flowered throughout Western Europe during the post-­war reconstruction period of the mid-­twentieth century. Initially most significant in France and Sweden, this approach was later also widely adopted in the United Kingdom where such Housing Associations were officially recognised in the 1964 establishment of the Housing Corporation, specifically to encourage their contributions to constructing and managing affordable and accessible social housing. By the time of its merger with other government housing agencies to form first the Homes and Communities Agency in 2008, and then Homes England in 2018, the organisation had grown to oversee and fund more than 2000 Housing Associations (all of whom

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were regulated as ‘Registered Social Landlords’ or RSLs). The current government has now contracted and consolidated this number into 31 sizeable RSLs still intended to deliver nearly 20,000 grant-­ supported affordable homes a year over the five-­ year period 2021–2025 (GovUK  2021). Although this represents a reduction of 50% in their scale of operations from earlier planned totals of around 30,000 dwellings a year, this still represents a substantial commitment, amounting to nearly 10% of the expected annual national construction of all the country’s new dwellings. the future roles of social housing enterprises in the uk

Throughout the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom maintained an ambitious bi-­partisan policy of public housing, known as ‘Council Housing’ funded by the national government and managed by local councils. This had grown by the early 1970s to constitute almost a third of the total national stock. Much sound and progressive accommodation was provided in this way, but by the time the Conservative Thatcher government launched its campaign against public enterprises of all sorts in the 1980s, the country’s many large public housing estates were beginning to attract the stigma often attached to client populations. Consequently, the Thatcher government’s policy of sale of council houses to their occupants or commercial organisations, or disposal of them to Housing Associations, supported and overseen by the Housing Corporation, did not attract as much widespread popular criticism as might have been anticipated. Instead, housing activists diverted their energies into campaigning for more funding and targeted support for special housing projects by such not-­for-­ profit organisations as the country’s many RSLs.xviii Such associations are particularly suited to provide social housing because they combine greater credibility and a more universally trusted ethos than commercial bodies with being able to operate with more flexibility and on a more personal scale than large government agencies. They are often associated with ‘Third Way Politics’, discussed earlier in Chapter 2, The Lives of Local Communities. They aim to avoid both the short-­term profit maximisation of market economies and the enforced conformity of state provision. They may take a variety of forms, including organisations like London’s Glenigan, Southern Housing and Places for People, Spain’s Mondragon Workers Corporation (2022) and Bangladesh’s Grameen Housing (World Habitat Awards  1998). Other housing

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versions of such bodies may result from initiatives by well-­established charities, including faith-­based organisations. A relatively recent Australian social enterprise dedicated to housing provision, which is in part based on the models discussed above, may serve to demonstrate the quite rapid contributions, which can be made to provisions of social housing. The Brisbane Housing Company (BHC)  was officially established with the Queensland State Government and the Brisbane City Council as its major shareholders in 2002. It was registered as a charitable organisation for tax purposes, reflecting both its ‘not for profit’ status and its commitment to providing affordable housing. Led by an energetic CEO, David Cant, with a background in inner London Housing Associations, and a Board of Directors including representatives of government, business and the wider community, the BHC has taken advantage of access to the steady flow of government surplus land that is common in all mixed economy societies, occasioned by such social and land use change as old schools, public storage spaces, disused railway marshalling yards, works department and other residual land uses. In less than 20 years, the BHC has completed more than 2000 dwellings, including many one-­bedroom units in large and carefully designed apartment blocks, illustrated in

Figures 7.5–7.9. Current intentions are to raise this total to 3500 by 2025 (BHC 2022b). These dwellings are offered for rent at levels not exceeding 75% of normal market levels, and some are now also offered for sale. The Company also partners with private developers to build on parts of sites the BHC own. Winning a number of awards, including the Planning Institute of Australia overall Award for Excellence in 2007 for a scheme conducted jointly with the Queensland State Government and the Queensland University of Technology in the inner city Kelvin Grove Urban Village, the BHC has established a reputation for attention to relationships with surrounding spaces and urban activities and for very high-­quality design, illustrated in Figures  7.5–7.7. While originally not intending to directly manage tenure of the dwellings it constructed, the company has now established its own effective and responsive rental section, which is itself responsible for financial management of over half of all the company’s building projects. A Tenant Participation Section also encourages the formation of Tenant Participation Groups in all of its buildings (Brisbane Housing Company  2022a). An example of the nimble organisation and inventive approaches of the company is provided by one particular site developed by the BHC, which is summarised in Box 7.1.

Box 7.1  Brisbane Housing Company, Columba Street Redevelopment of Richlands Highschool site, Inala The Richlands site (See Figures 7.1 and 7.2), once occupied by a state school and later temporarily used as an employment incubator, was originally identified as a suitable place for affordable housing by a local community housing action group, Butterfly Housing, whose president, Tony Green was a local resident. The 11-­hectare site already included an Aboriginal “Yarning Place” and social centre in the old School Library, as well as the proposed location for a new Council swimming pool. The State Government had then a practice of making available its surplus lands for purposes supported by different departments, and Queensland Housing was persuaded to support the sale of four hectares of the site for a very reduced sum to the BHC, who have developed it for a wide range of two bedroom terrace houses (see Figures  7.3 and  7.4). Twenty-­six low rental two bedroom dwellings have been converted from an old school block, and made available at rents originally varying from $ Au 110 to $ Au 230 a week (levels not readily obtainable elsewhere in Brisbane). Each dwelling has its own patio, balcony and small garden and residents display considerable pride and pleasure in their secure and comfortable homes. Despite the high density of the development, they say that they find the place quiet, and enjoy good relations with their neighbours. Minor design problems with the organisation of the internal spaces, such as the bathrooms and cupboards, have been noted for design adjustment in future schemes. Elsewhere on the site, new dwellings have been built, also for rental in attached rows of two storey town houses and part of the site has been sold to a private developer who has also erected 21 similarly compact townhouses using Commonwealth ‘Fiscal Stimulus’ funding at a cost of AUD$4.9 million. They were completed by mid 2010, within a period of seven months from the agreement of funding to readiness for occupation.



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The site is shared with Mission Australia, some of whose clients are also residents of the new development. Newcomers are put in touch with a wide range of other social, medical, financial and recreational support groups in the suburb. A street, Albert Holt Place, was named after the local Aboriginal leader and author, who continued to play an important role in local community life and consultation. No less importantly, a meeting place has been maintained for Inala’s thousand strong Aboriginal community, many of whose children attended the former school after its closure, in the ‘Yarning Place’, which now occupies the converted old school library.

Figure 7.1  Conversion of former Richlands High School teaching block for 26 affordable rental dwellings, with small front garden spaces, nearing completion, 2009.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.2  Rear view with patio garden spaces, conversion of former Richlands High School teaching block for 26 affordable rental dwellings, nearing completion, 2009.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.3  Earnshaw Haven, single-­storey, medium-­ density affordable rental dwellings, with small back garden spaces.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.4  Tony and Judy, affordable housing residents at one of BHC’s inner-­Brisbane high-­density, mixed-­ tenure rental complexes.  Source: Courtesy of Brisbane Housing Company.

public housing supplied as a government service. Worldwide, another version of public initiative, based on the Garden Cities advocated by Ebenezer Independent, faith-based and government-­ Howard (1902, 1946) remains a continuing success. supported and sponsored Housing Associations, Dating from his proposals to rehouse the urban Trusts and Companies offer effective means of workers penned in the overcrowded and polluted meeting the housing needs of less affluent houseindustrial towns of Britain and other industrialising holds that differ from and complement traditional the continuing roles of  public authorities and social enterprises in  community housing and development

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Figure 7.5  Hartopp Street apartment block, communal landscaped interior garden space high-­density medium-­ rise affordable rental dwellings.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.6  Hartopp Street interior of two-­bedroom apartment block, high-­density, medium-­rise, affordable rental dwellings.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.7  Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, 12 storey, affordable rental apartment block, interior of one-­ bedroom apartment, with view towards city centre. Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

nations at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his championing of ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’ has grown into the world wide ‘New Towns’ movement with many successful examples in all six continents. Howard himself saw Garden

Figure 7.8  Masters Street, Newstead inner city apartment block under construction with city centre in background.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Figure 7.9  Fitzgibbon outer suburban green field site previously owned by Queensland Housing being developed for mixed rental and purchase medium-­priced and affordable dwellings, using 2008 Commonwealth Fiscal Stimulus funding.  Source: Reproduced by courtesy of the Brisbane Housing Company.

Cities not as ‘public housing’ but rather as community enterprises, with every resident being a shareholder in their own Garden City Development Association. Nevertheless, the New Towns that have been planned and built in all six continents have often been developed by national governments, designated and funded by them and managed by government-­appointed Development Corporations (Hall  1998;  2002a,b). Such bodies continue to offer considerable advantages for the provision of affordable housing, especially in its establishment phase. They can combine, for stipulated periods of time, coherent control over the initial physical, social and economic development of new communities and in so doing, can help to create integrated communities to respond to the needs of rounded citizens. Such New Town Development Corporations can also utilise the generally excellent credit rating enjoyed by most national governments to raise large development funds at low rates of interest. They can subsequently benefit from financial increments from resultant increases



in land values while fixing monthly payments at levels appropriate to residents’ capacities and needs and the town’s social health. As such, the model offered by the well-­defined structure of the New Town Development Corporation remains a valuable option for societies facing the need for large-­scale house-­building programs to respond to extensive population movements or increases, or administrative innovations especially the establishment of new capital cities like Australia’s Canberra, Brazil’s Brasilia, Punjab’s Chandigarh, Nigeria’s Abuja and Indonesia’s Nusantara. Management by government-­designated Development Corporations does not have to be exclusive or elitist. In the spirit of contemporary collaborative planning, their Management Boards can well include community, as well as public and private stakeholders.

Balancing demands with supply for shelter Residential development occupies about half of the total area of most cities so that accurate projections of housing need and relevant location and density policies become very significant for overall and statutory settlement and community planning. Resulting  projections of demand and associated plans for coordinated supplies of sites, services and infrastructure, can benefit from practical techniques and information sources, including:

• Regularly updated population and household

forecasts available for most major cities that provide transparent and easily understood material to help estimate housing need to support the necessary integration of land assembly, provision of hard, soft and green infrastructure, house construction, and health, education and transport provisions; • Demand studies and analyses that include community involvement concerning preferences and possibilities.

demand factors

Estimates of housing demand should take into account existing deficiencies and projections of future population change  and household sizes, which will be affected by factors such as ageing, reproduction rates, migration balance and anticipated income levels. Locational preference will be influenced by similar factors, especially family size, life cycle phase, cultural norms and senses of social affiliation. Demand will be capable of

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refinement into different categories of dwelling size, tenure types and locational characteristics and preferences. supply factors

Land supply will include not only green field sites at and beyond the city edge but also brown field ones throughout the city’s developed areas. These brownfield sites may take any of several different forms:

• Areas

for densification or redevelopment around designated activity centres linked to transit-­orientated development • Areas included in metropolitan densification corridors adjacent to existing major communication channels (Adams 2009) • Areas in inner cities regarded as ‘ripe for clearance and redevelopment’ • Lands becoming available through d­ emographic change (such as school sites where populations of whole suburbs have aged) or land use change, resulting from the closure or movement of obsolete activities such as inner city rail marshalling yards or port areas which have moved downstream to deeper water locations. Significant barriers to land release may include administrative, financial and physical constraints, which will need careful review. Periodic checking can ensure that unnecessary bureaucratic rigidities do not impede prompt decisions on land release and development approvals. Shortages of investment funds can be addressed by government policies, loan guarantees and participation in development schemes. For instance, requirements for superannuation schemes to invest a certain proportion of their funds in housing provision can ensure regular flows of housing funding, while guaranteeing the security of investments ‘as safe as houses’. A number of such collaborative approaches are explored in the 2022 Australian report, Give Me Shelter that advocates systematic cooperation between public and private sectors to achieve coordinated provision of millions of units of affordable housing across a number of initial tenures (Spiller, Gibbons, Swann (SGS) 2022). Governments clearly have key roles to play both in affordable housing collaboration and market regulation. The planning and sequencing of Infrastructure can also help coordinate land release, housing construction and community building to meet anticipated demands. Coordinated and integrated infrastructure supply can also help to shape future developments. Portland, Oregon, achieves this through binding

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government infrastructure planning and commitments (Metro Portland  2021) while In South East Queensland, it is being promoted through a series of indicative Infrastructure Plans and Programs produced by the State Government. The latest, for the period 2019–2036, aims to respond to the radical population increases of nearly 800,000 households that are projected for the next 25 years in the SEQ Regional Plan Shaping SEQ (Queensland Government 2017). Government, having promoted the ends, is accepting that it should  provide the means in the form of commitments to timely physical and social infrastructure. current policy options

As the great cities of the mid-­twentieth century reach maturity, selective redevelopment and densification become possible and often necessary. For instance, strategies to manage the increase in the population of Melbourne by approximately two to five million people by 2029 propose intensifying activities, particularly residential development, along existing major corridors of tram, train and major bus routes (Adams 2009, pp. 18–21). In this case, new development would be limited to eight storeys, while the existing inner and middle suburbs and their hinterlands would be preserved as areas of traditional housing, urban conservation and ‘green wedge’ spaces. Adams’ calculations show that these intensification corridors would occupy only 3% of the total metropolitan area, allowing future development to be restricted within the recently declared outer limit or ‘urban growth boundary’, creating an effective metropolitan greenbelt. These investigations by the City of Melbourne and the Victorian State Government recognise and support the large capacity of ‘missing middle’ solutions of medium-­ rise, medium-­ density apartment blocks, from which European cities have benefitted ever since the growth of the Renaissance cities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not-­ for-­ profit Housing Associations and Companies can play important roles, as they have for several decades in North America and Western and Northern Europe and are increasingly doing in many parts of Australia. Funding is a major factor. Promising examples of the options that are available to support governments to improve and diversify the supply of affordable housing can be found in such schemes as the UK’s Affordable Homes Programme 2021–2026, under which Homes England (2021) is committing almost £5.2 billion of affordable housing grants to strategic partnerships with 35 such RSLs, and Australia’s National Rent Affordability

Scheme, discontinued in 2022 after more than a decade of successful operation since its establishment in 2009 (Lending Guru  2009; Australian Government Department of Social Services 2021, 2022).xix Energy and imagination are needed to assemble adequate supplies of land, skills, funding and legal powers. Methods of land assembly include release of government-­owned land; densification of existing low-­ density development in new transit-­ orientated developments and partnerships with private developers to designate and develop new green field sites. To ensure that the necessary skills are available, links with the education sector, particularly Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs can support appropriate work force training. Parallel support for ‘Sweat Equity’ schemes can encourage individual enterprise through inclusion of scope for traditional self-­building methods. In summary, funding options include taxation relief, loan incentive schemes, market regulation mechanisms and partnerships with market and social enterprise providers. Finally, the power of positive planning should not be under-­rated. By presenting coherent pictures of intended futures and combining the actions of public, private and community stakeholders, community plans can create confidence and mutual understanding among the various key providers whose work is necessary to turn appropriate housing designations into active and healthy communities. homes and communities

Wider communities of association and interdependence provide the settings within which dwellings need to be embedded. For instance, it is difficult to sustain a satisfactory home life in isolation from other people or without the support of services of health, education, work and transport, so it will be useful here to conclude our discussion of homes and communities by indicating how concerns for place-­making and wider settlement planning can help shape the ways we set about planning land and investment for housing development. A general model to relate different types and levels of housing supply to appropriate scales and locations of settlement can help practitioners across a wide range of public services to understand and integrate their work with those of related activities so that they can promote service efficiency, coordination and delivery. While in no way claiming to provide a universally applicable template, such a model can help to provide a useful background of shared understanding for mutual adjustment and collaboration among agencies and levels of governance.



Homes and Communities 155

Relevant ideas about central place hierarchies and networks of activity centres date back to the nineteenth century with scholars such as Johan von Thünen, and in the early twentieth century, Walter Christaller, August Lösch and Brian Berry (Glasson 1974; Friedmann and Weaver 1979). They evolved to play significant roles in twentieth-­ century regional planning practice and continue to influence contemporary regional planning in the form of hierarchies and networks of activity centres, which are widely used in current regional planning to guide distribution of government service functions and roles. These include locations and spaces for investment in public transport, health, education, cultural and entertainment facilities and focus points for community and social

interaction (Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning 2009a,b).xx In considering this pattern of systems, it becomes clear that the grain and structure of settlements can be interpreted along a continuum, one end of which is firmly anchored in daily needs for regular and recurrent contact between individuals and households, while the other end extends to include the increasingly dynamic field of regional scale metropolitan growth. The range of potential communities thus now extends from the local neighbourhood to the metropolitan region. In order to locate and link different kinds of housing need, responses and policies appropriately, some indication of the resulting spectrum and scope of settlements will be helpful. This is provided in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1  Community size and types of appropriate housing provision (developed countries). Indicative thresholds of size

Frequency and intensity of contact

Neighbourhood or Capacity for daily village (up to 1000 and direct households and personal contact 100 hectares) with neighbours

Predominant types of dwelling

Links

Governance

Mainly detached family dwellings

Corner store, pharmacy, kindergarten, child care centre, bus stop, ride share network, indoor/ outdoor play space

Neighbourhood association, kindergarten committee

Secondary school, several primary schools, public transport hub (train station/bus stop/ community transport and active transport networks for pedestrian and cyclists), local park/ recreation area, local medical centre

Community Council with designated local government support and roles, secondary school council, parents and citizens associations size

District shopping and local government services, Multi Service Health Hub, public transport hub, active transport network focus, VET college

Ward councillors office and district federation of community councils

Mix of detached family District or locality Weekly and dwellings and some (from 3000 to recurrent contact higher-­density housing 10,000 households with people in for young, ageing and and from 300 to shops, schools, buses and medical specialised households 1000 hectares) centres

Town or suburb Focus on a number (from 10,000 to of different age, 50,000 households income, activity and from 1000 to and interest groups 5000 hectares)

Wide array of housing types, styles, sizes, tenures, cost and densities with greater heights up to approximately 20 m or eight storeys around local transport hubs

City or rural region (from 50,000 to 200,000 households and from 5000 to 20,000 hectares (50–200 km2 within urban areas)

Interdependent specialists providing recurrent health, education, recreation and governance services

Metropolitan or nodal region (1 million+ households and >1000 km2 area)

Specialist activities, balancing demands and supplies for services and resources

Mix of types and tenures, City/regional council Local government including owner-­ administrative centre, council, local occupied family housing central business district progress and public and private with public transport association, rental stock, including focus, regional health organised central high-­rise (>50 m) centre, public and active interest groups apartments transport network hub, for housing, cultural centre/library/ social service, museum, regional environmental university campus, city care, etc. and regional parks Full range of types and State/provincial Metropolitan tenures including government offices and regional inner-­city apartments, cultural centre, focus of governance suburban villas and national and international specialised student transport networks of and retirement land air and sea accommodation

156 Planning for Community

This kind of table requires two kinds of res­ ­ervations: 1. The array of locations should not be read as an authoritarian template to regulate the lives of communities, which are, in reality, much more complex than any such summary table can depict. 2. In the indicative thresholds  of size, few of the categories, characteristics or population estimates will hold true across all situations. For instance, some neighbourhoods in New  York, Shanghai or Mumbai, may be more populous than whole districts or towns in Australia, New Zealand or Portugal. Nevertheless, it is useful for those engaged in community planning to have a general guide to different levels of social interaction and the kind of facilities that are required for each, as developed, for instance, in such documents as Queensland’s initial SEQ Regional Plan Implementation Guide No 5, Social infrastructure Planning (Queensland Government  2005). The intention of the table is not, therefore, to invent or impose an ideal pattern or hierarchy of central places and functions, which could be arbitrarily rolled out over whole cities and regions, but to raise questions and prompt answering options in the minds of those responsible for planning and providing such major community elements as schools, clinics, transport services, parks and economic development programmes. It has been included for these reasons and to illustrate the ways in which housing policy can reciprocally take account of the many other activities, which are required to contribute to the growth of successful communities, and to help those working in these allied fields to identify basic cooperation required to build well-­serviced communities able to assume responsibility for their own subsequent successful evolution.

the urban growth of the last few decades has often been concentrated. In this period of mounting instability, we shall need to guide short-­term market preferences away from locations prone to repeated disasters from future fires, floods and disease. Metropolitan growth needs to be located both within urban growth boundaries and green belts and beyond them in locations that are not prone to flooding or wildfires. Increasing and mutating pandemic infections remind us that there is also a need to rethink recent escalating inner city residential densities  –  sometimes approaching 1000 persons per hectare – which may frequently lack adequate local open space and expose residents to infection. The rapid growth of metropolitan populations and the decentralising effects of rising proportions of people choosing to work from home also need to be considered in selecting and planning residential locations. More multi-­centred and locally clustered settlement forms (Hall’s ‘polycentric regional cities’ 2014) will need to be considered, characterised by the medium levels of height and density of dwelling structures, discussed later in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design. The necessary homes, the spaces to build them, and the designs and services to make them safe, healthy and habitable demand fresh approaches to community planning, involving not only collaboration with a wide range of practitioners with well-­grounded knowledge of climate, environment, health and hydrography but also increased participation by local communities whose members  will  themselves  occupy and do much to maintain these dwellings.

Endnotes i

Conclusions: future directions for shelter Three prime moving global influences are exerting accelerating impacts on communities’ needs for shelter throughout the world:

• crises

of fire and flood associated with climate change • the impacts of stubbornly mutating pandemics • recent and continuing rapid growth of urban populations. Housing Action Plans are required that avoid the flood-­prone river valleys and flood plains where

ii

There are clear signs that global ‘Peak Population’ is within sight. Rising levels of female education and access to birth control information and technology may within the lifetimes of people now entering the workforce be raising the need to plan for ‘The Stationary State’. This was identified by J.S. Mill (1848,  2011) more than one and half centuries ago, as a desirable goal, so that efforts could be refocused on improving the quality of life and shelter instead of having to devote dominating attention to matching ceaseless growth. For instance, the laterite mud dwellings of the Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa peoples of West Africa have surprisingly similar internal spatial organisation to the farm cottages of rural Kent or Gloucestershire in England. Further back in time, the two storey, shop-­ top dwellings of Akrotiri, on the southern shores of the Greek Island of Santorini, buried in the volcanic explosion of 3500 years ago, display remarkably similar characteristics and spatial organisation



to a modern townhouse in an English or Dutch new town, with consistent human scale and cubic geometry combining to shape similar rooms to meet the requirements of family life. iii Scholars have long speculated over the recipro cal roles of the city and the road in generating this growth. Lampard (1964, p.  332) notes that many interpret the great urban explosion of the second half of the nineteenth century as resulting directly from improved communications themselves prompting economic opportunities in locations with the best access for collecting, producing and distributing goods. However, it is possible to reverse the causal sequence, with increased concentrations of populations themselves generating transport improvements. Most probably the two phenomena are related in a prime example of Gunnar Myrdal’s ‘cumulative causation cycle’ (ResearchGate 2007). iv Such inventions and techniques as reinforced concrete and electronic elevators increased the pace and scale of construction to an extent that prevented the processes of feedback, progressive adjustment of form to context and resulting cyclical elimination of error, identified by Christopher Alexander and discussed in Chapter 5, Ways and Means. These had enabled earlier cities like Athens, Amsterdam and Paris to evolve with their celebrated grace, harmony and aesthetic unity. The scale and impacts of tower blocks of flats, for instance, often resulted in the loss of humanity and responsiveness (Heywood  1974). These developments were not cheap because construction costs mount for any structure above two storeys and are, as a rough guide, twice as expensive on level 12 as on ground level. High rise technology as a means of meeting housing need provides an instructive lesson that ‘is’ should not imply ‘ought’  –  that because something is possible, that does not necessarily make it desirable  –  indicating that technology can be  an excellent servant but an unacceptably tyrannical master. v Privatised use of the same technology is destined to produce very different and less beneficial results, by providing underground toll roads for private vehicle movements through the inner suburbs and into the centres of growing metropolitan areas, encouraging further penetration and exhaust depositions of private vehicles and associated pollution into central cities and inner suburbs. This is currently occurring in many major metropolitan areas throughout North and South America, East Asia and Australia. vi Lewis Mumford (1961) in a celebrated aside, once famously speculated upon the transformation in urban development that would have resulted if the invention of the means to generate electric power had preceded that of the steam power which produced the ‘cities of dreadful night’ of the Industrial Revolution. These have been memorably described

Homes and Communities 157

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

by Charles Dickens (Hard Times,  2003), Emile Zola (Germinal,  1968), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment,  1951), and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1973). In the inspired words of Gordon Campbell, then Chair of the Greater Vancouver Regional District in 1993: ‘We can have anything we want; but we can’t have everything, and we can’t have it right now: we must take choices!’ Community planning is about the process of taking those informed and enlightened choices. Their wider social effects remain undecided. On the one hand, the new communications technologies and their associated social media endow the more than three  billion cell phone owners worldwide with potentially equal access to the information and capacity to participate in debate offered by the global network. All can in theory generate and circulate their own ideas and views to contacts and followers in open access and opensource networks around the globe. On the other hand, central command of information media can be, and has been, concentrated in the hands of lucrative owners, controllers and operators at key nodes in the communication system, climaxing in the dramatic command of media and internet magnates, such as the late Robert Maxwell, the  Murdoch dynasty, Mark Zuckerberg  and, Elon Musk. There is therefore no certainty whether the ultimate effect will be to empower or subordinate individuals and communities  –  or indeed whether there will be an ultimate outcome or instead continuing tugs of war between the incessant initiatives of commercial moguls to achieve and monetise central control in their own interests, as against individual and community actions to achieve and expand open access. Meanwhile, global communities of interest like Wikipedia, Avaaz, World Vision, World Wildlife Fund and the Inter-­ Governmental Panel on Climate Change are empowered to spread their reach to help inform  and support individuals and communities with the most recent and carefully corroborated information available. There are enormous gains in health, convenience, time and energy from such installation of reticulated water supplies but the associated sacrifice of recurrent community contact at the local well or tap risk losing a valuable local nucleating force, which needs to be recognised and compensated for by activities such as regular festivals and creation of incidental meeting places to bring people together to exchange information and emotional support in casual and enjoyable contact. This is well described both by Freidrich Engels in The Condition of the English Working Classes (1971) and Elizabeth Gaskell in her influential novels, North and South and Mary Barton (1985, 1998). The celebrated initiative of Richard Ketley and ten other working men who combined to form the first recorded Terminating Building Society, at

158 Planning for Community

the Golden Cross Inn in the rapidly growing metal working centre of Birmingham, consisted of an agreement to pool their annual savings (Building Societies Association  2009). These were used to provide one dwelling each year for successive members, in a ‘Terminating Building Society’ until all 11  had been housed. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, this approach had grown to include ‘Permanent Building Societies’ and banks who would advance sums for home purchase in return for guarantees of continued monthly repayments, which might be spread over periods of 20 or more years. xii It is nevertheless interesting that the West German Social Market Housing Policy, combining government incentives and private enterprise construction and management was equally successful in numerical terms, and far more so in achieving socially desirable dwellings (see Denton et al. 1968). xiii This approach, originally developed in post-­ war West Germany to hasten reconstruction, aimed to avoid the excesses of both the national socialist authoritarianism of the country’s preceding decades, and unconstrained profit maximisation of an unregulated market economy. Making use of the economic theories of Professor Walter Eucken, West German Treasurer Erhard provided very substantial tax benefits to construction and development firms that constructed housing to meet specified requirements of type, size, cost and tenure, in areas of housing stress. As indicators of housing adequacy were achieved, areas were removed from the schedule of further subsidisation. Within a period of 10 years, West Germany succeeded in producing three million high quality dwellings, starting from the basis of a war-­devastated infrastructure (Denton et  al.  1968). The difficulty of maintaining low housing prices in a sellers’ market was met by making continuation of tax concessions to organisations conditional on rents being maintained within stipulated levels. In adapted and updated forms, these policies have been maintained by a sequence of governments of differing political persuasions, and have succeeded in managing successive challenges including the major population movements following the 1989  national reunion; large inflows of guest workers across many decades; and successful accommodation of more than a million refugees in the period 2015–2020. xiv By completion, this new suburb comprised nearly 10,000 dwellings and a population of 30,000  residents. In 1983, the Trust had approached Delfin to undertake a joint development on publicly owned land, with its value to be recouped in the form of new public housing units, which would be distributed throughout the new development and constitute 10–20% of the total new dwellings. Both parties also benefited from close cooperation between developers and government departments in the phased provision of schools, community facilities and public transport. The social objectives of

the South Australian Housing Trust (now Housing South Australia) were better met by securing attractively designed dwellings, integrated into the physical fabric of the new community, than if they had attempted to construct an exclusively public housing estate themselves (Financial Review 1998). xv The alternative approach, to levy ‘betterment’ charges on developers for infrastructure provision, without mandating how they will be spent  is less effective in producing affordable housing, because the resulting payments may simply be incorporated into the general funds of the administering local governments, instead of being used to build or finance social housing. xvi Looking back, John Sewell (1993), the former Mayor of Toronto, doubted whether Metro Toronto had exacted sufficiently watertight or even-­handed contributions from the private development companies such as Bramah Pty, but the ‘Planning Agreements’ approach certainly proved a more efficient and inclusive way to produce a wide range of large scale developments than alternative approaches sometimes adopted south of the border, making use of the less targeted policies of the US Federal Housing Mortgage Authority at the time, which have been interpreted as contributing to sometimes sprawling and racially segregated housing being constructed at that time on the fringes of major cities in the United States (Davidoff P. & L. and Gold, N. 1970). xvii In particular, Goal Number 2, Land Use Planning, requires that suitable implementation ordinances be adopted to put the comprehensive plans of cities and counties into effect. Goal Number 11, Public Facilities and Services also mandates efficient planning of public services such as sewers, water, law enforcement and fire protection to ensure that public services are planned in accordance with a community’s needs and capacities rather than being forced to respond to development as it occurs (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2020). xviii Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) are government-­ funded not-­ for-­ profit organisations that provide affordable housing. They include housing associations, trusts and cooperatives. They work with local authorities to provide homes for people meeting the affordable homes criteria. As well as developing land and building homes, RSLs undertake a landlord function by maintaining properties and collecting rent. xix NRAS was intended to supply up to 50,000 affordable rental houses at a cost of AUD $623 million across Australia, and is credited with helping Australia to avoid the worst effects of the worldwide recession that followed the 2008 Global Financial crisis. Where housing investors reduce rents by 20% of the normal market rent, the government provides an incentive of AUD  $8000 per year (AUD  $6000 from Federal and AUD  $2000 from the State governments). This incentive, which in 2009  was  AUD $8672 per



dwelling per year, was guaranteed for 10 years, with increases in line with the Consumer Price Index. Eligible tenants were determined on an income basis with the service industries such as police, teachers and nurses prioritised as potential tenants. Because the incentives were tax-­free they may have had a real value up to AUD $13,675 a year per dwelling (Lending Guru  2009; Australian Government Department of Social Services 2022). However after a change of government in 2013, it was capped at 38,000 dwellings and programmed to close after 2026 (Australian Government Department of Social Services  2021) and its withdrawal is being seen as contributing to the current crisis of homelessness throughout the country (Clun 2023). xx For instance, the spatial aspects of all of the suite of nine regional plans produced in the Australian state of Queensland between 2004 and 2009 and since regularly revised, are mainly built around networks of activity centres, classified as ‘principal’, ‘principal rural’, ‘major’, ‘major rural’ and ‘specialist’ in metropolitan and urbanised regions, and ‘major regional’, ‘major rural’, ‘district rural’ and ‘community centres’ in the rural regions of the west. This hierarchy has been specifically designed to assist in locating government investment, and to help in steering that of related private sector initiatives (Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning 2009a,b).

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Metro Portland (2021). Regional framework plan. https://www.oregonmetro.gov/regional-­framework-­ plan (accessed 23 October 2021). Mill, J.S. (2011). Principles of Political Economy. New York: Public Domain first published 1848. Mondragon Workers Corporation (2022). Mondragon Corporation. https://www.mondragon-­corporation .com/en/ (accessed 10 December 2022). Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New  York: Harcourt Brace. Newman, O. (1973). Defensible Space; Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. New York: Macmillan. Newman, P. and Kenworthy, J. (1991). Cities and Automobile Dependence: A Sourcebook. Aldershot: Gower. Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (2020). Statewide planning goals and guidelines. https://www.oregon.gov/lcd/OP/Pages/ Goals.aspx (accessed 23 September 2022). Ozawa, C. (ed.) (2004). The Portland Edge, Challenges and Successes in Growing Communities. Washington, DC: Island Press. Portland (2023). Max light rail. https://www.travel portland.com/plan/max-­light-­rail/ (accessed 23 January 2023). Queensland Department of Infrastructure & Planning (2009a). South East Queensland Regional Plan, 2009–2031. Brisbane: Queensland Government. Queensland Department of Infrastructure & Planning (2009b). North West Regional Plan. Brisbane: Queensland Government. Queensland Government (2005). South East Queensland Regional Plan, Implementation Guide No 5, Social infrastructure planning. https://www.slideshare.net/ SimoneCuers/implementationguideline5 (accessed 23 September 2022). Queensland Government (2017). Shaping SEQ, South East Queensland Regional Plan SEQ Infrastructure Plan and Program, 2021–2031. https://www.data . q l d . g o v. a u / d a t a s e t / s o u t h -­e a s t -­q u e e n s l a n d -­ regional-­plan-­2017-­shapingseq-­series (accessed 25 October 2021). ResearchGate (2007). Myrdal’s theory of cumulative causation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 274455034_Myrdal%27s_Theory_of_Cumulative_ Causation (accessed 10 December 2022). Roberts, B. (2014). Managing systems of secondary cities. https://www.academia.edu/8967512/Managing_ Systems_of_Secondary_Cities (accessed 25 July 2022). Routley, N. (2020). 20 years of home price changes in every US city. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/20-­ years-­o f-­h ome-­p rice-­c hanges-­i n-­e very-­u -­s -­c ity/ (accessed 12 December 2022). Roy, A. (1999). The Cost of Living. London: Flamingo. Salk, J. and Salk, J. (1981). World Population and Human Values: A New Reality. New York: Harper and Row. Sewell, J. (1993). The Shape of the City, Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (with a foreword by Jane Jacobs). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Simons, M. (2020). Cry Me a River: Quarterly Essay. Melbourne: Black Ink Books.



Sinclair, U. (1973). The Jungle. London: Penguin. Spiller, Gibbons, Swann (SGS) (2022). Give Me Shelter, the long-­term costs of underproviding public, social and affordable housing. https://www.sgsep.com.au/ assets/main/SGS-­Economics-­and-­Planning_Give-­Me-­ Shelter.pdf (accessed 24 July 2022). Stiglitz, J. (2010). Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: Norton. Turner, J. (1976). Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars. United Nations (2021). Sustainable development goals. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/ 2015/07/un-­p rojects-­w orld-­p opulation-­t o-­reach-­8 -­ 5-­b illion-­b y-­2 030-­d riven-­b y-­g rowth-­i n-­d evelopingcountries/#:~ (accessed 21 October 2021). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018a). World urbanization prospects, the 2018 revision. https://www.un.org/development/desa/ publications/2018-­revision-­o f-­w orld-­u rbanization-­ prospects.html (accessed 23 January 2023). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018b). World population prospects, the 2018 revision. https://population.un.org/wup/Download/ (accessed 22 October 2021).

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Wainwright, O. (2022). A massive betrayal: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out. https://www .theguardian.com/uk-­news/2022/jun/30/a-­massive-­ betrayal-­how-­londons-­olympic-­legacy-­was-­sold-­out (accessed 17 January 2023). Wikipedia (2022). Bedford stuyvesant restoration cor­ po­ration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_ Stuyvesant_Restoration_Corporation (accessed 23 September 2022). Wikipedia (2023), Projections of population growth, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_ growth#:~:text=The%20most%20recent%20report%20 from%20the%20UN%2C%20issued,decline%20 %28the%20median%20line%20on%20the%20accom panying%20chart%29 (accessed 6 April 2023) World Habitat Awards (1998). Winners and finalists, the Grameen Bank Housing Programme. https://world-­ habitat.org/world-­h abitat-­a wards/winners-­a nd-­ finalists/the-­g rameen-­b ank-­h ousing-­p rogramme/ (accessed 21 November 2022). Young, M. and Willmot, P. (1963). Family and Kinship in East London. Harmonsdsworth: Penguin. Zola, E. (1968). Germinal (translated by Havelock Ellis). Gloucester, MA: P. Smith.

8

Facets of Community

Introduction and organisation of the chapter key facets of  community

Chapter  7 explored the crucial roles of shelter in community life and planning. This chapter now proceeds to consider the roles of three other important activities  –  those of work, education and health. Work is not only the source of people’s ability to survive and prosper; it is also the basis of personal independence and self-­esteem. Education promotes the essence of successful living, allowing people to take control of their lives in worlds of fluctuating change, where survival and flourishing often depend upon the capacity to understand, interpret and manage environmental conditions and opportunities. Health is no less vital to well-­being and flourishing, crucial to both preserving life and to ensure that it can be enjoyed to the full. All three values are clearly of the greatest importance to communities and their planning. The chapter addresses these issues in the following five sections: 1. Levels and justifications for community intervention 2. The planning and organisation of work 3. The place of education in community life and development 4. The planning and delivery of health services 5. Conclusion: the many facets of community

Levels and justifications for community intervention In the planning and management of each of these activities, strong links connect the interests of individuals with those of their wider communities, indicating the importance of both collective responsibility and community participation. On Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

the one hand, individuals and communities seeking communal ends should be prepared to explore collaborative means. On the other, strongly argued objections are frequently raised against collective interventions on the grounds that activities can be best managed by individuals in direct interpersonal negotiations and arrangements. Classical economists, for instance, have for many years argued that production and consumption of goods and services can be completely harmonised by the ‘hidden hand of the laws of supply and demand’ adjusting market relations by linking potential buyers to willing sellers both locally and across entire regions and nations (Hayek  1944; Friedman 1968, 2008). In practice, hybrid systems may result. In education, for instance, a worldwide increase in patronage of private schools, academies and universities often results in a mix of both public and private systems, aiming simultaneously to enhance individual access and institutional efficiency. Making use of rapid developments in information technology, both public and private educational bodies now offer online and distance teaching with similar aims of combining improved institutional profitability and individual access. In matters of health, choices between public and private care systems have become more insistent, as governments waver between the financial attractions of private insurance schemes and widespread concerns that total reliance on this may produce damaging differences between the life chances of different income groups. It is significant that during Barack Obama’s two terms as US President, this matter became a major and continuing theme of debate, as significant as managing the impacts of international terrorism or the global economic recession. Transport can also involve a wide range of private and public provisions, from active movement of walking and cycling, through private ownership of vehicles, to government provision of roads and wharves and public transport systems. Recreation also spans individual and community,  and  commercialised  and publicly provided forms, ranging from continuation of the active play of local playgrounds, beaches, sports fields and walking trails to the spread of computer gaming and the



promotion of high-­ profile international sporting competitions. Meanwhile, social life is evolving towards more reliance on communal networks through social media and related sites, including dating agencies. In the field of political control, governments have long faced the challenge of contentions that ‘that government is best which governs least’ (Thoreau 1854, 1984). Support for such small government has led to proposals for the ‘reinvention of government’: Osborne and Gaebler (1992), for instance, propose that governments place more emphasis on ‘steering not rowing’.i Without contesting the need for some overall democratic controls, many market theorists are led to advocate quite radical privatisation of public activities, in the interests of benefits that they believe would result in efficiency, ‘incentivation’ and economic progress (Friedman  2008). Meanwhile, opposing trends in such absolutist regimes as Russia and China and many other authoritarian systems worldwide are leading to mounting controls by central governments over community life, assisted by the increasing reach and depth of surveillance technology. The resulting paradox in these regimes is that community life is being stifled by centralised controls in the name of supposed  communal interests. Community organisation emerges as a third path between market rent-­seeking and centralised authoritarian government. the case for  community involvement

In response to these conflicting extremes, the case in favour of substantial and defined levels of communal responsibility is grounded in six main arguments:

• Accountability:

In items of common consumption such as water supply, power distribution and public transport infrastructure, market failures and the dangers of private monopolies can best be avoided by community regulation, based on social objectives of equity and sustainability. • Social and environmental impacts: Control of damaging social costs and environmental impacts, such as infectious diseases and the pollution­ resulting from  carbon emissions, may require strong public powers of regulation including conservation of open space and steps to combat or mitigate outcomes such as global warming. • Flexible and wide-­ranging responses to rapidly changing conditions: In times of rapid external change and challenge like our own, adaptation and survival require communal commitment to protect diversity, rather than exclusive

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reliance on market mechanisms designed to promote most immediately profitable activities (Ridley 1997). • Promoting collaboration: The consensus building and conflict management required to sustain such supporting systems as education, health, social welfare and income security require shared commitment to equal opportunities and voice for all citizens.ii • Maintaining community ‘voice’ as an alternative to ‘exit’: Building trust and cooperation will require consultation, collaborative management and operation of community services responsive to democratic governance. In this way, it is possible to balance the social influences offered by exit  –  exemplified by widespread rejection of existing democratic arrangements – with the more positive ones provided by community voice – ensuring that people feel that they can make their voices heard and interests known (Putnam  1993; Florida  2005; Cooke and Morgan 1998; City of Greater Geraldton 2022). • Common goods: Community or state partnerships may be required to forestall ‘the tragedy of the commons’ where private profit-­seeking may extinguish a resource on which everyone relies, such as the rapidly mounting pollution of metropolitan air sheds of current times; the depletion of the North Atlantic fisheries of the mid-­ twentieth century; the enclosure of the common grazing lands of the medieval European Commons; or further back in history the destruction by overfarming of the North African grain lands of the first millennium AD (Hardin 2008). regarding the  self and others

Differing levels of government involvement in productive and service activities will result in significantly different and often hotly disputed costs and benefits. Successive generations of politicians and administrators have cited criteria of public benefit to reach and justify contrasting decisions concerning the extent to which governments should involve themselves in fields such as education, health and income support.iii Based on these analyses, there are widely varying levels of participation by all levels of government – local, national and international – in many of these systems. An example, already referred to in Chapter  4, Human Values and Community Goals, relates to the United Kingdom’s General Development Order. Successive Town and Country Planning Acts over eight decades  –  originally containing 23 pages of exemptions from government  controls  –  have set

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precise limits to the extent of public intervention in the affairs of individuals. Current legislation continues to exempt domestic development from planning control unless it impinges unfairly upon neighbours’ senses of sight, sound or smell. No one wants to be prevented from making a small adjustment to their home or to be required to enter into a complex and formal application process in order to do so.iv Equally, no one wants to have massive and inappropriate new development imposed on their neighbourhood for someone else’s benefit, without even the opportunity to be informed and object. In summary, community participation can be seen as a natural activity of a sociable species of exploratory individuals living in communal communities. It requires a combination of:

• individual initiative; • community engagement, voice and review and • social oversight and resourcing. Combining these roles constructively will demand particular skills and methods of mixed scan­ning, community collaboration and communicative problem-­solving (Etzioni 1973). Mixed scanning can help apply the understanding of wider social contexts to specific proposals. Collaboration will make possible joint action among people responsible for, and affected by, different activities in community, commercial and government organisations. Resultant communicative problem solving can link many different actors and players in constructive activities such as community forums, futures workshops, charettes and enquiries by design to produce consensus and well-­tested proposals.

The planning and organisation of work Good decisions about the aims, organisation and locations of future work will require careful consideration of its roles in society and contributions to people’s lives. purposes

Three related sets of roles and contributions of work to people’s lives can be identified:

• Productivity to sustain life at individual, family and community levels (Smith 2021)

• Creativity, fostering and harnessing individual

self-­expression (Florida 2005, 2017) • Personal agency and autonomy, providing individuals with tradeable capacities to secure and justify their places and roles in the community (Jacobs 1992).

productivity

There is no doubt that the extraordinary multiplication of material goods of the modern world, ranging from cell phones to tank-­like SUVs and from solar panels to orbiting communications satellites has been fostered by the economies of scale that maximise output and the division of labour that focuses energy and skills among trades and professions. However, an international division of labour has also resulted, dividing rich, poor and developing countries. Unregulated, these processes also produce the recurrent boom and bust cycles of the classical capitalist economies. By contrast, the emerging, more collaborative, field of ‘associational economics’ (Cooke and Morgan  1998) succeeds in combining economies of scale achieved through clustering with more flexible forms of production and innovation. In the simplest terms, there is a growing acceptance of the need for primary cooperation in production to support secondary processes of competition within the global economy. This clearly has the greatest significance for the scope and style of community planning. creativity

It is human creativity that combines knowledge and imagination to transform ideas and materials into new inventions and uses. In so doing, it stimulates the pleasure we feel in personal agency, fulfilling not only our own aims and visions but also the satisfactions of meeting the needs of others. Life is thus enriched. The computer programmer of contemporary times, working out how to reduce the scale of book-­length assemblages of information to a format where they can be attached to an email and distributed and accessed throughout the world wide web at the triggering of a single click, is both meeting personal needs for employment and conferring society-­ wide benefits (Sennett  2008). Such creativity involves both individual and communal contributions, often involving a high degree of trust between related inventors and operators (Cooke and Morgan  1998, pp.  29–31). Richard Florida (2005) has drawn attention to the advantages of promoting opportunities for interaction among individual practitioners forming networks of workers in the creative and knowledge industries within loose associations, which he terms the ‘Creative Class’. These thrive in the fertile and welcoming environment of relatively unconstrained inner city communities in ‘downtowns’ of cities like New York, London, San Francisco, Austin and Toronto. Planning to foster creative work should therefore aim to combine the individual choices and



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opportunities offered by tolerant and supportive communities with planned stimuli for activities to support and develop innovation. These aspects of creativity are strongly linked to the criteria of autonomy and personal agency, discussed below. autonomy and personal agency

A sense of personal agency is socially productive and psychologically important to individuals, promoting people’s belief in their own capacities and self-­worth. It can also form a basis for asserting individual rights, providing a powerful protection against intrusions of power or privilege into people’s private and productive lives. This is equally true whether the prevailing regimes are Plato’s ‘Guardians’, modern market monopolies, the financial operations of the big investment banks of the contemporary western world, Lenin’s or Xi Yinping’s ‘Leading Role of the Party’, or Putin’s network of corrupt plutocrats. Jane Jacobs (1992) sees this capacity as the most secure platform for individuals to weave  those networks of shared power that can resist domination by more established groups. Creative people thrive best  in free societies. the experience of  work

Telling insights into the wide-­ ranging personal experiences of work are provided by a wide range of writers. Emile Zola (1968), describes the heroic struggles of the lives of nineteenth-­century French coal miners in Germinal. Leo Tolstoy in his novel Anna Karenina (2002) captures the elation of sharing the physical labour of Russian peasants harvesting  in the fields. David Lawrence celebrates the creative energy of craftspeople throughout the world.v In a poem simply entitled ‘Work’, for instance, Lawrence writes: There is no point in work Unless it absorbs you Like an absorbing game. . . When a man goes out into his work he is alive like a tree in spring. He is living, not merely working. . . He goes on to describe how: When the Hindus weave thin wool into long, long lengths of stuff. . . they are like slender trees, putting forth leaves, a long white web of living leaf. . .

As with cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or loaves men might put them forth as a snail its shell as a bird that leans its breast against its nest, to make it round (Lawrence 1994, pp. 367–368) By contrast, the automatic distinctions that we are accustomed to make between work and play and between our social and productive lives may come not only from conviction but also from the historical control of workers’ lives by elites based on investment, education and politics. Today’s community planning can and should help to provide alternatives to the domination of work by such remote investment controls. Work opportunities can be planned to match people’s natural creativity, interests and self-­expression with their own needs and aspirations and those of their communities. In so doing, we should also be able to improve flexibility to survive and prosper in the rapidly changing physical and social conditions of the contemporary world. Creativity has great survival value. the changing nature and locations of  work

Five or six waves of dominant activity, each associated with particular technologies, can be recognised in human history (Mumford 1961): 1. Palaeolithic food-­ gathering and hunting, predominated for a million years up to about 10,000 years ago and still survives in such recidivist activities as big game hunting and whaling. 2. Neolithic and Iron Age subsistence agriculture prevailed up to the Industrial revolution of 250 years ago and likewise continues as a source of food for many in Africa, South America and southern Asia. 3. The epoch of mass manufacturing and exchange ushered in by the industrial revolution that continues to produce millions of tons of consumer products every year. 4. For a period in the first half of the 20th century physical services for people and production formed the largest category of employment and they continue to play an important role in contemporary society. 5. Today, the knowledge, information and communications industries employ the largest and most rapidly growing numbers of workers in the development, exchange, processing and application of knowledge in activities like including health, finance, insurance, research, education and information technology.

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Finally, one can postulate the possibility of a developing sixth wave of integrated work where individuals and communities balance their time more equally between production (whether of components, consumer goods, craft items or information); provision of human and physical services for their families and neighbours; food growing; and devising and exchanging ideas across global networks to help create new collaborative enterprises (Kropotkin 1939). As people increasingly seek the advantages of working from home, making use of modern communications technology, and avoiding the potentially dangerous congestion of city centres, such developments are clearly being foreshadowed. They would also bring together the three main purposes of work discussed earlier, combining personal creativity, associational activities and individual independence in decentralised but linked clusters of population. One example of such integrated and flexible work, termed ‘associational economics’ has grown up in the central Italian province of Emiglia Romagna and is described in Box 8.1.

Work locations have also adapted to these successive waves of dominant activities, from the earliest times. Hunter-­ gatherers were immersed in the richly varied and many-­layered natural environments of forest, range and riverbank, always enlivening and sometimes dangerous (Graeber and Wengrow 2022). Subsistence agriculture contracted the workplace to a few hundred acres around each village. Specialised craft production and commercial manufacture progressively drew people into yet tighter and less healthy habitats of mine-­ top and quarry-­ side settlements and industrial towns, with compact ‘horizontal’ integration of related processes, transport terminals and workers’ housing. Further specialisation and the introduction of zoning regulations resulted in increasing ‘vertical’ integration’ of large, free-­ standing production plants on the edges of major cities like those of Ford Motors in Detroit and their Dagenham plant in England (both approaching a hundred hectares or a square kilometre in extent), as well as Austin Motors at Longbridge near Birmingham and Volkswagen at Wolfsburg

Box 8.1  Community Collaboration in the Economy of Central Italy The central Italian regions are justly celebrated for their long traditions of social capital and collaborative social institutions (Putnam 1993). Nevertheless, the end of the Second World War found the region of Emilia-­Romagna with its old cities of Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Ravenna, Ferrara, Parma and Carpi impoverished and without any clear economic base. A tradition of small enterprises making straw hats around Modena provided an immediate post-­war entry into the international clothing market, but this was rapidly overtaken by lower cost suppliers in Asia and Latin America. Nevertheless, the contacts established in the hat trade had familiarised the Modena producers with the changing dictates of the international fashion industry, encouraging small firms to diversify into production of T-­shirts, sportswear, children’s wear, men’s dress shirts and women’s upmarket knitwear (Cooke and Morgan, 1998). Regional producers, building on long-­standing traditions of collaboration and exchange, were able not only to interpret and anticipate but also to respond to the latest trends of the international fashion market by rapidly applying flexible skills to create new products. These developments coincided with the 1971  introduction of regional government into the 20 Italian regions. The new regional government quickly established a regional development agency ERVET (Ente Regionale per il Valorizatione del Territoria) to encourage cooperation between the many small artisans of the region to compete in national and world export markets, involving the National Confederation of Artisans (CNA) as well as educational, technical and government bodies to encourage economic development by providing services of accountancy, vocational training, bulk purchasing, marketing, credit facilities, technical support and ‘industrial incubators’ to sponsor start-­up processes. ERVET also established ‘artisans clubs’ to encourage people in supply chains to get to know each other and build mutual trust. A ‘service centre’ model was developed, with the one for the fashion industry in Carpi providing access to very sophisticated design software to encourage innovation and interactive links to offer direct contact with international consumers. The Information Centre, CITER, occupies two floors of a terraced house in a largely residential street, with a library of fashion, design catalogues and magazines, a lecture theatre and a workshop equipped with a CAD-­CAM system linked to an automatic loom which can produce experimental designs on the spot. By 1991, the knitwear industry in the city and its



Facets of Community 167

neighbouring communes had grown to involve 2500 enterprises employing 18 000 people, giving a good indication of the small-­scale units which have combined to create the area’s associational economy. Similar arrangements have been established for ceramics, footwear and generic technology transfer in Bologna, earthmoving equipment in Ferrara, agricultural machinery in Reggio Emilia and mechanical engineering and subcontracting in Parma (Cooke and Morgan 1998). The results have been to promote the region to be one of the two most prosperous in the European Union, with a flexibility based on the continuing innovation, which is essential to survival in the rapidly changing global market. The organisational pattern is one of many small enterprises, forming a collaborative economy involving cooperation between state, region, innovators and producers. The model relies heavily both on government support and services and cooperation between local producers. It is neither totally organic nor totally planned but rather a collaboration which allows continuous evolution to meet the demands of a constantly changing market. As a model, it is highly appropriate for community planning and development.

in Germany. The current rapid industrialisation and accompanying urbanisation of contemporary China represents the most recent and dramatic example of such movements (Hessler 2010). While city regions rapidly expanded, mechanised and automated, sociologists began to identify the rise of industrial anomie. The lives of production line workers were beginning to be seen as ones of deadening alienation (Wirth 1964). Throughout the western world, this degree of gigantism and specialisation proved economically rigid and counter-­productive, and the highly segregated cities that resulted are now evolving to favour again more mixed uses and horizontal integration  of activities. Such  patterns are now becoming familiar in, for instance, the central areas of New  York, London, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Bangalore and Kolkata. Reference has already been made to the ideas of Richard Florida, on the roles of the ‘creative class’ in building new economies based on the human capital of inner cities, and of Philip Cooke and Kenneth Morgan in describing the associational economies drawing on the pools of social capital of well-­established regions such as Northern Spain, Western Germany and Central Italy and featured in Box 8.1 Community Collaboration in Central Italy.vi planning and providing jobs

Chapter  4, Ways and Means argued that planning should first aim to fulfill widely derived and values and goals, and should only then proceed to identify and interpret relevant facts to guide beneficial proposals. Employment planning, therefore, becomes more than just a trend exercise in

statistical analysis and projection or the invention of an ideal world based on personal conviction. The worth and legitimacy of a number of sometimes competing values will have to be assessed,vii and facts about predictable requirements and available resources collected and analysed to determine how best these valued ends can be achieved. Valid future scenarios can then be developed to balance projected aggregate demand for goods and services with potential supplies of components, products, skills and investment funds, as indicated in Table 8.1, below: Table 8.1  Generalized factors of  demand and supply for goods, services and jobs.

Goods and services

Jobs

Demands

Supplies

Forecast levels of consumption Currently suppressed demands Emerging wants Trend forecasts Projected populations of working age Personal preferences Social priorities for health, education and community services Social and political choices Time allocations between work and leisure Child-­care arrangements

Projections of energy, raw materials and labour stocks Substitution estimates Satisfaction of quantified needs Investment policies and production needs Retirement and pensions policy Social needs and wants   Skill stocks Technological change Social policy, regulation and funding

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The shaping of practical and desirable future activities can thus be guided by collaborative planning and discussion and winnowing of options. Processes of this sort have been pioneered for a number of years in forums such as Portland Future Focus and Portland Development Commission (Seltzer  2004) and in numerous advisory boards in cities like Amsterdam and Cambridge, UK (Healey  2007). Their most valuable potential is to stimulate ideas for future policy options rather than providing precise quantified projections or proposals. projections of  job need

Figure 8.1 indicates how community goals can provide the dynamic to influence desirable directions for the future work system. Because work should be a means to an end, predominant and shared visions of desired futures should help shape the ways that changing populations can best organise their time to produce goods, services and knowledge and the kinds of workplaces where they will pass significant proportions of their waking lives. This figure is intended to provide a generalised understanding of the links and relationships involved in the complex reality of work and employment systems. A more linear and quantified model, linking objectives, population, educational and resource analysis, would be required to establish specific numerical job, training and investment needs. work locations

The rapid developments of the last half-­century in technology, transport, communications and production processes have revolutionised workplace location. Gone are the days when populations could be confidently expected to move to places where manufacturing jobs were available. In the current millennium where human knowledge is more important than traditional materials, it is equally as likely that jobs will move to places where entrepreneurs and people with cutting-­edge skills want to live as  that large numbers of job seekers will move to sources of raw materials or even transhipment points. Indeed, it is probable that many factors as yet barely surfaced will grow in significance to exert strong influences on future work locations in the forthcoming decades. Others, identified in Table 8.2 Workplace Locations: Influences and Outcomes, can be confidently predicted and their

potentialities incorporated into creative community planning. It is, for instance widely accepted that ‘Sunbelt and Snowbelt’ environments of high natural quality and pulling power will continue to attract skilled people who will, in turn, create further employment growth. Similarly, the changing numbers of jobs in different sectors exert powerful locational impacts. Manufacturing employment in western nations has plummeted from around 50% of total jobs at the beginning of the twentieth century to around 10% at its end, resulting in a major shift in employment from pioneer industrial locations like the Detroit and the Pittsburgh – Lake Erie regions in the United States, and the Moselle, Tyne and Clyde Valleys in Europe and the UK, to more environmentally attractive locations such as San Francisco’s Bay Area, the French Riviera and South East England. The vocational pressures on operators in the knowledge industries have far more to do with the lifestyle choices and access to information technology of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’, than with production of raw materials, which no longer act as basic magnets-­pulling metropolitan growth toward themselves. The main factors of influence and their predicted locational effects are summarised in Table 8.2. It will be seen that there is a pervasive shift from historic locational factors of raw materials and even such transportational ones as rail lines and port facilities, towards magnets of environmental quality, urban aesthetics and educational opportunity, which are more readily influenced by public decisions, choices and investment. As a result, these trends significantly increase the important role of community planning in ensuring future productivity and prosperity. work provisions

It is neither possible nor desirable to impose on communities a rigid hierarchy of central places into which all employment, education, health and other services are expected to fit. Nevertheless, there are obvious advantages in ensuring that appropriate provisions and facilities are available to support workplaces at each of the different levels of settlement. Table  8.3, Support Provisions for Employment Nodes, is intended to act as a prompt to assist economic and physical, as well as social and educational, planners to respond to the need to integrate their activities within hierarchies and networks of convenient and accessible central places.



Facets of Community 169

People Population numbers, structure and change

Outcomes Organisation, products and control of work, employment and retraining rates and incentives, wage levels and distribution of wealth

Values Creativity, productivity, autonomy, sustainability

Work places Home, central area, specialised locations skills: technology, communication, problemsolving funds: infrastructure and plant

Resources Natural, economic and social resources Figure 8.1  The work system.

Production Knowledge, services and goods literacy, numeracy, e-literacy

Activities and processes

Visions social goals and values

Working population Working age groups, learning population, vocational and retraining, supported population, participation rates

170 Planning for Community Table 8.2  Workplace locations: influences and outcomes. Influencing factor

Predicted locational effect

Growth and spread of knowledge Industry

Increasing use of educational and health investment, particularly for new regional university campuses, research institutes and major hospitals to promote regional economic development Increased emphasis on creative e-­clusters and mixed uses in inner areas of cities and suburbs Support for development of Creative Industry nodes in inner areas of great cities Evolution from large vertically integrated activities (like vehicle manufacture) into flexible swarms of horizontally related activities and knowledge industries Increased attention to environmental quality as a locational factor

Growing policy support for the development of regional economies through fostering horizontal links of association Increased locational pull of high-­quality environments Increasing costs of raw materials Growth of working from home and home occupations Increased levels of automation and personal productivity Tailing off of growth in global population and aggregate national and global production

Expansion of recycling and conservation industries along major transport routes Increased proportion of people working from home and decentralisation to create clustered metropolises Reduction in the average scale of productive and organisational units Mounting need to re-­sort and re-­develop redundant industrial and employment sites

Table 8.3  Support provisions for employment nodes. Facility

Home offices, studios or workshops of 1–10 people

Indicative thresholds of scale and size of hosting community

Links

Neighbourhood (Up to Local internet connections 5000 people) Circulation systems and foot and bike paths Corner shops Incubator hubs, Internet cafés District (10,000–15,000 Public and active transport Computer and office supplies people) nodes, interchanges and and services network focuses District Community Service Centres (local government services) District Health Clinics Town centre administrative Town/Suburb Town Business Centre and commercial (40–100,000 people) Vocational Education and employment Training (VET) Service Centre for local Public transport focus production and software Inner city Creative Industry and Info tech networks Employment Node with ‘back City Region (250,000– Regional University Campus office’ support facilities in 500,000 people) Cultural Centre/Library/ the inner city Museum Mass Transit and Active Transport network hub Regional Health Centre City Hall and main offices of City/Regional Council Inner city accommodation pool Major metropolitan centre Regional and National State/provincial governance with national-­scale scale catchments National business and cultural administrative and 2–10 million people centre commercial services, National university campus including finance, research Focus of national and and development, international financial and packaging and marketing transport networks of land air and sea.

Governance

Family life Neighbourhood Associations and Committees Ward Councillor, Community Council or Board

City Council, Economic Promotion Bureau, Economic Advisory Board and Traders Association

Chamber of Commerce Regional administrative, business, academic and interest group councils, involving government, industry, professions, advocates, academic and student representatives National Policy and Research Advisory Committees   National and regional councils, involving government, industry, professions, staff and student representatives

conclusions concerning work: links with  other activities

Rapid development of new fields and forms of work are among the most significant driving forces of contemporary change and are also potent causes driving further changes throughout contemporary life. They are, in turn, influenced by developments in other systems. As we have seen, the cultural environment and its attractions will strongly influence where creative workers will choose to congregate to produce the new activities that are increasingly dominating today’s employment structure. Education and knowledge industries can transform and shape regional economies, as in the San Francisco Bay Area with Silicon Valley, Cambridge (MA) with its ‘Knowledge Corridor’ and the Bangalore and Chennai nodes of the information, communication and knowledge industries of Southern India. Similarly, environmental attractions of coast, climate and resort can also exert major influences on the locational decisions of managers and entrepreneurs. Economic and labour force planners need to scan widely to understand and manage the many impacts of these attractors, and this should include direct discussions and dialogues, both official and informal, with their fellow practitioners in such fields as higher education and environmental management. As long-­established but diminishing economies of scale of congested city centres are being challenged by the health advantages of small and medium-­sized local communities, the prospect of the decentralising and dispersing effects of recurrent pandemics may well accelerate a new round of what Hagerstrand (1967) prophetically termed 50 years ago as ‘diffusion down the urban hierarchy’. Both economic and social planners have great contributions to make from their own knowledge and understanding towards the creation and shaping of such active, confident and self-­reliant communities, as well as themselves standing to gain from this responsive and enquiring approach.

Education: the place of learning in community life and development the significance of  education

Although no single thread of community development can be singled out as the most important (because they are all woven together to create the fabric of collaborative community life) nevertheless, education provides a unique impetus to

Facets of Community 171

the growth and development of individuals and communities. Learning flows continuously fresh from the springs of human enquiry to nourish and enliven the knowledge of each new generation. Individuals gain consciousness, start to collect and process observations, gather understanding and develop new ideas to add to the accumulated wisdom of their forbears. Though grounded in the developing senses of each child, learning is borne forward by the wave-­like force of more than a million years of communicated knowledge.viii Great advances are still being made in the fields of self-­knowledge and the sciences of mind and society, opening the prospect of improved capacities to shape our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with families, communities and environment. global trends –  education re-­shaping the  world

Learning exerts powerful impacts on the attitudes that in turn influence the behaviour patterns that combine to shape community life. These effects are not confined to higher education or the latest explorations of science technology and philosophy. Basic educational attainments have never been higher. Adult literacy rates in China, for instance, are already above 90%, providing more than a billion Chinese with the potential  –  though highly regulated  –  capacity to participate in the worldwide communication of the web and mobile phone networks. Literacy in India is also rapidly expanding, and by 2009  had already reached more than 60% (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)  2009). By the end of the twentieth century, well over half of the world’s eight billion people could read and write, representing a new peak of human learning and also providing a firm foundation for its continued growth (Dreze and Loh 1995). Inevitably, controversial issues of control are associated with this wave of change. While Internet and mobile phone networks have disseminated capacity to originate and distribute information and ideas to the more than three billion owners of cell phones in all parts of the world, powers to control and extract income from this global system are concentrated in the hands of small numbers of carefully positioned owners and gatekeepers of media systems. These include authoritarian governments and rulers, as well as print, satellite and electronic entrepreneurs and barons. While these social and commercial media magnates and controllers of satellite information and entertainment

172 Planning for Community

work hard to preserve their lucrative market control, public interest bodies such  as Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Linux are contesting the field, creating self-­regulating storehouses of free information (Sennett 2008). In issues of validity and meaning, too, various groups battle for command of public definitions of truth, in inflammable conflicts contesting control with the  fields of education. Traditions of received knowledge of established religions and cultures are coming into angry confrontations with challenging new ways of thinking and seeing the world. Examples are presented by fundamentalist religious groups, who often contest the rights of other groups to freedom of expression, including, in the United States, the right of science to teach evolutionary theory. Others oppose the distribution of birth control information.ix In 2021, the then Australian Minister for Education, Alan Tudge, launched a campaign to over-­rule the recommendation of his own government’s official Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) because he objected to the proposed History Curriculum’s recognition of past killings and other injustices to Australia’s indigenous people (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2022). Such conflicts are well reflected in theories of the nexus between knowledge and power explored by Michel Foucault (1984), further illustrating the importance of education to community planning, and emphasising its significance for such related fields as governance, culture, access, economy, play and prosperity. methods and issues

Like other forms of community planning, educational planning demands the use of various forms of mixed scanning, of thinking in context by switching focus from immediate needs to longer-­ term goals and from local requirements to wider regional and national policy issues and back again:

• First, there is the need to relate past, present and

future situations in order to understand trends without being dazzled by them. • Second, there is the need to integrate values and facts, both normative views of what people think to be right, based on their social, political and professional values and accurate descriptions of current conditions, such as existing populations and their characteristics and needs. This ability to distinguish between and reconcile ‘is’ and ‘ought’ without confusing the two, and to combine

measurements of both quality and quantity is itself a major attribute of successful education. • Finally, there is the need to give detailed attention to learning systems and places while still relating them to their wider social contexts, including systems of work, access, culture and healthy social life. The effects of rising levels of literacy and numeracy also link, match and test the local and the global against each other. Because this is an era of instant communications, global access acquaints ever-­growing numbers of children with the power of computers and mobile phones to offer entry to an Aladdin’s cave of information and interest. This way of learning is often supported by rapidly acquired technical skills. In Bangladesh, for instance, the microcredit activities of the Grameen Bank have combined with social inclusion policies to create a network of more than 80,000 villages, each boasting a ‘telephone lady’, who can walk phone calls to every household in the village, potentially including much of the rural population within a digitally accessed global system. The Grameen Bank, whose activities have been discussed earlier in Chapter  1, has now invested a small portion of its large member funds in creating Grameen Telecom to produce these mobile phones and has encouraged at least one member of each its 80,000 village branches to borrow funds to each buy a phone, repaying the loan by acting as the village messenger, allowing people anywhere in the global communication network to contact local villagers, thus revolutionising the country’s level of community linkage and access (Yunus 1998). In such articulated ways, cutting-­ edge information and communication technology (ICT) is becoming a powerful tool in creating a global community of learning and knowing, which can be continuously tested and validated by strongly grounded local learning. Teaching at all levels from primary schools to universities and research institutes can build on these naturally acquired skills of e-­ literacy and numeracy to develop competencies that become routine parts of people’s daily lives, helping them to integrate and interpret the floods of new information that are characteristic of the contemporary world. At the same time, it is equally essential to maintain each generation’s access to the storehouses of literature, philosophy and science on which our contemporary society is built. Once developed, these capacities can make invaluable contributions to maintain and fashion productive, well-­informed and increasingly inclusive societies.



They can expand people’s natural drives to understand to prepare them for wider social roles of contribution and collaboration. In these ways, the educational system can build on individuals’ own learning capacities, in keeping with Noam Chomsky’s conclusion that ‘humanity is a species programmed to understand’ (Lyons 1991). Such an approach gives rise to three sets of requirements:

• Differentiation of values and facts, supporting

both normative considerations of what people want and believe to be right (based on their social, political and professional values) and accurate descriptions and analyses of current conditions, including population structures and available funds and spaces. This ability to distinguish between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ without confusing the two, is itself a major attribute and role of education. • The capacity to relate past, present and future situations in order to understand trends without being dominated by them. • Identifying essential links between planned educational systems, spaces and structures and such other related systems as employment, access, culture and social life. This third aspect of mixed scanning, defining relations with other systems, is reflected in Figure  8.2, The Learning System, illustrating the place of education in a changing world. It will be seen that its context is provided not by static principles, but by the possibility of change in each of the four fields of learning groups; their processes; their places; and their knowledge outcomes. Both operational needs and external change generate links to other systems. Educational access, for instance, will both influence and be influenced by, where people live and their networks of central places. Opportunities to gain and develop skills and keep contact with others will interact with work arrangements and social contact and vitality. Other feedback loops will test whether technological changes are well suited to produce desirable learning outcomes, help control resource depletion and support public participation. In these ways, learning and communication can be combined to prompt positive responses and changes and thus assist healthy social evolution. A particularly crucial current example of this problem solving capacity is the skills retraining that will be essential if the many millions of workers now employed in the fossil fuel industries are to be given reassuring opportunities for interesting, relevant and

Facets of Community 173

well-­rewarded jobs in the new growth sectors of renewable energy and associated activities and the expanding health and knowledge industries. The generally high standards of demographic knowledge and records in contemporary societies can provide necessary information about numerical requirements and projected future needs, as indicated in Figure  8.2. In this way, projections based on census data of five yearly age cohorts can be modified by migration assumptions to produce useful forecasts of future need for different levels of pre-­school, primary, secondary and tertiary education. These can be related with different curriculum options to ensure required skill levels and desirable employment opportunities and targets for teacher training and educational facilities. When related to intended provisions of overall school, college and university places, these can indicate positive links required with other major activities in the activity centres of evolving settlements, including housing, health and transport as indicated in Table 8.4, below. educational provisions

Because learning lies at the heart of contemporary human society, it can help to create communities with healthy mixes of activities, generating strong links with other primary systems of shelter, work and transport. Table 8.4 examines some of the more significant of these links to both physical and social spaces and provides some broadly indicative figures of the scale of facilities and hinterlands that may be involved. These will vary  with the circumstances of particular societies, especially with their cultural traditions, levels of wealth, population densities and infrastructure provisions, so that particular places may differ from the  indicative levels and ratios presented here. For instance, rather different arrangements would be suitable for the local scale in a developing country, and these might include incorporating a village Madrasah or community school into the neighbourhood scale of the system. However, the intention of the table is to provide an effective working model appropriate to the situation of an urbanised, economically advanced nation, which could be adapted to meet the different conditions and needs of more rapidly expanding and less affluent developing societies. Questioning such standardised levels of provision should itself help to generate productive options including making use of Internet, radio and TV learning and instruction to spread the catchment

174 Planning for Community

People Population numbers, structure and change

Knowledge and attitudinal outcomes Knowledge of natural sciences and society, professional and technical skills, social awareness and capacities

Values Knowledge, communication, productivity, sustainability

Learning places Kindergartens, play spaces, primary schools, secondary schools, universities, workshops and on the job facilities, research institutes, prisons

Resources Natural, economic and social resources Figure 8.2  The learning system.

Learning processes Oral skills, literacy, numeracy, e-literacy, play, volunteerism, social learning

Activities and processes

Visions Desired future knowledge and attitudes

Learning groups Pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational and re-training, third age



Facets of Community 175

Table 8.4  Model of standard educational provisions in a developed country. Facility

Scale

Links

Preschool child care centre and Kindergarten (2–5 yr)

Neighbourhood (500–1000 people)

Indoor/Outdoor play space Corner shops

Scale and governance

20–30 places User committees Parents and teachers circle Primary school (normally 5–11 yr Locality (4000–6000 Public transport access (bus 400–600 pupils old) people) stop or community transport School Board, Parents and drop off) Citizens Committee Active transport system Parent Teachers Association (pedestrian/cyclist priority Government Department of path systems) Education Local park/recreation area Local medical centre 1000–1500 students Secondary School (normally District (10,000–15,000 Public Transport Interchange, School Board, Parents and 12–17 yr old) people) Active Transport network Citizens Committee focus District Community Service Parent Teachers Association Government Department of Centre (local government Education services) District health clinic Vocational Education and Town/Suburb the City Business Centre 1000–2000 full and part-­time Training (VET) (normally (40–100,000 people) Public transport focus Technical and Further 17–25 yr old but capable of a Education (TAFE) students much wider age range in areas Joint Industry, staff and of rapid industrial change) student Liaison Committee Regional University Campus Urban Region/ City Cultural Centre/Library/ 10,000–20,000 full and part-­ (18–28 yr old) (250,000–500,000 Museum time, undergraduate and people) Mass transit and Active post graduate students Transport network hub University Academic Council Regional Health Centre involving government, Municipal/Regional Council industry, professions, staff main offices and student representatives Inner city accommodation pool Major metropolitan/national Regional and National State/Provincial government, 40,000–100,000+ students university campus scale catchments business and cultural centre University Academic Council, National Research Institute 2–10 million people Focus of national and involving government, international transport industry, professions, staff networks of land air and sea and student representatives

of all levels of education more widely. Throughout the world, the partial closure of schools and universities resulting from the Covid-­19 pandemic of the 2020–2022 period has indicated how alternative forms of instruction can be made to work, but it has also shown how deeply valued by parents, children and young adults are the contributions of face-­ to-­ face contact and learning of schools, universities and colleges, as meeting places and storehouses of community life. Education plays formative roles in economic, social and community development at each of these scales, providing meeting places for physical activity and cultural exchange as well as for learning. The neighbourhood kindergarten or preschool centre becomes a place where children can learn to socialise and recently arrived parents can mix and make new friends among longer-­standing residents. Primary and secondary schools can be places either of integration or alienation and are

frequently a mixture of both. Then at university, lifelong friendships, romantic relationships and future professional and business alliances can be formed. Crucial economic and social skills are acquired at each scale, ranging from foundational ones of literacy, numeracy and sociality in the early years to the more advanced ones of applied knowledge and research in later vocational and university training. Links between these learning centres and their wider communities can be creatively fostered and developed: schools should be located near the heart of new communities. Inclusive school governance and collaborative planning can help ground syllabi in local environments and cultures, thereby improving the relevance of teaching and learning programs. Prominent among the benefits from such coordinated planning are opportunities to share facilities for sport, recreation, art classes and library provision, conduct community service programs for disabled and elderly people,

176 Planning for Community

participate in environmental care and community gardens and play constructive roles in community visioning and governance programs. The North American approach, placing responsibility for educational management in the hands of locally elected Schools Boards, can help to integrate school life into that of the wider community, as well as providing a productive path for local people from participation in School Boards into wider political life. Elsewhere, where education is a responsibility of state or central governments, community involvement may be through Parent Teachers Association or Parents and Citizens Committees. Though having fewer formal powers, they may take many individually small initiatives, concerning the conduct of school life and provision of new sports equipment or information technology, that cumulatively come to shape the quality and style of school life. Educational planners may choose to ignore these organisations as irrelevant to the hard business of curriculum development and site acquisition, but they will benefit more from integrating them as grass roots partners in the process of total quality management and consistent system improvement. Religious and charitable foundations will have their own systems of school administration, but they may still benefit from guidelines to ensure parent, pupil and teacher participation as in the publicly provided system. A community that participates in directing and enlivening its own learning systems is playing a significant role in the creation of new knowledge and engaging with some of its most talented future members. conclusion: links of  learning with  other activities

Education provides driving forces for beneficial change in contemporary society. It fosters the mental development to create new inventions and perspectives that can power economic well-­being and manage mounting changes and challenges in the social and physical environments. Equally important, it can expand human sympathies to forestall conflicts caused by misunderstanding, fear of the unknown and unthinking anger at the ‘shock of the new’. Links to the demographic, economic, housing and health maintenance systems of settlement and society include leading roles in producing the ideas and social skills needed to support evolving community life. Education, in turn, receives vital contributions of access and information from other activities, especially the transport and communication systems, and therefore also needs to have a say in their organization, development and planning. The roles of higher education institutions in acting as ‘area

forming’ dynamos of employment and innovation in the integrated planning of regional development are already being widely acknowledged in regional planning strategies (Roberts 2014). However, status as one of society’s highest merit goods, and the possession of very large public budgets sometimes results in tendencies for educational planning to be undertaken in rather unilateral ways. Instead, the work of demographers within education departments should be fed early into that of site planners and educational architects to locate, acquire and plan designs for the necessary sites and schools well in advance of new suburban developments. The planning of higher education, especially, needs to be undertaken with full appreciation of its area-­forming importance for regional economic development. Integration of the planning of educational facilities within the wider fields of community planning and development emerges as essential to ensure that their capacity for impetus, energy, funding and facilities achieve their full social impact and benefit.

The planning and delivery of health services introduction

Although providence and  personal wealth can bestow on fortunate individuals the advantages of strong constitutions, good food, clean water and appropriate medical treatment, they cannot banish the spectre of such diseases as Malaria and pandemics like Covid-­19, which may endanger all members of their communities and then spread to become global afflictions, capable of mutating into ever new variants. Energetic public health programs are needed to provide inclusive protection against these recurrent scourges. As early steps in planning and administering such programs, target levels of population health and vitality can be related to proposed processes of health testing and reporting, disease prevention, vaccination and control, caring and contingency plans for disaster response and treatment, as well as scientific investment and research. Subsystems indicated in Figure  8.3, The Health System  also  include the key aspects of child delivery and care, cardiac treatment, physiotherapy, radiology, reproductive health and specialist attention to such different limbs and organs as the brain, knees, ankles, ear, nose, throat and dentition, as well as vaccination, emergency care and support for vulnerable groups in times of pandemics. Understanding external



Facets of Community 177

People Population numbers, structure and change

Social outcomes Achievement of social goals and objectives: personal vitality, mortality rates. Social activity levels, economic participation rates, birth rates, at risk groups

Values Health, vitality, nurture, caring, curing

Facilities and places Clinics (ante-natal and childcare). Surgeries, hospitals, specialist services, health hubs, home care and support

Resources Natural, economic and social resources Figure 8.3  The health system.

Medical processes Ante natal care, paediatrics, general practice, specialist services, hospital treatment community care, physiotherapy, food support programs, drug treatment, mental health care, ambulance systems

processes and activities

Visions Desired future states

Life cycle and health groups Expectant mothers, children, adolescents, working age groups. people at risk

178 Planning for Community

influences, especially the powerful links of health with housing, income, education and communications, can be assisted by use of social statistics of changing population levels  and components, including fertility, mortality and vitality levels, providing invaluable information for the continuing success of the public health system. global trends

Health maintenance has been an important concern throughout human history. At times of major social change and disruption such as the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe and Asia, epidemics and famines have threatened to reduce human populations to dangerously low levels. At others, such as the 19th and 20th centuries, globally improved

health and sanitation practices have outstripped recurrent epidemics and pandemics to contribute to dramatic population increases. Table 8.5, Global Health Trends: Challenges and Responses summarises a number of the most important and intrusive problems that affect health provision throughout the contemporary world, indicating that many of them, though having global causes such as pandemics, climate change and desiccation, still require locally planned and applied solutions, including improved water supply, vaccination, recycling programmes and the introduction of new crops. However, the most remarkable implication of the table is the high level of linkage with other systems that it reveals. Control of pandemics and epidemics depends upon national and international governance. Clean water depends on

Table 8.5  Global health trends: challenges and responses. Current challenge

Potential responses

Clean water supply   Water shortage, pollution and desiccation

Increase supply through desalination, and systems of small dams to enlarge storage capacity Apply modern science and technology to introduce water recycling schemes Reduce consumption by demand management, pollution control through improved sanitation systems and effluent control Negotiative and incentive-­based processes to build civil peace; community development programs involving cooperation between local and international government and non-­government organisations (NGOs); water retention and irrigation schemes; improved agricultural practices; women’s education and support programs; spread of voluntary birth control access and practices Emissions monitoring and control through regulation, taxation and trading Technological innovation and social initiatives to reduce waste generation and discharge

Maintaining adequate food supplies Combatting increased famine and starvation Pollution control Increasing pollution of air, water, land and sea causing breathing, skin, digestive, lymph, liver and other disorders Management of epidemics and pandemics

Climate change response Increasing prevalence of natural disasters of floods, storms and droughts

Increased life expectancy, and ageing populations Equal access and rights to medical treatment Campaigns to end social inequities, unequal access to medical support, physical, sexual and economic exploitation and differences in life expectancy and chances

International cooperation through World Health Organisation (WHO) and international organisations such as EU, NAFTA, ASEAN; USAID and NGOs such as Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; coordinated programs by national health services and regional community health agencies and networks in conjunction with pharmaceutical concerns Review of urban plans to channel growth away from creek corridors, swales and flood ways and onto middle and upper slopes Community programs to increase urban and rural tree planting and marine vegetation schemes in conjunction with government bodies Improved forecasting and monitoring methods; emergency planning and relief programs; coordinated long-­term adjustment measures, including cooperation in evacuation and resettlement programs Healthy lifestyles programs to reduce lifestyle ailments such as obesity, diabetes and substance abuse and addiction; health incentives and deterrent taxation; active transport; community health activities; aged care; techno medicine (e.g. eye lens implants, organ donation and transplant and micro and nano surgery) National Health systems: Britain’s NHS, Medicare systems in Canada and Australia, USA’s partial National Health Insurance Scheme Global guarantees for rights of low-­cost production and distribution of generic drugs for pandemics like SARS and Covid-­19 and mass diseases such as malaria, stomach ulcers, AIDS, tuberculosis cholera etc.



Facets of Community 179

infrastructure, settlement planning and governance. Food supply depends on governance, community development and agriculture. Limitation of pollution requires regulation of environments and workplaces. Finally, successful management of ageing populations will involve each of community development, social organisation and local governance. Health planners clearly need good lateral vision and ability to forge links with numerous other systems, particularly governance, at all scales from the local and regional to the national and international, especially in times, like the present, of mutating pandemics.

practical methods and techniques

Health Planning, like educational planning, can benefit from mixed scanning to combine the universal scope and influences indicated in Tables 8.5 and 8.6 with the necessarily targeted applications of specific programs and facilities. In terms of data collection and analysis, it is helpful to focus on key aspects and objectives of the intended program, rather than attempt comprehensive collection of all available health data. The analogy of small magnets drawn through fields of iron filings can help to indicate this process of selective data collection and analysis, by using the magnetism of

Table 8.6  Health provisions, locations, indicative scales, links and governance. Facility

Locations and scale

Links

Pharmacy: both prescription and non-­prescription medications of

Neighbourhood (1000– 5000 people)

Indoor/outdoor play space Corner shops Fitness circuits

Size and governance

Pharmacist plus two to three staff   Government pharmacy and Fair Trading regulations Medical staff and Primary General practitioner and Locality (4000–10,000 Public transport access (bus Health Care facilities Medical Centre: doctor/s, people) stop and community Reviewed and regulated by nurse practitioner/s, transport drop off) Local park/recreation area/ Regional Health Board or physiotherapist, ante-­and Fitness Circuit Gym/ Fitness ‘Medicare Local’ post-­natal clinic (Primary Centre Health Care) Primary School, Community Hall/Church/Mosque, etc. Grouped health facilities District Health Centre: District (8000–80,000 Public Transport Interchange, (approx. 1000 m2) District Medical Practice, Blood people) Active Transport network focus testing and X-­Ray facilities, Health Forum District shopping centre, Day Care, Community   Sheltered housing, Outreach: Multipurpose Planning, review and Retirement Village, Service Hub (Secondary regulation by Regional Secondary School Level Health Care) Health Board Town/Suburb (40–150,000 Vocational Health Training Administrative offices cluster Town/Suburb public and people) Courses for Allied Health (1000–2000 m2) private health Insurance Services administrations: home Link to local government and Business Centre support system, separate Regional Health Board Public Transport focus District but related drug and Community Service Centre alcohol treatment (Secondary Level Health (local government services) Care) Major Hospital Urban Region/City Public and active transport 200–500 bed hospital Multi-­Service Agency: (100,000–500,000 network hub (10,000–20,000 m2 floor space specialist surgical and people) Regional university campus approx.) treatment facilities and City/Regional Council main Regional Health Board referral systems (Tertiary administrative centre (representatives of medical Health Care) service users, practitioners and government departments) Major Medical Research Regional and national National Scale University/ 100+ health researchers Facility scale catchments of Hospital, State/provincial 10,000–100,000 students 500,000–10 million governance University and Institute Councils involving people Business and cultural centre government, industry, Focus of national and professions, and staff and international transport student representatives networks of land, air and sea

180 Planning for Community

objectives to cluster the iron filings of information from the rich array of health-­related demographic and scientific data available at all scales from the local to the international. Gaps in published material sources can then be identified and met by primary research into matters such as frequency of symptoms and success rates of available methods of treatment, carried out in cooperation with local communities, health practitioners and medical research institutes. In conducting such research, health planners will benefit from certain simple guidelines:

• Focus

information collection and analyses on issues relevant to the objectives identified for the health system and channel this into the wider community planning process. • Express all statistics both in absolute and percentage terms to indicate relationships and assist comparisons over time and between scales, to illuminate the significance of local figures. • Develop time series comparisons to identify trends and shape tentative projections. • Research and incorporate standards of accepted leading practice or adequacy when discussing current or proposed service provisions. Adopting these approaches should assist later policy formulation and monitoring throughout the health-­ related aspects of the overall community plan, increasing opportunities for collaboration, mutual understanding and compatibility with other systems such as education, governance and settlement. links to  other systems

It is important to recognise the strong linkages between health and other community concerns and activities, especially education, work environment and housing. Healthy children have more energy to learn. Well-­educated societies, particularly those with high levels of female literacy, are better at both preventing and curing disease than those afflicted by superstition and ignorance. Environmental quality and resources also exert continuous and cumulative impacts on community health. Health  conscious communities generate the kind of active awareness that is an important safeguard for both education and environmental quality, concerning the consequences of products and energy sources such as hydrocarbons, asbestos and radioactive waste. Relations with work are also close and influential, shaping the size, vigour and innovative capacities of the workforce, and in turn being influenced by workplace conditions,

pollution and emission practices. Other impacts include those exerted by community development that can transform people’s sense of control over the conditions affecting the health of their families. Decisions about housing quality, form, density and location are also strongly influenced by health considerations: the UN-­sponsored ‘Healthy Cities’ program of the 1990s and 2000s highlighted the need for health standards and indicators to become basic concerns in town planning decisions (National Library of Medicine 2022). Housing and settlement include the reciprocal impacts of the scale and grain of settlements on location of public health facilities and their possibilities for co-­ location in neighbourhood and district hubs. In similar ways, access is an important factor: medical facilities both rely on good public and community transport and can contribute significantly to the levels of demand that justify their creation. Health planners therefore need:

• Awareness of community planning issues and

capacity and opportunities to participate in setting planning objectives at local, urban and regional scales • Demographic information and access to skills of analysis and projection • Opportunities for exchange of information on policy aims and instruments with planners and practitioners in education, housing, transport, industry, culture, environmental resources and governance • Awareness of community planning matters and opportunities to participate in identifying planning objectives at local, urban and regional scales • An informed interest in spatial and social aspects of community health planning • Capacities to balance and integrate professional expertise with issues of public preference and concern in health planning. conclusions: health provisions

Health is regarded as a merit good in most societies and therefore figures prominently in government budgets. The scale of facilities, influenced by progress in medical and transport technology increased steadily throughout the 19th  century from small hospices caring for a few dozen patients to the large and highly specialised hospital complexes of the mid and late-­20th century. Problems of diseconomies of scale, perceptions of patient anonymity, endemic and acquired infections such as ‘Golden Staph’ and Covid-­19, legionnaires disease and sepsis, have all prompted second thoughts



about this policy of ‘Bigger is Better’. Careful consideration is now being given to the most appropriate levels for the provision of different services. Such approaches have many similarities with the administrative ‘Principle of Subsidiarity’ by which activities are planned to subside to the lowest level at which they can be effectively performed. One potential advantage of this  move towards more manageable and humane scale is increased capacity to integrate health facilities within responsive community planning. At each scale, shared use of common locations has advantages  that go beyond urbanisation and localisation economies. There are great benefits in co-­location of facilities where hubs can offer people not only convenience and access but also the experience of intensity, contrast, a sense of citizenship and the safety that comes from continuous operation throughout all hours of the day and deep into the night. The opportunity to shop, meet friends, pick up prescriptions, visit a gallery or museum, go to a cinema, or wait for children to come out of school, all in one place, requires careful collaboration and planning. Well planned mixed uses can help achieve these physical advantages of shared spaces can result from Well-­planned mixed uses, as can be seen from the health planning model developed in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation, outlining. This identifies a system of integrated health governance and delivery, that combines the advantages of large-­scale specialised services with the local delivery of essential primary care.

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skills on which the whole society will have to rely for its future prosperity. Health is common to everybody as a universal good because epidemics are no respecters of persons. In activities such as public transport, economies of scale can result from integrated community development, while others, like water supply, communication networks, policing and defence, are natural monopolies unsuitable for private ownership  and therefore better suited to community planning and provision. Shared use of common locations has benefits that go beyond urbanisation and localisation economies. There are great advantages in co-­location where hubs can offer people not only convenience and access but also the experience of intensity, contrast and a sense of citizenship and the safety that comes from continual use of spaces throughout all hours of the day and deep into the night. Opportunities to shop, meet friends, pick up a prescription, visit a gallery or museum, go to a cinema or wait for one’s child to come out of school all in one place require careful and collaborative planning. These physical qualities of shared spaces are functions more of well-­planned mixed uses than of abstract design principles. Methods that build on this multifaceted approach to community planning to create vivid and engaging places at a variety of scales and in different parts of cities and districts are the subject of the next chapter, Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design.

Endnotes Conclusion: the many facets of community This chapter has explored the significant advantages that accrue for each activity and for the wider community when the crucial activities of work, education and health are planned and provided within the context of overall community life, drawing on shared values and objectives and based on methods that can promote collaboration. Many other activities require similar approaches, including play and open space conservation, and community life and culture, as well as the homes and communities which were the subject of the previous chapter. Because of their powerful influences on each other and on the overall lives of their communities, all require integrated community planning. Work creates the conditions for sustaining and enhancing life. Education and health are matters of universal concern: education develops the

i Ideas of the inevitable supremacy of ‘the selfish gene’, espoused with evangelistic self-­ confidence by evolutionary geneticists such as Richard Dawkins (1975,  2006) and populist publicists such as Christopher Hitchens (2007) challenge the most basic  concepts of collective collaboration or community values as being inherently illogical and misleading. For a thorough philosophical review of this important matter see Mary Midgely’s Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). ii This may take  several forms, including both extensive communal provisions (as in the ‘Monsoon Cultures’ of East Asia), and state intervention to ensure equitable life chances (as in the ‘Longboat Cultures’ of Europe’s Nordic nations) (Wilkinson and Pickett  2009). Either way, extensive state participation or intervention will be required to ensure provision of community services. iii Early attention was directed to these questions by John Stuart Mill, In his classical work On Liberty of 1859 (1983). Mill distinguished between matters that should be left to the free choice of individuals

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and families, and those where government intervention and control were needed to ensure efficiency or equity because of their impacts on others. He argued that those activities that were primarily self affecting, such as personal faith, sexual preferences, disbursement of personal wealth and income and rights of public assembly, should be left to the choice of the individual and not subjected to attempts at regulation by groups or governments. He observed, however, that these were precisely the activities that the English government of his day regulated most strictly, whereas matters of public health, work conditions, housing and education which were very much ‘other affecting’ were left to the power of individual entrepreneurs and investors. As a result, cholera was rife, overcrowding of housing resulted in whole generations of working people in industrial and port cities, like England’s Liverpool and Manchester, suffering severe living conditions (of up to six persons a room in the basement dwellings of Liverpool) and work in factories or mines that shortened life expectancy and damaged health. Mill’s theories, elaborated in Representative Government (1859,  1983) also recognised that all actions must inevitably exert some impacts on both the individual and the community. He examined the interplay of this mixing of public and private issues in education, which is fundamentally important to the success and evolution of society, balancing legitimate parental concerns for the ethical or religious education of their children with public interests in ensuring a well educated and productive upcoming generation. He resolved this dilemma by concluding that parents, teachers and religious groups should be free to plan, develop and manage schools to reflect their particular religious and social values, as long as they complied with principles of universal tolerance and justice, while the role of the state should to provide free and compulsory education for all those not choosing for their children to attend such sectarian schools. Nevertheless, state authorities should also inspect all schools, regardless of their doctrinal allegiance, to ensure that they achieved acceptable standards of educational content, health and safety. Such mixed economy prescriptions have outlasted the dramatic authoritarian political experiments of the mid-­twentieth century (Popper  1945). They align well with the Contractarian idea of a Bill of Rights, in guaranteeing basic human freedoms from interference by repressive elites or majorities (Robertson  2011). The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1947), for instance, states in Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change religion and belief and freedom, either alone or in a community, with others and in public or private, to manifest this religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Article 19 continues: Everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without

interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas a through any media, regardless of frontiers. iv This kind of cautious and constructive approach to evaluating likely consequences in terms of how well they match established values and principles has many helpful applications in the practice of community planning, providing an explicit but flexible basis for participants to engage in discussion and problem-­solving. v Growing up in an old mining area at the end of the nineteenth century, with a father who had worked underground from the age of 10 and a genteel but embittered mother who had been a private school teacher and was frustrated by her role as a miner’s wife, the young David Lawrence was well aware of the social consequences of the division of labour! (Callow  1998, pp.  22–26). As a child, he observed the working  men’s weekly escapes into Friday night drunkenness and the ritualized and repressive labours of the school class room. His many later journeys round the world, exploring cultures, places and times identified other, less alienated forms of labour, where work could express personality and provide a focus for community life and learning, instead of being a form of drudgery. vi A further lesson from these naturally occurring processes is that community planning should be more concerned to foster the evolution of healthy and confident communities than to forge and impose elaborate sets of rules. Planners therefore need to establish, participate in, and maintain community discussions to explore existing values and promote growth buds in community life rather than attempting to subject all proposed development to tests of conformity with long established and standardised templates based on formulaic  segregation of land uses. Development control should have firm criteria and guidelines based on objectives but should avoid such rigid templates of segregation. vii These will include, for instance, competing priorities between such pairings as  productivity and creativity; social justice and personal freedom; individual consumption and environmental sustainability and economic competition and personal autonomy. It is such debates that can drive the public discussion on which community planning must depend for its validity and vitality. viii As demonstrated in Chapter 3, we are now immersed in the midst of a wave of very rapid physical and intellectual change, punctuating the equilibrium of the second half of the twentieth century (Gould 1988). It is therefore no surprise that the applications of new knowledge are multiplying in a crescendo of inventive activity, ranging from developing renewable sources of energy through genetic engineering and 3D printing to space exploration and tourism. Our understanding of matter is intensifying to identify ever more minuscule particles, giving us the power to initiate nuclear chain reactions that can both create vast supplies of energy and devastate the material and



living worlds. At the same time, our understanding of the external world is being driven far beyond the limits of our own solar system and galaxy to distant extremities of space and time. Advances in learning are endowing us as a species with capacities, both challenging and dangerous, to constantly increase our power over our environment in ways that are both transformative and potentially deadly. ix In related ways, disputes over equal female rights to education divide Islamic societies. Similarly, some Hindu groups react against equal opportunities for different castes  and religions. In the USA, the aims of successive Presidents to diminish the incidence of increasingly deadly mass shootings continue to founder on the commitment of both the influential Gun Lobby and many private citizens to maintain unrestricted rights to acquire and bear arms. Elsewhere, Australia experiences long running so-­called ‘History Wars’ including the campaign by former Prime Minister John Howard to deride a ‘Black Armband’ view of history that would have acknowledged past offences against the country’s indigenous people, including mass killings and removal of children from their parents. Similar conflicts exist between the historical record and those who deny the truth of the Holocaust killing of six million Jews in the mid-­twentieth century in Nazi Germany, despite the existence of massive photographic and documentary evidence.

References Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) (2022). Review of the Australian curriculum. https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/ curriculum-­review (accessed 24 January 2023). Callow, P. (1998). Son and Lover, the Young D.H. Lawrence. London: Alison and Busby. City of Greater Geraldton (2022). Community voice-­ shaping our future project. https://www.cgg.wa.gov .au/your-­council/having-­your-­say/having-­your-­say/ community-­voice-­shaping-­our-­future.aspx (accessed 13 December 2022). Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998). The Associational Economy, Firms, Regions and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1975). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. London: Bantam. Dreze, J. and Loh, J. (1995). Literacy in India and China. Economic and Political Weekly 30 (45). https://www .jstor.org/stable/4403423 (accessed 24 January 2023). Etzioni, A. (1973). Mixed scanning: a third approach. In: A Reader in Planning Theory (ed. A. Faludi), 217–230. Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Florida, R. (2017). The New Urban Crisis, How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and

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Failing the Middle Class – and What We Can Do About It. Philadelphia: Basic Books. Foucault, M. (1984). Truth and power. In: The Foucault Reader (ed. P. Rabinow), 51–75. London: Penguin. Friedman, M. (1968). The role of monetary policy. American Economic Review 58 (1): 1–17. https://www.aeaweb.org/ aer/top20/58.1.1-­17.pdf (accessed 24 January 2023). Friedman, M. (2008). Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. New York: Princeton University Press. Gould, S. (1988). Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow, Myth & Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological time. London: Penguin. Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. (2022). The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane. Hagerstrand, T. (1967). Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (translated with the assistance of Greta Haag). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www .jstor.org/stable/3101713 (accessed 24 January 2023). Hardin, G. (2008). The tragedy of the commons. In: The Oxford Book of page range and pub detailModern Science Writing (ed. R. Dawkins), 263–266. Hayek, F. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul. Healey, P. (2007). Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times. London: Routledge. Hessler, P. (2010). Country Driving, A Journey Through China. New York: Harper. Hitchens, C. (2007). God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve. Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kropotkin, P. (1939). Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. London: Penguin. Lawrence, D. (1994). Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. London: Penguin. Lyons, J. (1991). Chomsky. London: Fontana. Midgley, M. (1979). Beast & Man, The Roots of Human Nature. London: Methuen. Mill, J. (1983). Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (ed. H. Acton). London: Dent  (first published 1861). Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New  York, Harcourt: World Brace. National Library of Medicine (2022). Healthy cities: overview of a WHO international program. https:// pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10939093/ (accessed 15 December 2022). Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley. Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 1: Plato, Volume 2: Hegel and Marx. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Putnam, R., Leonardi, R., and Nanetti, R. (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ridley, M. (1997). The Origins of Virtue. London: Penguin.

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Roberts, B. (2014). Managing systems of secondary cities: policy responses in international development. Cities Alliance. https://www.academia.edu/16904361/ Managing_Systems_of_Secondary_Cities_Policy_ Responses_in_International_Development (accessed 11 November 2021). Robertson, G. (2011). The Statute of Liberty. Sydney: Random House. Seltzer, E. (2004). It’s not an experiment: regional planning in metro, 1990 to the present. In: The Portland Edge (ed. C. Ozawa), 35–60. Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London: Allan Lane. Smith, A., 2021 The wealth of nations: an inquiry into the nature and causes. Kindle version, e-­art now (first published 1776). Thoreau, D. 1854, Civil Disobedience, USA Value Classic Reprints (city not specified). First published 1854. Thoreau, H. (1984). Walden and On Civil Disobedience. Mumbai: Sanage.

Tolstoy, L. (2002). Anna Karenina. New York: Penguin. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (UNESCO) (2009). United Nations Development Program Report, 2009. https://www .undp.org/publications/undp-­a nnual-­report-­2 009 (accessed 24 January 2023). Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Penguin Books. Wirth, L. (1964). Urbanism as a way of life. In: Louis Wirth on Cities and Social Life: Selected Papers/Edited and With An Introduction By Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yunus, M. (1998). Socially conscious capitalism towards a poverty free world, public lecture transcript, Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology. https://www .jstor.org/stable/43041826 (accessed 24 January 2023). Zola, E. (1968). Germinal. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith  (translated by Havelock Ellis).

9

Places, Spaces and Community Design

Introduction: organisation of the chapter This chapter explores the ways in which the many activities that make up community life can be drawn together to create vibrant, interesting and safe places that people can experience with confidence and pleasure throughout their lives. To this end, the chapter is organised into the following six sections:

• Places and their properties • Communal, collective and

private places and spaces • The language of design and the vocabulary of space and place • Place making: designing to make life • City shapes • Conclusions: bringing places to life

Places and their properties Our urban places are what we make them. They become detailed maps of the myriad sets of our aims, needs and skills, combining multitudes of attitudes and power relations into familiar finite forms. We love or resent such places because they express so faithfully the values and dilemmas that have shaped our lives and the activities that occupy our days. Inescapable bonds that link our characters and interests with the events and places in which we live mean that these places, as well as the times that we inhabit, often come to express, for good or ill, our societies’ dominant values and activities. When we aim to enhance the places where we live, work and through which move, we must therefore consider and possibly re-­shape the activities we want them to accommodate. Creating a beautiful street picture, where there is no sanitation nor regular waste disposal, may well be impossible and certainly not productive, but underground drainage and sewage systems can transform the Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

stagnant water bodies of a cholera-­ridden slum into a vivid and vital public water play area. This happened, for instance, in the Bustees of inner Kolkata in the 1980s, in an instructive story told in Box 9.1 and illustrated in Figures 9.1 and 9.2. urban design and its principles

Although shaped by many social, economic and technical influences, places remain very important to people as ends in themselves. In a study on Social Planning Issues and Methods conducted for the Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) in the mid-­1990s (Menzies et  al.  1996), it emerged from a series of regional workshops that participants attached the highest importance of all to ‘Urban Design’. The study team concluded that this was because of the direct and palpable impacts that people’s immediate surroundings have upon their daily lives. Most people retain a strong attachment to the places and images of their childhood and to later locations where they have experienced significant events or personal achievements. Because places provide the context for our first perceptions, which then shape the framework within which we construct understanding and meaning, radical changes to familiar places can sometimes be very threatening. A constant or common sense of place can, on the other hand, provide a positive starting point for a shared sense of community, most easily defined at the local and district levels, where individuals are best able to recognise the particular elements that they value. At the larger, regional scale, it is major elements like distant vistas or the prevailing vernacular of regional housing styles that are most readily recalled. The signals that we first decipher from places are those that respond to our basic survival demands for food, water, security, sunlight and space. Places may thus be reassuring or threatening, promising or intimidating, attractive or repellent. In short, their character results from how well they respond to our human needs and wants. These capacities underlie Jay Appleton’s celebrated landscape interpretation theory of ‘Prospect and Refuge’ (1996), which classifies landscapes according to the extent

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to which they offer the stimulus of distant prospects or the promise of secure personal refuge. Beauty is indeed in the eyes of its beholders, and those eyes reflect human values and experience. When we look at the beauty of a natural landscape of distant mountains, winding valleys, sweeping estuaries or majestic curving shorelines, our appreciation may include sub-­ conscious awareness of their many millennia of adaptation and exploratory action by

humanity. It is these that have come to shape that landscape by use of technologies invented to fell the forests, train the streams, plough the slopes and create the harbours. Likewise, our communities and settlements are expressions of our nature, evolving along paths whose future courses are not yet fully determined. In the oft-­quoted words of Winston Churchill, ‘First we make our cities and then our cities make us’.

Box 9.1  Place making in inner Kolkata Clustered around Kolkata’s intensive inner city, a series of inner metropolitan residential areas stretch out at a distance of about 2–4 km to accommodate more than three million people or a fifth of the city’s total population. These ‘bustees’ are defined as ‘areas in excess of 700 m2 composed of huts for habitation’. They are built on often recently reclaimed land interspersed with water areas of normally 5–10 hectares (accurately described as ‘borrow pits’), from which the silt has been taken to raise the house sites above water level. The bustee dwellers are legal tenants having acquired their tenure at the end of a three-­stage process commencing with the original landowners, who leased sizeable blocks to intermediaries and built large numbers of cheap houses in varying materials – mud bricks, wood, tin and thatch – which they then rented out to recently arrived families, often from the home state of the intermediary. As a result, these bustees tend to have a strongly clustered physical form, with a traditional cohesive village character and social structure, incorporating small shrines and holy trees. When the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) was first formed in 1970 with World Bank backing, one of its intentions was to rehouse many of the bustee dwellers in modern accommodation. However, this selective clearance and rehousing policy had very limited success due to a combination of costly expense, impracticality of achieving sufficiently rapid land acquisition and development on the city fringes, and economic dislocation of the relocated communities. In the 12 years between 1970 and 1982, a totally inadequate number of 44,707 dwellings were completed (CMDA  1983, Table  50) compared with 10 times that number  for the total of crowded inner-­city bustee dwellings. Equally importantly, the policy suffered from social rejection. Many bustee dwellers refused to occupy the new maisonettes which were on the periphery of the city, had no economic base, did not reflect their social values or organisation, and were very much more expensive to rent that their current accommodation. The engineers of the CMDA acknowledged that their original top-­down physicalist solution had failed and they carried out surveys and discussions to discover a more relevant approach. They discovered that the problems of the bustees were fourfold: 1. First, they were subject to flooding, which made them frequently unpleasant and permanently unhealthy. 2. Second, the rudimentary sanitation systems deposited human waste in the water areas, increasing health dangers and giving rise to endemic and epidemic cholera and malaria. 3. Third, water supplies had to be drawn from the very sources which were contaminated by waste. 4. Finally, many of the internal routes, which were simply composed of compacted silt, became impassable during the long monsoon season. These factors were outside the control of the local residents or their landlords. On the other hand, residents felt positive about their homes and were happy to take responsibility for them. It appeared that the original relocation policies of the CMDA had been tackling shelter, while the real problem was services. Since the option of total replacement was proving neither feasible nor popular, the CMDA engineers decided instead to produce a series of specific solutions to tackle these problems in collaboration with local community groups. Local drainage and water-­ supply schemes were designed for construction on a manpower-­intensive, area-­by-­area basis at depths of approximately 2 m below newly paved paths. If the paths were wide enough to walk along, they were wide enough to swing a pick and to install a drain. This resulted in 500 km of



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drains, mains and paved paths, as well as 51,000 communal latrines, at an average density of 1–25 persons, providing local employment through both production and installation of pipes and sanitary ware. Local communities developed a strong sense of communal responsibility for the maintenance, working order and cleanliness of the communal latrines. Standpipes to provide access to mains supply of clean water were also installed. In the period 1973–1986, nearly two million bustee residents had their living and health conditions significantly improved. Piped water has been installed on the basis of one standpipe for every 50–100 persons. Cholera has been eradicated. The borrow pits, no longer needed as sources of domestic water, have emerged as popular and safe swimming, washing and amenity areas. The paths have been paved with bricks and street lighting attached to the neighbouring dwellings. The cost of these internal improvements amounted to a total of R30 million a year, the equivalent of approximately US$ 2 million. Ten times this (or approximately US$ 20 million a year) was spent on necessary improvements to urban infrastructure of sewage treatment plants and water supplies, amounting over the 13-­year period to the considerable sum of nearly US$ 300 million. The results, supporting the dynamic and productive inner-­city economy of Kolkata suggest that this was money well spent and there have been huge savings on the social costs of trying to construct new accommodation for the bustee dwellers, which had proven simply impractical. What have been the outcomes in terms of place-­making? The high-­density, inner-­city residential areas have great vitality and preserve a strong atmosphere of sociable urban villages, with their density being relieved by the balancing effects of numerous water bodies, reflecting the changeable skies of Bengal (see Figure  9.3). During festivals such as the annual Hindu Puja of September and October, which involve the celebration of water as an agent of renewal and cleansing, the large lagoons come alive with many families splashing and washing in the shallows, alongside strings of gleaming white laundry. Young children dive and splash. Equally important, the preservation of these residual areas has supported their mixed economic activities. An extraordinary array of productive and culturally valuable mixed uses line the vehicular streets with shrines, different forms of transport, shops, eating houses, homes, workshops, class rooms, commercial and administrative offices and service industries, in a remarkable anticipation of the milieux which Richard Florida describes and advocates as the breeding ground for the creative classes of cities like San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Austin, Texas (see Figure 9.3). It is important to remember that this form of place-­making had its origins in community involvement and in re-­prioritising public action away from the top-­down policies of housing clearance towards supportive policies of widespread community service provision. It is important to remember that this form of place-­making had its origins in community involvement and in re-­prioritising public action away from the top-­down policies of housing clearance towards supportive policies of collaborative and large-­scale provision of public services of water and power supply, waste disposal and basic access, whilst residents were left free to provide and improve their own shelter. The enhancement and expansion of such settlements is a very important challenge for community planners because they accommodate many hundreds of millions of people in under-­serviced and often unhealthy conditions in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Figure 9.1  Kolkata water space at Puja Festival after installation of Metropolitan sewage System. Photograph by author.

Figure 9.2  Kolkata, inner city street scene awash with clean water for Puja festival. Photograph by author.

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COMMUNAL SPACES Shared Activities Culture & Religion

Commerce & Exchange

Family & Community Celebration

COLLECTIVE SPACES

PRIVATE SPACES

Ceremony Formal Assembly

Health

Ritual & Display

Family Life

Play& Self Expression

Regimentation

Beauty & Aesthetics

Figure 9.3  Types and roles of community, collective and private spaces.

The equally remarkable reclamation of S­alford Quays, discussed in Box 9.2, Placemaking in Salford Quays to provide centres for public ­ Water Sports and Digital Technology is no less

important for Greater Manchester, even though its popula­tion of 2.5 million is only one-­sixth that of Greater Kolkata.

Box 9.2  Place-­making in Salford Quays For nearly a century, Salford Docks had provided major port facilities at the inland terminal of the Manchester Ship Canal. This was before the decline of the Lancashire textile industry and the contraction of much of the rest of the city’s manufacturing sector caused the dock’s closure in 1982. Following a different path to that taken by the privatised and global policies of London’s Docklands, the Salford City Council purchased the site and established a public corporation to redevelop the area for a mix of public and private purposes. The Council was primarily interested in regenerating the inner area of the conurbation, and preparing  the notorious rat-­infested dock area again for public use after a hundred years of segregation and dislocation of land uses, which had made Salford a byword for urban blight. In 1983, the Salford City Council purchased the docks from the old Manchester Ship Canal Company and two years later, established the Salford Quays Development Company. Design and development studies continued apace with strong council and community participation. Queen Elizabeth opened the Lowry Creative Arts and Cultural Centre in 2000. Now the old docks are occupied by a lively water sports centre



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offering wind surfing, kayaking, powerboat training and dinghy sailing. During the 2001 heatwave, the water body was full of young people splashing around in the old docks, in a way very reminiscent of the use of the Kolkata Borrow Pits during the Puja Festival a dozen years earlier. The Salford Quays project expanded to include a large plaza and terraced areas leading to the canal with a lifting footbridge to Trafford Wharf. It is surrounded by the Imperial War Museum and the Lowry Centre, which is a high-­technology business development providing serviced premises for the Digital World Society. This is a thriving think tank opened in 2003 to promote innovative projects in digital technologies with support from the English Arts Council and Millennium Commission, English Partnerships, Salford City Council, Trafford Park Development Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation, as well as the European Regional Development Fund, and the private sector. The contrast could not be more emphatic between the diverse public–private, recreational-­ business style of the Salford Quays redevelopment and the high-­intensity international commerce commitment of the redevelopment of London’s old docks, where the spectacular buildings of Docklands and Canary Wharf have been designed to function as a focus for the global economy. The contrasts between these two examples of place-­making have resulted from their very different cultural traditions, political choices, geopolitical locations and cultural values. On the other hand, there are some surprising similarities between the place-­making processes in inner Kolkata and Manchester, which both involve partnerships between governments, communities and semi-­independent public agencies.

Christopher Alexander (1964) has pointed out that this cycle of cumulative causation worked far better when there was time for the latest inventions of technology to be tested and bedded down within the wider social and urban context than is the case in today’s era of turbulent change. It is no longer so practicable for settlements to evolve by ‘elimination of misfit’ as described earlier in Chapter  5, Ways and Means. Instead, we have to develop conscious processes of design to replace the winnowing effects of time, systematically testing proposals for unintended consequences, before they are adopted in practice and can result in possibly disastrous outcomes, such as much of the high-­rise public housing and many of the inner city urban motorways of the last half of the twentieth century. As Alexander’s ideas have evolved over the last 60  years, his recommended methods of design have become ever more closely linked to direct individual and community involvement (Alexander  2002a,b,c,d). In the first volume of his Nature of Order, entitled The Phenomenon of Life, he argues that even where radical change is strongly desired and needed, centralised, comprehensive designs developed from distant centres will always be flawed by rigidity and inability to respond to the natural diversity of

localities and their myriad evolving new combinations of activities. Instead, he argues that designs at all scales should unfold from their existing elements interacting with their physical and social  contexts, particularly the values, experiences and capabilities of their current and future users and the natural characteristics and potentialities of the physical environment. This human-­ centred approach provides strong support for community participation in the design process. Over the decades, Alexander has been involved in a number of schemes incorporating these methods in India, California, Japan, Mexico and England, which often produce results of very great originality and beauty (Alexander 2002b,c). Although he believes that individuals and communities themselves can best choose the patterns for their own plans and environments, he does not ignore the contribution of skilled and motivated designers, who are schooled and experienced to understand and apply the design language of the many universal patterns that have been developed over the past 5000 years. The knowledge of these patterns can be applied in particular situations to meet local needs and desires in truly original ways. Such applications are best achieved when specialists work closely with these communities and their voluntary representatives.i

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1. Levels of Scale promote the relay of patterns and provisions from one scale of community or space to another to encourage coherent, equitable and accessible distribution of space and resources. 2. Strong Centres projects the way individual centres, each linked to its own sub-­centres, can inform the analysis and design of interacting networks of community life. 3. Boundaries determine the extent, scope and relations of different centres and zones of influence, in the organisation of community life and space. 4. Alternating Repetition incorporates rhythm, pulse and repetition as equitable ways to manage scale and diversity. 5. Positive Space encourages respect for the form and values of existing spaces and the roles of communities in their development  and evaluation. 6. Good Shape applies Alexander‘s belief that people possess a natural appreciation of good shape, expressed in works of art and craft, which can thus  contribute to collaborative design. 7. Local Symmetries promote pattern, and order to support reciprocity and equity. 8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity support inter-­ connections and open-­endedness to help shape successful places and communities. 9. Contrast promotes diversity, dialectic and communication to foster healthy community life. 10. Gradients recognise and support transitions to favour variation and relationships among different activities and levels of intensity. 11. Roughness celebrates the open-­endedness and variability of life, making space for growth buds of future development that will transcend current practice. 12. Echoes promote the replication of past successes, the preservation of living heritage and the repetition of successful and unifying characteristics throughout communities. 13. The Void, settling at the centre of social and physical spaces, creates space for reflection, problem-­solving and innovation. 14. Simplicity and Inner Calm promote the reflection and meditation required for personal fulfilment and balanced community life. 15. Not Separateness creates inclusive spaces to foster and link the many different activities required to support fulfilling lives for fully-­ rounded people and communities.

Later in this chapter, we shall explore the valuable ideas and methods offered by other design theorists and how they might be adapted to meet contemporary needs, including those of Kevin Lynch, Randolph Hester, the Responsive Environment theorists  of Oxford Brookes University (including Bentley, Alcock and Murrain) and from the United States, the New Urbanists, all of whom have much to offer in the field of community design. However, Alexander’s combination of locally grounded objectives, universal methods and robust pattern language provides an especially open-­minded and creative perspective for people engaged in community planning. It combines psychological, physical and aesthetic insights that can make community collaboration a process of discovery as well as one of mutual appreciation. A particular merit of this approach is its capacity to apply to all the domains of public, private and community spaces and to draw them together in support of integrated community life. However, each of these domains also has its own design requirements and processes, involving different stakeholders, with their own implications and contributions. The following section explores the nature and design options involved in each of these communal, collective and private places and spaces.

Communal, collective and private places and spaces Places are both the physical stages on which we act out our daily lives and the arenas for the structures which enhance or constrain those lives. Places are also  latent dimensions, waiting for us to confer purpose and character through our intentions and activities. They may vary  in meaning according to their users’ ages, experiences and intentions, becoming malleable human and social products. Community Planning is concerned with communal spaces because they accommodate community life; with collective spaces because they combine cultural symbolism with means of physical control where great numbers of people can be assembled; and with private spaces because of their role in shaping the physical and psychological health and family life of the individuals who compose communities. These interests give rise to the definitions listed in Boxes 9.3, 9.4, below.



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Box 9.3  Alexander’s 15 properties of good design 1. Levels of scale 2. Strong centres 3. Boundaries 4. Alternating repetition 5. Positive space 6. Good shape 7. Local symmetries 8. Deep interlock and ambiguity 9. Contrast 10. Gradients 11. Roughness 12. Echoes 13. The Void 14. Simplicity and inner calm 15. Not separateness Source: Alexander (2002a)/Center for Environmental Structure.

Box 9.4  Definitions of communal, collective and private spaces Communal spaces are places where people regularly meet informally for purposes of recreation, entertainment, discussion, exchange and access to essential common provisions such as water, food and transport. Collective spaces are places designed to accommodate large  numbers of people gathered for formal purposes of collective ceremony, cultural and ritual performance and acts of collective allegiance, tending towards periodic and high-­intensity use. Private spaces are places owned and occupied by individuals and families, into which others may only enter by invitation and where personal values may be expressed in activities and forms of people’s own choosing.

communal spaces –  shared activities

The story of civilisation over the last 5000 years has been recorded vividly and indelibly in its communal spaces. From the earliest times, such places have been shaped by the activities of sociability and exchange, expressing shared values, responsibilities and needs and forming places where people could gather, pause, talk, meet, barter, reminisce

and negotiate. In these ways, they promote both personal relationships and public life. Such communal spaces characterised the classical world of the Eastern Mediterranean, often adopting a circular form, with the  capacity to include a maximum number of people within a given area. Ancient Greek amphitheatres such as those in Delphi, Delos and Athens were designed and used to stage rituals and plays, exploring themes of major human concern including war, revenge, loyalty, incest, destiny and terror, as well as airing current controversies and political debates, like those of Sophocles and Euripides in classical Athens. In these ways, they also became celebratory spaces, expressing and the civic spirit of their communities. The amphitheatre, physically adopting the symbolic equality of the circle, with its equidistance of all points on the perimeter to the central focus of the stage, and its public performances, must have contributed strongly to the communal life and resilience of the warring, waxing and waning Greek city states. Squared forms, more characteristic of the highly regulated character of the Roman Empire, incorporate other aspects of organised community, including imposed order, ease of land allocation and rapid construction of services in new settlements. Perhaps coincidentally, grid development also results in the replication of numerous pathways, thus maximising movement and meeting at each of the many intersections where streets cross and people can meet to discuss the issues of the day, climaxing in the central forum or city square, which often forms the commercial and social focus of the whole city. In the Middle Ages, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, these forums and squares became the sites for the great markets which provided one of the most important activities of the communal life of the emerging medieval towns and city states. Religious life, too, echoed the clarity and organisation of the square in the form of the Cloister which emerged in the early years of Christianity to provide reflective and secure communal spaces where members of religious orders could gather to exercise their minds and bodies. Time and again, abbeys and cathedrals reproduce these forms to combine the individual life of the spirit with that of the organised community. Lewis Mumford (1961) suggests that the communal space of the cloister is also reflected in the development of the university college quadrangles of Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, and many later universities. It is also echoed in the central squares and

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market places of the re-­emerging medieval towns like Perugia and Padua, as they matured to become the models for the great Renaissance cities with their central spaces such as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and the Piazza dei Signore in Florence. In Siena, the city field (the Campo) evolved to provide the city with the wonderful combination of circle and square, which is so celebrated and well used today, vividly illustrating the importance of Alexander’s principle of ‘The Void’ as a space where people can gather and ideas can be exchanged. In urban design, the square, piazza, place and platz continue to be both symbols and spaces for sociability and exchange. They are the places, such as London’s Trafalgar Square, New York’s Times Square, or Milan’s Piazza di Duomo, where the city celebrates its communal activities, whether they are cultural, festive or commercial. The story of civilisation over the last 5000 years has been recorded vividly and indelibly in its communal as well as its collective spaces. From the earliest times, such communal spaces have been characterised by the major themes of celebration as is illustrated in Figure 9.5 of Stonehenge in southern England. Their activities express shared values, responsibilities and needs, responding to and promoting sociability and forming places where people can gather, pause, talk, meet, barter, reminisce and negotiate. In these ways, they promote both personal relationships and public life. a more recent example of  a successful

Figure 9.4  Brisbane’s post office Square. Photograph by author.

communal space

Figure 9.5  Stonehenge. Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons Licensing.

Analysis of a relatively recent, successfully functioning communal space can serve to illustrate both these processes and Alexander’s principles in action. Brisbane’s Post Office Square (see Figure 9.4) provides a good example of ways to combine continuity and traditional character with the introduction of new activities and roles. In so doing, it captures the spirit of many of Alexander’s design principles, in particular, levels of scale; strong centres; boundaries; alternating repetition; positive space; good shape; local symmetries; deep interlock and ambiguity; contrast; gradients; echoes; the void; simplicity and inner calm and not separateness. Respect for levels of scale is expressed in the stepping down from the 30–40 storeys of the surrounding city centre office blocks, through the preservation of the historic facade of the iconic neo-classical nineteenth century Post Office to the square’s grassy open spaces of seating and circulation, which  constitute a strong central focus. Balancing secondary centres include both the elegant

f­ açade of the General Post Office itself at the northern end and, at the southern end, the historic Anzac Monument of Eternal Flame, linked to the square, both visually and physically, by a pedestrian concourse over the lower level of Ann Street. The elegant and well-­preserved stone facades of bordering buildings provide strong spatial boundaries and seams with activities that front directly onto the grassy public spaces A regular rhythmic succession of conserved three to four-­storey facades of offices, shops, public services, restaurants, wine and snack bars and entrances to shopping arcades create patterns of alternating repetition. Public transport buses at both the northern and southern ends flow regularly, with restricted  interruption by car traffic. Figure 9.4 displays the square’s positive space and good shape, with its scaled transition from the 4–10-­storey neighbouring buildings rising up to 40-­storey office blocks behind them, without significant interruption from the traffic of



Places, Spaces and Community Design 193 cultural and religious communal spaces

Figure 9.6  Swayambhunath temple and forecourt, Kathmandu.   Source: John Hill, Creative Commons.

cars or buses. The preservation of historic facades-­ reflecting evolution of scale and form over many decades–supports the local symmetries and deep interlock and ambiguity that Alexander celebrates. His contrast, gradients and echoes are achieved through adopting the design approach he terms ‘unfolding’, conferring the advantages of conservation, human scale and memorability. Simplicity and inner calm, among the most elusive ingredients of the contemporary cityscape, are achieved particularly well by the combination of the square’s generous expanse of the void-­like grassy open space and its visual inclusion of the historic associations of the linked Anzac Square and Monument of Eternal Flame, across Ann Street. The constant flow of walkers, shoppers, outdoor picnickers, sunbathers and gatherings of old and new friends filtering in from surrounding activities to the borders of this welcoming space vividly celebrate physical connectedness. Connections in time are made through the space’s rich historic associations: the grassy square at one end sets off  the elegant and historic General Post Office as a symbol of communications extending beyond the city to provide global links, while at the other, the Anzac Memorial records the continuing significance of past heroes. Every day the square offers fresh opportunities for casual, convivial and sociable community life.

Cultural and religious spaces reflect shared values and promote shared activities. The Renaissance cathedral squares in Europe and the grand spaces in front of temples and monuments in Mughal India, such as Agra’s Taj Mahal, create some of the most memorable and best-­loved urban places. Other celebrated examples are the wonderful – eye-­ shaped – ellipse of St Peter’s Square in Rome, and in Venice, the almost perfectly balanced interplay between the vast elegant and arcaded perimeter of St Mark’s Square, and the façade of the Cathedral, accentuated by the slim symbol of the campanile, which forms a powerful but not overpowering feature. No less faithfully, the Varanasi waterfront on the Ganges River, with its merging of the paired  elements of water and land, river and city and temples and people expresses and sustains the sense of mysticism and merging of Hindu culture. Five hundred kilometres to the north east, the sacred spaces of Swayambhunath, rising above Kathmandu, bring together elements of religion, learning, community, pilgrimage and assembly in its thousand-­year-­old hilltop temples, both Buddhist and Hindu. Together with their associated meeting places, monastery and library they create a place where everybody can feel at home (see Figure  9.6). In the Middle East, the spectacular combination of the Great Square in Mecca and the mystical dominance of the central Kaaba draws millions of pilgrims every year to celebrate the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, in a vivid demonstration of the significance of place in people’s lives. New Zealand’s Marae represent more localised examples of the importance of cultural planning and spaces in contemporary societies. Marae are places where Maori culture is celebrated, where community and family occasions such as weddings and birthdays can be held and where important ceremonies can be performed, not only welcoming visitors or farewelling the dead, but also celebrating the continuing cultural values necessary to maintain personal pride and mutual support. Often the Marae is the open space in front of the Iwi or tribal meeting house. Because it has both cultural and legal status, it cannot be bought or sold and is protected by law (Ministry of Maori Development 2022).ii This model could be applied with great benefit to preserve and create cultural space in many other societies and settlements. Emphasis on human elements rather than monumental scale is another key to responsive community design. Cultural spaces do not have to adopt massive size to be effective. For instance, the little

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Figure 9.7  Acropolis of Athens.   Source: Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons licensing.

statue of Eros in the middle of London’s heavily trafficked Piccadilly Circus has become a major symbol of London life. Similarly, Kevin Lynch records in his Image of the City (1960) how the space in front of Jersey City’s Medical Center occupied by a small landscaped garden plot emerged in a study of users’ perceptions as a more memorable image than the great bulk and towering skylined silhouette of the building which rises above and behind it (Lynch  1960, p.  32). The small urban farms and community gardens discussed in Chapter 1, which are spreading throughout cities in all parts of the world, also perform important roles as cultural spaces that remind their workers and visitors of the importance of nature in human life. Spaces for celebration have their own, rather different qualities, more explicitly designed to evoke sensations that visitors can take away with them. The resplendent assemblage of temples and statues of Athens’ Acropolis, celebrating the city’s gods and the artistry and creativity of its people, also continue to provide the city with a sense of focus in time and space (see Figure  9.7). A more contemplative spirit of Moorish meditation, reflecting the arrival of desert Berbers in the well-­watered plains of Andalusia, is expressed in the calm and beautifully proportioned spaces of Granada’s Alhambra, where central pools reflect the building and gardens and fountains provide a constant reminder of the presence of life-­giving water (see Figures  9.8 and  9.9). In a similar way, the perfect clarity of the Taj Mahal commemorates the love of the Mogul Shah Jahan for his queen, lost in childbirth, in forms that transcend political and religious affiliation. Modern spaces may no less touch the spirit of those who observe and pass through them. The

Figure 9.8  Alhambra Palace, timeless elements in community design: rhythm and alternating repetition in Granada’s twelfth century Alhambra Place.   Source: Image courtesy of Catherine Oakley.

Berlin Holocaust Museum and the spaces that it defines provide one such example, emphasising the restorative forces of the natural vegetation, which draw back into the life of the city the jagged edges of a structure that both crumples space and cuts into its fabric like a knife (see Figure 9.10). New York’s monument to the Twin Towers of the New York Trade Centre, destroyed by the air attack of 2001, also relies on the symbolism and shade of natural materials and urban forestry to proclaim the community’s resilience. Urban redevelopment, too, can be visually enhanced: an example is the way that community gardens can bring life to cleared sites awaiting new development and that a newly planted small wheat field can temporarily replace the blank expanses of a cleared site surrounded by block-­like tall buildings, as with the work of Agnes Denes’ Environmental Art, which



Figure 9.9  The delights of enclosed and secluded spaces: Court Of The Lions, at the Alhambra Palace, Granada, Spain.   Source: Joaquim Morelló / Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 9.10  The Jewish Memorial Museum and associated spaces in Berlin.   Source: Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons licensing.

celebrates the symbolic expression of natural forces (Denes 2003). commercial spaces

The dynamic spirit of contemporary commerce is often expressed in spaces that pulse with variety, contrast and communication, whether they are the night time galaxies of lights created in New York’s Times Square and Bangkok’s night markets or the swirling vitality of London’s Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Such commercial roles of community spaces date back at least 2500 years to the Stoa surrounding Athens’ Agora, where traders erected their stalls. It was continued in the great markets and Kasbahs, which were threaded along the Silk Road connecting China and the Mediterranean for a thousand years until superseded by the sea routes of the seventeenth century

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(Thubron  2007). In Europe’s Renaissance towns, the market square formed a major focus of both the physical form and social life of the community, enlivened by weekly and even daily occurrences, as in the cases of Florence’s Piazza del Mercato Centrale and Padua’s Piazza de Fiori, Frutta and Erbe. Such spaces still display the irrepressible vitality of individualism and character that commercial life brings to public spaces everywhere, whether they are Bangkok’s floating markets or Kuala Lumpur’s night markets, where the pulse of these activities transforms the lifeless spaces of daytime car parks with the vitality of food, clothing and craft stalls. Commercial life can fashion public space out of waste land by the sheer force of the energy that continually creates riverfront and lakeside markets everywhere. Both open-­air and covered markets combine the pleasures of spectacle and bargain hunting. The wide range of ages and styles and the mix of local people and visitors creates an inclusive feel, while local craft wares confer a sense of cultural appreciation. Food is on sale and displays are arranged with freshness and an eye for colour and form. The presence of crowds of visitors becomes a cultural experience in itself; the criss-­cross network of pathways and stalls presents repeated choices and the variety and density of the scene create a sense of abundance and opportunity. The custom of a visitor who may be unregarded at home or at work will be eagerly sought and an air of good humour and occasion pervades the scene. Such recurrent markets, occupying spaces also used for other purposes at other times, occur worldwide. San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf is a particularly celebrated example, as is London’s Petticoat Lane street market. In the north Italian lakeside town of Luino, the entire town of 30,000 people is closed to traffic on Wednesdays and the streets are filled with stalls stretching from the Embarcadero on Lake Maggiore to the break of slope – where the streets start to zigzag upwards towards the Alpine passes  –  offering everything that can be carried away on foot from jewellery to jackets and from truffles to trousseaux (Ascona/Locarno 2022). Such collections of small-­scale commercial activities can actively help create community spaces, transforming more restricted uses – ranging from abandoned docks, through land banks and closed school sites to redundant waterfront and road spaces – to create vivid places for community life. As evolution of activities continually brings obsolescent land uses into review, open-­air markets and communal spaces offer very significant opportunities for community planning to bring new life into

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formerly unloved parts of the city. John Forester in The Deliberative Practitioner (1999) describes in detail the negotiative process by which a very significant part of the Oslo Waterfront that was being held in reserve for port purposes was opened to public access and enjoyment, thus transforming the city’s waterfront (1999, pp. 92–101). In another instance, the State of Oregon in north west USA has developed a comprehensive and creative set of planning goals and guidelines that safeguard public access to waterfront sites and monitor their design, development and management, to ensure that changes of land use always protect community access (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2020). Immediately to the north, however, Washington State has very different traditions. Access to the magnificent waterfront of Puget Sound is largely privatised, from Everett in the north, through Seattle to the port of Tacoma in the south. Many planning situations lie between these two extremes, with such spaces becoming ‘contested terrains’. A successful example of this process of contestation for land undergoing a radical change in use is described in Chapter 1 in Box 1.2, recording the development of Brisbane’s Southbank Gardens. As the pace of technological change accelerates, such opportunities will arise increasingly frequently in cities throughout the world. A telling example of a reverse flow  –  towards privatisation of communal space  –  resulted from the twentieth-­century introduction of gated shopping centres. Such centres are often still patrolled by private security guards, authorised to exclude any unwanted visitors or groups suspected of being ‘unruly elements’, particularly young people drawn to the centres by their general atmosphere of material affluence, well-­controlled micro climates and glamorous displays of consumer items. Again, issues of access, community life and security need to be balanced. Thoughtful community planning can do much to achieve the necessary physical permeability and social inclusion. Requirements for improved pedestrian access and permeability can be introduced into approvals to build or modify such shopping centres. Design improvements can be negotiated, to integrate them better into the regular street pattern of the surrounding community on whose custom their shops depend for much of their commercial success (Heywood et al. 1997). collective spaces

Collective spaces present the other side of the urban coin, expressing the power of rulers and

elites to create central places where subjects can be assembled for control or indoctrination. The vast but oppressive Avenue of the Gods at Karnak (see Figure 9.11) is an early example of one such space, as is the even more psychologically overpowering space in front of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple (see Figure 9.12) at Luxor. Prominent among numerous instances dating from the European Renaissance is Milan’s elegant Piazza di Duomo where the ruling  Sforzas combined the forces of church and state to enhance both Castella and Cathedral. In a similar way, Le Vau designed Louis XIV’s great ceremonial avenue leading from the centre of the town to the Royal Palace of Versailles itself. Later, Baron Haussmann’s monumental set pieces of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysee celebrated the power of Emperor Louis Napoleon and the central role of Paris in French society. In Moscow, Kremlin Square not only expressed the might of Tsars such as Ivan the Terrible but also continued to provide the focus of Russian society where, for more than four decades, Communist regimes staged their massive May Day displays of military power and the current authoritarian regime maintains that confronting  militaristic tradition. Tiananmen Square has played a similar role in the Chinese state ever since the Ming Dynasty moved the national capital to Beijing 600 years ago (see Figure 9.13). In 1989, it became the site of one of the modern world’s most explicit enforcements of centralized state power when the Chinese People’s Army opened fire on peaceful student demonstrators resulting in the deaths of hundreds  –  perhaps thousands  –  of its own citizens. These are spaces controlled by rulers and elites for their own purposes – to review their troops, display their power and exact expressions of loyalty and tribute from the masses. They are neither designed nor intended for inclusive political discussion or cultural debate.

The language of design and the vocabulary of space and place Designing for everyday community life, on the other hand, has developed its own vocabulary and grammar, grounded in human perceptions, sensations and values, just as the vocabulary developed by physics to define and explore the behaviour and properties of matter has  assisted  our understanding of physical space, at scales varying from the miniscule to the universal. If such processes as those we have discussed earlier in this chapter are to become widespread, they need language,



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Figure 9.11  Temple, ceremonial way and avenue of the animal gods, entrance to Karnak Temple. Source: Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons licensing with Chipdawes.

Figure 9.12  Temple of Hatshepsut, processional way and forecourt. Source: Mountains Hunter / Adobe Stock.

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Figure 9.13  Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Source: Yo Hibino / Flickr.

theories and imagery that can be relied upon to express ideas in regular activities, solid shapes and a grammar of design to link these ingredients to form living places. The examples showed how positive planning, reflecting health-­giving and life-­ sustaining values, has created places of satisfying urbanity, interest and vitality in the improved bustees of inner Kolkata, and in the heart of the Manchester conurbation, introducing the new Lowry, Digital World and Water Sports Centres to create lively recreational, cultural and employment environments where previously there were only the stagnant and decaying Salford Docks. In these cases, the introduction of well-­designed new goal-­ based activities has resulted in transforming spent spaces into memorable new places. The foundations of the required language of design go back to the invention of the principles of perspective in fifteenth-­ century Italy by Fillipo Brunelleschi that must have done much to inform the shaping of such great European set pieces as Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, John Churchill’s Blenheim Palace with its grounds laid

out by Capability Brown at Woodstock in England and Catherine the Great’s Hermitage Palace in St Petersburg. Even earlier, other methods had already emerged in Ancient Egyptian and Greek practice, including contrast, variety and association By the mid-­nineteenth century, Humphrey Repton in the United Kingdom, L’Enfant in Washington and Olmsted in the great city parks of New York, Baltimore and Chicago were consciously incorporating these kinds of elements in their designs for new public places. However. it was left to Kevin Lynch (1960), in the democratic spirit of mid-­ twentieth century America, to develop a language of places and design that could express people’s everyday use and enjoyment of space. Lynch’s starting point was that people’s views of their environments are subjective mental maps, often amplified into four dimensions, including not only length, breadth and height but also past associations, which allow us to find our ways between activities and through spaces. Their images of places are therefore more than mere aesthetic reactions. They can form navigational



maps, initially composed of series of disjointed fragments, which are subsequently joined together to form sequences within meaningful networks, inside which we can locate significant destinations. Images thus combine to form mental codes, enabling us to understand, memorise, master and enjoy our environments. In order to understand this process, Lynch devised three original types of participatory survey. The first consisted of intensive office interviews with about 100 local residents in each of Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles, specially selected for their perceptiveness and articulacy, with the aim of discovering what elements of the city they found most memorable, what emotions they associated with different places and vistas and which features they used as reference points in their journey through the city. The second set of surveys consisted of asking the same questions of random samples of people stopped in the street, producing very similar general results. For the third, a system of urban classification was developed, using features found to be significant in the first two sets of surveys; intensive field discussions were conducted by trained staff to explore why interviewees had found certain features and districts more memorable and pleasant than others (Lynch 1960, pp. 140–181). The conclusions were as interesting as the methods. Significant city features were perceived as falling into five major types:

• Paths • Nodes (focal points) • Landmarks • Districts • Edges. Routes that passed through areas of distinctive character were preferred to more direct but less varied ones, with the most popular being those passing through activities of changing intensity, or progressing past notable landmarks. Landmarks were themselves remembered as much for contrast, attractiveness, association or colour as for sheer scale. Districts were associated with interesting activities and unusual types of topography such as Boston’s Beacon Hill, with its steep slopes and well-­maintained and historic buildings. Clearly defined edges helped structure the overall shape of the mental map of the city, particularly where they marked the boundary between districts, such as along waterfronts, railway lines or industrial areas. Lynch also mentions the existence of seams, bordering areas that link areas as much as separate them, like creek corridors, waterside

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esplanades and old rail tracks turned into routes for active transport. Lynch’s vocabulary and analysis offer the basis for a common language that can promote productive cooperation between many different participants in community planning. It is also important to remember the inclusive process by which these ideas were developed. Time and again, students I have been supervising have benefited from this inspiration to go into communities to discover what their members most value about their environments, what they see as needing improvement and how new developments should respect existing spaces and places to help maintain and enhance people’s senses of place and character. Lynch has reservations about Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’. Whilst praising its imagination, humanity and participatory emphasis, he criticises Alexander for the universal and timeless nature of his 253 patterns, fearing that they will become tablets of stone that may produce standardised places for very different societies and cultures (Lynch 1984, p. 285). However, Alexander is at pains to explain in his later work that his patterns are intended as universal models, which can be consulted as a basis to prompt more local and original solutions. Names such as ‘Warm Colours’ (Number 250) and ‘Pools of Light’ (Number 252) illustrate this point. They may not constitute a fully developed language of design, but they do combine elements such as Lynch’s own vocabulary of Paths, Nodes, Landmarks, Districts and Edges into a wider language that can be used to transform local spaces into living places. Recognition of the importance of people’s values and feelings has also helped to shape the work of Randolph Hester Junior (1985, 1989, 2010), who applies some of Lynch’s participatory techniques to provide evidence for the importance of ‘subconscious landscapes of the heart’  (1985). Work Hester did in the 1980s in the small South Carolina fishing town of San Mateo produced results that were at first sight surprising. When he asked local people on the streets, in gathering spaces and at meetings about the environments they most valued in the town, their responses nominated several that had the appearance of being almost derelict, including a decaying old pier. It transpired that people valued the opportunity to meet and talk in a place of strong historical associations and environmental character, even though it was not very well maintained. Many readers will be able to think of examples in their own home towns of favourite visiting places which could well be kept in their current informal state,

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protected and improved by designation and modest funding to maintain their communal quality as well-­loved meeting places. An example of one such space is in the inner Brisbane suburb of New Farm, where I was working in the 1990s with a local community development officer, Fiona Caniglia, to identify places of heritage and cultural significance to be incorporated in a local development plan. During an afternoon working session with the Neighborhood Action Group, using a technique of Hester’s, we had distributed three stick-­on Purple Hearts to each participant to place on sites of particular importance to them. One boarding house resident, Joe, had placed one of his three hearts on a derelict site on the edge of a little used park located well above the main activity areas of the suburb. ‘Are you sure that’s where you meant to put that sticker, Joe’? I asked.‘Sure am’, he said ‘That’s where the breakfast coffee cart comes every morning to help start my life again’. Joe went on from the Coffee Cart issue to propound his quite radical views on the future of the suburb and the competing rights of café owners and local people to ownership of its pavements. There are many lessons for urban design: the need for loose fit and spare spaces, the question of who makes up the community; the methods of consultation we adopt and the partners we work with in planning for inclusive places. When we combine Hester’s ‘subconscious landscapes of the heart’ and ‘sacred structure’, with Lynch’s vocabulary of urban elements and Alexander ‘s universal patterns and commitment to unfolding existing places to reflect the needs and values of their members, we begin to see emerging a community-­based approach to urban design that involves local people in shaping public places, that will in turn build and sustain the lives of local communities.iii

Place-­making: designing to make life Happily, examples of effective place-­making abound in many open societies because individuals and communities are naturally adept at shaping their localities to match their activities and values, in ways that we share  with  the natural capacities of birds to shape their nests, badgers their warrens and beavers their lodges. At a longer-­term level, an analysis by Christopher Alexander (2002b, pp. 251–255) of the evolution of the Venice’s Piazza San Marco over a thousand-­year period illustrates

this process at work. He identifies 10 linked stages, dating from the space’s first emergence in the sixth century CE as a space behind the waterfront, through a series of adaptations and extensions, as existing uses were strengthened or superseded and new ones added: 1. Church and waterfront fortification about 560 CE 2. First Basilica Built in 832 – extending the existing function and strengthening the space’s centre 3. Construction of the Campanile in 976  –  amplifying and reinforcing the existing role by adding a bell tower 4. St Marks developed in its present cruciform in 1071 – extending and enriching the religious role 5. Piazza extended into the lagoon in 1100, expanding the existing commercial spaces where the square meets the lagoon 6. Northern gateway built in 1250 – emphasising the link to the larger settlement 7. The Ospicio Orseolo built at the eastern end of piazza in 1309  –  expanding the existing religious and charitable community functions 8. The Doges Palace built in 1450 – amplifying existing roles to include governance 9. Old Procuria built in 1523  –  further enriching governance roles 10. New Procuria added in 1600, reinforcing governance and developing a spatial and functional centre to balance both Basilica and Campanile. This process, which Alexander identifies as ‘unfolding’, has perfectly adapted the space to blend and balance religion, commerce and governance and has even succeeded in incorporating remarkably well the most recently added function of tourism. Alexander illustrates how at each stage the participants who needed to be involved (who would be called ‘stakeholders’ today) were able to review options and make choices informed by their knowledge and personal experiences and commitments. This is a case where design has been firmly grounded in the ‘Lifeworld’, as distinct from the ‘Systemworld’ of automated processes such as computer-­aided design (CAD). The resulting process of unfolding of  character linked to positive community involvement has prompted interaction of different activities and centres to present a deeply satisfying and compelling example of how to achieve a sense of wholeness – and incorporate many of the 15 properties of good design discussed earlier. Other important contributions have been made by the schools of ‘Responsive Environments’ associated with Oxford Brookes University in England (Bentley et al., 1985), and ‘New Urbanism’ which



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has been driving much urban design and planning in the United States since the 1990s and is strongly linked to the ‘Smart Growth’ movement that aims to increase urban densities, promote active transport and concentrate new development in ‘Transit Orientated Communities’ (Calthorpe 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001). place-­making: a  case study in  the atherton tableland of  north queensland

A further instance, particularly relevant for community planning, comes from the continuing social and physical renewal of three North Queensland country towns. This process was initiated in 1995 by John Mongard Landscape Architects (JMLA), working with the local Atherton Shire Council and community groups. John and his partner Jacque Ratcliffe were both graduates of a combined landscape and planning course and combine both skills in their landscape architecture and environmental design practice. For two decades they undertook projects in the beautiful but economically stressed tropical tableland area of Atherton in North Queensland (see Figures 9.14–9.17).

Figure 9.14  Tolga Village Enhancement: new street signage and historic fig tree.

The Atherton Tableland is home to a beautiful cluster of rural townships surrounded by interna­ tionally significant rainforests. In 1995, JMLA were invited to develop some ideas for the main street of Atherton, the Shire’s main settlement. This started a collaborative planning and place-­making process that would span over two decades resulting in a

Figure 9.15  Tinaroo Community Plan, showing village centre, lake front access and conservation and revegetation areas. Source: Reproduced with permission of Courtesy John Mongard Landscape Architects.

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Figure 9.16  Community planning workshop with local residents. Source: Reproduced with permission of Courtesy John Mongard Landscape Architects.

major cultural and environmental re-­orientation of the four settlements of Atherton, Tolga, Tinaroo and Kairi. Working from a vacant store on the Main Street, JMLA established a ‘Set-­Up Shop’ collaborative design process, involving residents, councillors, and planning and garden staff in describing what made each place special and listing suitable

Rainforest revegetation to volcanic crater

Picnic terraces

Interpretive centre Environmental Telstra sculpture trail tower

Interpretive signs at hou wang temple

ideas and strategies to enhance these qualities. The excitement that this generated provided the springboard for over 20 other small plans that would, over time, rebuild each town. The Set-­ Up Shop method is a more inclusive and evolving refinement of the ‘enquiry by design’ process. A vacant shop is turned into a temporary collaborative design studio, usually for five to seven days. People wander in to offer ideas about the future, and to raise their main issues related to the town. These are written or drawn on big A2 ‘post – it’ notes on walls. After a few days, the hand written ideas draw curious residents into the emerging collage and exhibition: they then add more comments, look at what other people think, and often invite their friends to come and comment, too. After a week, hundreds of people will have had inputs, some for hours, and some in numerous sessions. During this shop-­front development of ideas, meetings are also held with key stakeholder groups to get all community values onto the table. This deeply experiential process also allows people to wander in and point out specific things. It encourages  engagement that captures time and explores  spaces over a week, helping the designers to be grounded in the place and its people. It

Sculptural playground

Hallorans hill lookout & interpretive park

Sculptural landmarks at the lookout

Atherton rotary park

Figure 9.17  Creating a culture of appreciation: Atherton community sculptures, plan and vistas.   Source: These images are reproduced by courtesy of John Mongard Landscape Architects (www.mongard.com.au) to whom warm appreciation is expressed.



allows one-­to-­one and group engagement, and for other experts to be equally grounded into the place and its challenges. The outcome is a shop full of ideas, which are exhibited afterward for several months, so everyone can see them. The important community concerns are easy to spot in this shop of ideas, and their synthesis forms the basis for a community statement of key issues and vision, defining the main agreed design and planning ideas that can then be further refined into proposals and design schemes. This process allows on-­ site design shaped by reflective community input. It is a good example of how Habermas’s ‘Lifeworld’  (1984) can be integrated into engagement in both planning and design and is the opposite of contemporary digital ‘Systemworld’ consultation focused on template-­controlled communication. For over 10 years, John and Jacque came to the Atherton Tablelands for visits of four to seven days every month or two, developing a strong relationship with the four villages and their people. The underlying motive was to give the local communities the processes, skills and confidence to evolve their own towns in better and more environmentally sustainable ways. For example, when a new park at the lookout was to be planned, or a rainforest verge needed re-­vegetation, or when trees were proposed for the main street, the development team would meet with the council gardeners and a retired rainforest expert from the town. The local horticultural nursery also became involved in the planning so the required trees could be grown years in advance of the civic improvements, with everyone knowing what would be needed. This allowed for resources to be both available and cost-­ effective. The plans merged disciplines, scales and resources. For example, strategic planning happened in tandem with the making of civic furniture and the design of a new visitor centre. The placemaking strategies for the original four small towns were embodied in community plans that created physical improvements to streets, parks and entry points and supported local trade and tourism. By promoting productive existing and new uses, the plan responded to needs for economic vitality. The community strategies were enacted piece by piece, usually one or two plans per year, supported by one or two civic improvements at a time in each settlement and informed by consultation processes that led to more detailed information and ideas. Thus, an overall strategy for the town of Atherton would be whittled down into smaller plans (for example, the railway lands plan, the main street plans, the key park plans) each designed and implemented through a collaborative

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process, in ways that recall Alexander’s emphasis on the need for good designs to unfold rather than be imposed by a brittle short term blueprint. Small rural shires do not have the funds to rebuild themselves quickly or easily. Building new parks, for instance, may require employing more gardeners, and making cultural facilities may require more management staff. By firming up ‘big visions’ for the four villages, the community plans made possible grant applications for State and Federal co-­funding to meet these needs. As a result, Atherton rebuilt its whole main street, built a visitor centre, a destination park and town gateways. While these larger projects were developed, a range of small ones were enacted to provide immediate tangible outcomes. The first step was to create village entry signs, which captured the aspirations of each place. Then a range of locally made furniture, bus shelters and picnic structures were designed and created in a Tablelands style using local hardwood, steelwork and farmyard boulders. Over time, all of the public toilets and amenities were also renovated with the improved look and finishes. The Tablelands have rich volcanic soils supporting remnants of outstanding rainforest which have been isolated by progressive clearing for agriculture. One of the key strategies was to restore the forest by developing parklands and ovals next to creeks and rainforest, which were linked together by street and swale corridor plantings, creating wildlife stepping stones. As one village grew with new housing, water-­ sensitive urban design was created to clean and filter storm water before it reached the main lake. Finally, the statutory town plans were strongly shaped by the community plans, thus ensuring that the place-­making was embodied in both private and public spaces. Though small towns may lack the venues, density and diversity of big cities, they have their own cultural direction and arts, which the four villages’ community plans helped to foster. Creative people, interesting or unique assets resources and materials were identified, creating the basis for ongoing place-­ making projects. For example, when Atherton’s Lookout Park was improved, six public art and craft projects were incorporated, allowing local woodworkers, schools and emerging artists to help fashion and focus Halloran’s Hill’s new interpretation centre. Later on, when the Entrance Park was built with garden staff, local Rotary members became inspired and went on to make art and craft to place in the park. Thus, a cultural process emerged which gave the community the confidence to express and create its own artistic vision. The four local village

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community plans aim to help foster local culture and the arts. Creative local people and interesting or unique assets and resources have been brought together in place-­ making projects which feature such beautifully appropriate environmental art as the huge sculpture of a pumpkin or melon, hewn out of naturally occurring rocks within Atherton’s Entrance Park (Figure 9.17). People in the village of Tolga wanted to improve its visual quality but retain its rural character and sense of integration with the surrounding tropical rain forest. Figure 9.14 shows how the ancient fig tree, a major feature of the village centre, was not only retained in the median strip but also enhanced with sympathetic planting of rain forest plants, ensuring that it continues to provide shade and frame the elegant new signage of the village shops. Old and new have been combined in a simple design that maintains character and expresses traditions in an authentic way while actually involving the local people in the work of enhancing their community.

City shapes From time to time, communities will be called upon to face bigger decisions, often involving choices over-­ investment in major infrastructure, with long-­lasting impacts upon the opportunities and limitations facing present and future generations. Roads and railways may have to be built, and choices made between them. Greenfield sites may have to be subdivided or brownfield land cleared and released for redevelopment. New public investment may have to be located in existing or new centres. All of these choices will affect the evolving form of the city and will in turn, be affected by existing and developing settlement forms, either consciously or through unconscious influence. The available general forms fall into four main categories, evident since the earliest days of settled societies, related to the basic geometry of the circle, the square, the line and the sheet. Each has its own characteristics and implications for the communities which will be accommodated:

• The circle generates compact radial concentric forms square produces readily developed grid forms • The line is expressed in incremental linear and corridor development • The sheet gives rise to spreading and individualistic ‘galactic’ patterns.

• The

contributions of  each model to  future settlement forms

Radial concentric development The compactness, sociability and ease of contact of circular settlements have resulted in their continuing popularity as urban forms throughout the last 12,000 years. They can be observed in the widest possible range of times and places, continuing on to the garden cities and many of the planned new towns of contemporary times, with  historical roots going back to the early hunting encampments and Neolithic villages of mainland Europe and Britain, Italian hilltop towns, agricultural villages throughout Africa, and the compact fortified Bastides and market towns of Europe’s Renaissance. These circular forms can be relied upon to concentrate the maximum area and activity within a minimum distance to a central point. Their compactness offers economy in the use of space and the consumption of such resources as construction materials for the roads and fuel for transport of the contemporary metropolis. For these reasons, not only have ‘organic’ settlements often evolved in roughly circular shapes, but urban design practitioners have frequently favoured circular forms to promote easy access to central services and strong central place imagery. They also have the capacity to cluster different neighbourhoods, each gathered around its own focus in a hierarchy of centres, all contained within an ‘urban growth boundary’ or ‘green belt’. Such arrangements support co-­location of essential urban facilities of medical centres, schools, local shops and recreation areas, creating economy and convenience. Advocates of the New Urbanism school of design also embrace the idea of basically circular ‘Transit Orientated Developments’ (TODS) grouped around rapid transit stations to encourage higher densities and more convenience for daily life and active transport such as walking and cycling  (Calhorpe, 1993). In summary, circular settlements offer compactness, promote social contact, achieve optimal economies of service and distribution within a given radius or perimeter, and are appropriate to bounded forms of urban containment and green belts. Many great cities have evolved from a variety of forms to develop into ‘radial concentric’ shapes. Passing through stages of incremental peripheral growth, they have grown outwards along radial routes, with development infilling behind them, to evolve into star shapes. Public transport, as in Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Toronto, Washington and Melbourne, can assist such stellar metropolises to continue to function efficiently to accommodate



high population levels (for example, in Greater Tokyo the population now exceeds 30 million people while still functioning as a reasonably efficient radial concentric metropolis). Within market economies, incremental growth favours the development of such stellar cities, driven by successive waves of ‘invasion and succession’, flowing out from the inner city. As the ‘Zone in Transition’ moves outwards from the centre, ageing areas may be redeveloped for more lucrative uses (Burgess  1972). Some degree of habitability may be maintained by the development of green wedges along flood plains or ridges of steeper terrain separating the swathes of development along major roads and rail lines. However, though it is one of the current world’s dominant settlement forms, the stellar metropolis is inherently prone to problems of centralised congestion and conflict as regional traffic flows, arriving daily at the centre, attempt to fit into relatively narrow channels that can only be expanded by destroying the surrounding activities of the central areas themselves. Even public transport may start to confront limitations of necessary interval times between trains and feasible lengths of railway platforms. At some stage, the elongating journeys to work and distances between activity centres ordain that activities will start to decentralise and to evolve into a more multi-­centred settlement form (Hall  1977,  2014)  –  an outcome that will be accelerated by the increasing tendency of people to work from home. Grid cities Grid cities, by contrast, can disperse flows and destinations about wide fields of organised space and therefore provide a convenient basis for developmental planning. The Indus and Nile Valley cities of 4000–5000 years ago adopted this form, with both Medinet Habu (Manley  1996) and the systematic layout of the city of Mohenjo Daro (International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) 1980) offering good examples. Later, this form proved ideal for Greek and Roman ‘coloniae’, capable of being replicated wherever a new settlement was being established. Throughout western and southern Europe, the squared shape of old Roman castrae can be identified in the modern city centre street patterns. Grid forms proved just as suitable for the colonial settlements of the New World in the Americas and Australasia. New  York is perhaps the most celebrated example but the pattern is replicated to different extents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch and countless other cities

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stemming from colonial foundations. This is a settlement form that is also popular with developers because of its convenience for advance planning and organising of development. By maximising movement, it also increases the length of zones of contact, providing more commercial opportunities. However, it can also give rise to a sense of ‘placelessness’; requires very sensitive adaptation if it is to respond to natural features;  and maximises demands for energy and materials in an age where conservation of resources is becoming a mounting imperative. This form started to fall out of favour for planned new developments, once the development of ‘garden city’ concepts by Howard, Olmsted, Unwin and Stein brought organic analogies and natural settings into prominence. However, during the Western World’s long mid-­ twentieth century growth boom, the demands of rapid growth promoted both trend planning and a search for urban forms that could accommodate maximum use of the private car, irrespective of urban image or length of journeys. The University of California planning theorist, Melvin Webber (1964), speculated upon the ‘non place urban realm’ and dismissed traditional views of urban design and place-­making as anachronistic in an age of fast cars and even faster electronic communications. Called upon to act as a consultant for the design of Milton Keynes, last of the wave of English New Towns (located in the East Midlands communications belt and bounded by the recently completed M1 motorway), Webber produced a low to medium-­density grid structure that spread for several hundreds of square miles over England’s Midlands Plain with the explicit intention of promoting choice, ease of movement and ‘modern’ lifestyles. Milton Keynes New Town has fulfilled its allotted role of accommodating population, but its structure maximises resource consumption and favours neither active or public transport or the development of social life. Nevertheless, at a more local scale, advocates of both Responsive Environment and New Urbanism schools of urban design are attracted to concepts that support the provision of meeting places such as central squares and the variety of routeways and permeability which can result from grid networks of surrounding streets. They incorporate grid elements into the grain of their local designs. In particular, the reaction against cul de sacs and whimsical curves, which may create spaces that cannot be easily overseen from neighbouring dwellings and therefore lack natural surveillance, has encouraged returns to the use of grid forms at the most local scale of new communities. Later

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developments in settlement theory have merged the merits of order, logic and distribution of the activities of grid patterns with the incremental advantages claimed for linear development (discussed below) to propose a ‘Directional Grid’ which aims to combine the growth management characteristics of grid development with the flexibility attributes of lines and belts to advocate corridor development. Linear settlements These forms, which matched particularly well the demands of the automobile era of the last 100 years, are also common throughout the longer expanse of urban history. Street villages and waterfront fishing or trading settlements developed naturally as responses to commerce and topography. Modern versions continue to occur, generally now on the larger scale of the coastal conurbation, such as the urban region of the Puget Sound Regional Council which stretches for nearly  a hundred miles from Everett through Seattle to Tacoma, or South East Queensland, the ‘two hundred kilometre city’ extending across two states from Noosa in the north through Greater Brisbane to Tweed Heads in New South Wales, or the copper belt towns of Zambia stretching the 150 km from Konkola to Luanshya. In the mid-­ twentieth century epoch of mass movement and the motorcar, linear forms attracted much attention as appropriate models for new developments suited to accommodating the rapid growth of the times. With supplies of cheap fossil oil appearing inexhaustible, and concerns for global warming scarcely identified, traffic engineering consultants added transport and regional planning to their advertised lists of activities and produced statistics-­based models to promote maximal movement flows and continuous growth. The international consultants, Jamieson Mackay, contributed a concept that combined the promotion of public and private transport in a ‘3 Strand Linear Structure’ locating all new development in chunky beads of new settlements strung along both sides of a central public transport spine. Motorways would run along their outer edges to provide through routes and by-­passes for private transport (Jamieson et al. 1967). In a global extension of these ideas of linear settlement, the Athens-­based international planning consultant, Constantinos Dioxides, proposed a universal linear system to link all new and proposed settlements in a world-­straddling web of settlement he termed ‘Ekumenoplis’. This formed

the capstone in a proposed new field of study to be called ‘Ekistics’, aiming to ‘be the science of human settlements’. For instance, Doxiadis proposed (or predicted  –  it is not clear which), that settlement in England should crystallise into a coffin-­shaped belt stretching from Liverpool and Manchester through Birmingham and Nottingham to London. This itself would form the Atlantic extremity of an even larger belt of continuous urbanisation linking western Europe with central Russia, across  western and northern China to the seaboard cities of eastern China, Korea and Japan, in turn linked by Trans-­Pacific trade routes with the rapidly expanding cities of the Pacific coast of north America. These would themselves be linked by belts of continuous urbanization to the East Coast metropolises, and then, via rapid Transatlantic routes back to Europe (Doxiadis 1968).iv Planners in the Australian National Capital Development Corporation (NCDC), which is responsible for planning and developing the national capital city of Canberra, may have been influenced by this kind of 1960s  prevailing conventional wisdom when they commissioned traffic engineers and transport planners to contribute to a plan for the continued growth of the city, which had originally been planned on modified Garden City Principles by the earlier American husband and wife team of Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin. Their winning entry submitted to a 1913 competition had proposed a compact, broadly circular city design centred on a man-­made lake. Growth has exceeded expectations. Faced with accommodating populations up to and beyond the quarter million mark, the 1960s consultants responded with a new traffic-­based plan that they termed ‘The Y Plan’. This plan distributed growth in a series of new settlements to the north and an expansion of the existing edge of town settlement of Queanbeyan to the south, to be joined by new motorways in a heavily modified version of the ‘3 strand linear structure’, which, however, lacked a central public transport spine. There may have been a mid-­century assumption that public servants would all drive cars to work. The result is a structure that maximises daily movements, relies heavily on the private motor car and lacks ease of informal interaction at all levels above the local neighbourhood (where the Burley Griffin Garden City concepts survive, and produce a local environment that is comparatively well organized and sociable). Recently, Canberra’s planners have been aiming to increase densities in the inner suburb of Civic, encouraging the development of more intensive activities such as medium-­density housing,



street markets and open-­air cultural festivals associated with the compact circular city form of its original design. Critics of linear structure have pointed to a number of basic fallacies and failings. First is the danger of privileging means of movement over the maintenance of the quality of life and the activities which they are intended to link. Urban freeways often destroy the inner city communities which contribute life and interaction to cities. Second is the technical mistake of attempting to channel growth along a single band when people will inevitably seek living spaces throughout the breadth as well as the length of entire urban fields. Locations outside the proposed band, but laterally close to existing centres, will inevitably attract residential development irrespective of the transport planners’ intentions. Third, there are criticisms of their very large resource consumption, maximising movements between different activities, consuming scarce energy and devouring whole belts of space for new roads, shopping areas, industrial estates and low-­density car-­based residential suburbs. Finally, these enlarged daily traffic movements will greatly increase daily carbon emissions and contributions to the global warming that may have exacerbated the terrifying summer wild fires in 2019, 2020 and 2021 throughout Western USA and Eastern Australia. Responses to such criticisms have produced modifications and adaptations of the original linear city proposals to improve efficiency and reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions. For example, background studies conducted for the emblematic South Hampshire New City Study by Colin Buchanan and Partners (1968) investigated how to combine the capacities of grids to distribute movement flows more evenly throughout entire urban regions, with the flexibility and capacity of linear forms to accommodate continuous growth. These resulted in a hybrid ‘directional grid’ giving equal respect to the needs of both public and private transport and integrating central place concepts in a geometrically squared network. The resulting settlement pattern took the form of an elongated grid; focused around a hierarchy of central places adjacent to intersections of public and private transport routes. The major centres of Southampton and Portsmouth, for instance, were to have their locations enhanced, by a proposed new regional motorway, also linking the two cities to national rail lines. Lower levels of centres were to be located at the intersection of local public and private transport routes within the grid structure. This hierarchical principle of proposed

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centres continued down to the local neighbourhood level, locating local centres and their primary schools, recreational parks and convenience shops at the meeting points of active transport, bike and walking routes with residential collector streets. Ever since the publication of the South Hampshire Study, directional grids have been routinely included amongst the options for new or re-­ structured settlements, especially in ‘postcolonial’ cities like the Puget Sound conurbation and Greater Vancouver (Puget Sound Regional Council  2022; Walker 2010). Their emphasis on public transport, central place access and continuous infrastructure lines, and their capacity to accommodate both mixed and segregated use areas makes them effective structures for managing continuing growth. An interesting recent adaptation of linear urban structure occurs in the ‘corridor development’ proposed by Melbourne City Council and the Department of Urban Planning of the State of Victoria (Adams  2009). The study, Transforming Our Cities, planned to accommodate all of the two million population increase anticipated for the next 40 years within narrow bands of high and medium density, medium-­rise development. These would be located adjacent to radial major transport routes of existing tram, train and major bus routes as well as proposed new light rail additions. This proposal would combine incremental growth along existing radial routes with linear settlement ideas, to allow large numbers of people to enjoy the intensive social, cultural and economic life of the city at the same time as being able to move conveniently about their daily activities. An interesting sidelight on this combination of settlement forms is provided by the recognition that the structure of most major Australian cities has been largely shaped by the original rail and tram lines running from the outer suburbs into the city centres, with suburban stations linked to their residential hinterlands by nets of footpaths and roads originally intended for use as much by cyclists as motorists (Manning  1984, pp.  67–98). Adams’ proposals for intensification thus build on well-­established patterns of existing urban structure and grain. In the longer term however, problems may still arise from difficulties in managing the mounting pressure on central areas; the intensity of growth within the corridors, and sideways growth that could change the intended structure into a high-­ rise and high-­density sprawl. It may be significant that the original South East Queensland Regional Plan (Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning 2009) explicitly aimed to divert much future growth away from the existing north-­south

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coastal strip into a ‘Western Corridor’ towards and beyond the old mining and industrial centre of Ipswich (Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning 2009, 2017). This is proving very successful and further congestion in the metropolitan core of Brisbane is being avoided, as increasing numbers of city centre and inner city activities, especially health, higher education, culture and entertainment are decentralised to new ‘knuckles’ along the three growth corridors extending towards the Gold Coast, Ipswich and the Sunshine Coast, as occurred earlier in both Greater London and Toronto. Sheet and galactic settlement forms In places of abundant supply of water and fertile land, such as the plains of southern Germany and the prairies of North America, much early settlement occurred in isolated farmsteads spread quite evenly over wide areas. The rise of nation states with central systems that could impose peace and maintain service grids to distribute water and power to all parts of the countryside has re-­created conditions where human settlement can again spread quite evenly over whole regions. Advocates of individual freedom and personal independence have often been attracted by the idea of dispersed settlement. Peter Kropotkin (1974) in his book, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, envisaged a flow out of the great cities to repopulate the countryside in networks of small farms and craft settlements. Frank Lloyd Wright, the apostle of American independence, encouraged in his Broad Acre City, a spread of independent family units across the entire surface of North America, each ecologically well related to its surroundings and making its own contribution to the national productivity of goods and ideas (Fishman 1982). Since he produced these ideas in 1933 and established his memorably beautiful model of independence at Taliesin in Arizona, his ideas have become potentially more persuasive and relevant because of the dispersive capacities of new developments in electronic communications and the global reach of the internet. The significance of these trends was not lost on the Berkeley planning theorist, Melvin Webber, who made them the basis for developed them further in his influential article, ‘The Urban Place and Nonplace Urban Realm’ (1964a), in which he argued that traditional needs for direct spatial contact within settlements were being superseded by new communities of interest and association whose members were more likely to be distributed

across whole regions and throughout the world than to be concentrated in one locality. (This may have led Webber to his later proposal, in his consultancy report for the 1960s English new city of Milton Keynes, for a grid settlement pattern with its potentiality for dispersion.) He certainly dismissed attempts to shape settlements to support traditional values of physical interaction and direct economic exchange. He developed such ideas further to argue that planning should abandon its ‘narrow and negative constraints’ and allow the natural forces of technological change to re-­shape society to a more dynamic and psychologically challenging exploration of new urban structures (Webber  1968,  1969). He termed this approach ‘Permissive Planning’. My own response to this advocacy was entitled ‘Plangloss: A Critique of Permissive Planning’ (Heywood 1969). Kevin Lynch had partially anticipated (1961) the development of such ideas and later incorporated them into the broad framework of his explanations and evaluations of spatial form (1984). He examined what the forms would look like and how they would function. They would form sheets, he postulated, with regular small wrinkles occurring where local services such as petrol stations, schools or recreation centres were located at road intersections. Ecological concerns would also ensure that they did not extend into areas of vulnerable or precious natural environments such as flood plains, national parks, creek corridors or important natural habitats. They would require comprehensive nets of roads and infrastructure corridors and he proposed that these might best be arranged as a triangular grid, to cut down the number of corners involved in travelling around a square grid. As a result, this form began to resemble, suggestively, Christaller’s original hexagonal settlement model, prompting the idea that a renewed pattern of central place formation might naturally re-­occur. The question arises as to whether these are purely notional models or whether there are examples that we can study and whose performance we can evaluate. In many ways the chosen lifestyle of the affluent has always tended towards such forms of rural retreat, whether it was the retirement villas of Roman senators, aristocrats and writers in the hills of Umbria and Latium, the rural retreats of Mandarins in Han China or the chateaux established along the Loire Valley by the psychologically oppressed courtiers of Louis XIV. The suburban spread of the twentieth-­century Western World marks a further stage in this flight from congested and polluted central places, which reached its climax in the rural residential patterns of ‘exurban’ development that



have been spreading around North American and Australian cities for the last three decades (Nelson and Dueker 1990) whose international expression of which  can be found in the purchase of Italian rural and lakeside properties by German business people and of French farmhouses by wealthy English retirees. Clearly, this dispersed settlement form still proves attractive to many who ‘have it all’. Residents of sheet settlements, often with above-­ average incomes and expectations, would require services and supplies whose needs would demand large-­ scale diversion of energy and resources. Power, water, education, policing and roads all become problematic expenses, making the settlement form economically expensive. Socially it is scarcely more sustainable, depending upon a combination of public services and above-­average household wealth. Isolated dwellings can also be prone to random violence, with the associated rise of the gun culture which is common in many rural regions of the United States. In Australia and California, threats of natural disasters especially increasingly common bushfires and floods are recurrent spectres and huge sources of public expense. Culturally, this form of settlement can only reduce casual and informal contact, so that social and cultural capital seeps away and Jane Jacobs’ ‘systems of survival’ (of people exchanging face-­ to-­ face knowledge and skills to build the trust on which both business and social life depend) becomes more and more difficult (Jacobs  1992). For all of their good computer skills, Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ do not choose to gather round virtual spaces in front of computer screens in their home offices, but instead flock to the coffee bars, foyers of art galleries and bookshops of the inner-­city milieux that can offer the intensity and surprise associations by which their contributions to economic growth are triggered (Florida  2005). The Nonplace Urban Realm fails when it is asked to make the transition from virtual reality to the living world of human exchange, experience and physical demands. It fails on grounds of resource sustainability, personal sociability, mutual aid, economic productivity and visual interest and stimulus. When such individualistic ideas are elevated, as Wright and Webber advocate, into a major urban form, they prove unsustainable. Few planners would now advocate its more extreme versions in the form of Webber’s ‘Non Place Urban Realm’. However, this model is not without its own valid social contributions. The general concept of a more equal spread of activities and dwellings across available space can help equalise public access and

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thereby improve social justice. Reducing mass concentrations of people and production could also result in communities that step more lightly on their natural environments. Smaller clusters of population could also reduce nodes of congestion and improve the quality of people’s contact with each other  and with nature. Rather than a totally decentred settlement pattern, galactic settlement thinking can be applied to suggest a future, not of de-­centred, but of multi-­centred regional settlement, which could be described as the ‘Cluster Metropolis’ or in planning jargon ‘polycentric’ or ‘multiple nuclei’ development. contributions of  each model to  future settlement forms

Each shape has its own contribution to make. Compact circular settlements remain a major basis of community life, promoting access, intensity and choice, but running the dangers of the self-­destruction of success as their growth sends progressively expanding rings of conflict and congestion outwards from city centres through the inner suburbs. Grid forms can demonstrate 5000 years of effective organisation of space to manage new development and continuing exchange. They have also provided the classical squares, piazzas and plazas for people to meet, discuss, exchange and argue. They have become, in many ways, symbols of organised civic life, spanning from the stoa-­lined Agora of Athens, the Roman Forum, university quadrangles and great Renaissance squares to the modern meeting places at the heart of all great cities, such as Times Square in New York and Trafalgar Square in London. However, at a larger scale, contemporary grid cities can also maximise traffic flows and length of journeys, waste energy and resources and structure urban regions which possess little sense of place or focus. Linear forms continue to evolve naturally in response to elongated spaces like coastal plains, lake shores, river valleys and city docks. They are well suited to flexible growth and the integration of land use, transport and infrastructure provision. However, they are even more prone than pure grid forms to maximise movements and are inherently insensitive to the needs of communities to cluster around central places to obtain essential services. Their most practical forms often consist of combinations with other shapes, such as circular and grid forms. Sheet settlements respond to human values of personal independence and choice. They use the full capacity of modern technology for instant

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transmission of information and ideas across increasingly large areas of the world. However, in extreme applications, they can also create unsustainable demands for resources and deprive societies of the direct personal contact that is essential to the continuation of culture and to many of the chance contacts and experiences that enrich daily life. In this current age of unstable climatic and physical conditions, the inherent isolation of individual households also  imposes increasing costs and threats to personal safety. No single pure settlement form, therefore, provides all the answers to the spatial needs of community life and none is devoid of contributions to imaginative future planning. This is particularly welcome because we are currently immersed in the middle of a period of the most rapidly increasing demands for dwellings and places for work, health and learning in human history. The challenge of population growth is not unending, but one whose conclusion we can already glimpse. World population should stabilise at less than 11 million people by the middle of this century (see Section 6.1, Home and Communities). Nevertheless, we are confronted by the need to accommodate an overall population increase of a further two billion people or a quarter of our existing total, in a period of less than 30 years. At the same time, we must strive to rectify gross deficiencies in existing provisions of shelter and standards of living, learning and health care. We must also manage continued major global population movements from poor to rich countries, from countryside to cities, and from disaster-­ racked regions confronted by the periodic effects of global warming to the well-­established world cities where they will seek to arrive as refugees. The likely decentralising effects of recurrent and mutating global pandemics must also be taken into account. We shall need as good an understanding of the contributions of all possible models of settlement form as we can achieve. Because rigid templates are as destructive in physical design as they are in social, economic and overall community planning, the following snapshots of how each of the elements of settlement form discussed above might contribute to meeting the current needs of metropolitan regions in developed nations is intended as a suggestive scenario rather than a universal prescription. With that qualification, it appears that the planned evolution of many great metropolises will benefit from steering future residential and employment growth into secondary centres, located throughout a well-­defined urban region linked along corridors of intensive movement with high-­quality public

transport (Roberts  2014). Urban Growth Boundaries would mark the outer edges of the regional metropolis, ensuring opportunities for continuing contact with nature and spaces for conservation of natural life and habitats. Within the metropolitan region, growth would be promoted in development corridors by public transport investment and coordinated programs of social and physical infrastructure, separated by river valleys and creek corridors providing space for both conservation and recreation. Selective, intensive and carefully regulated multi-­ storey development could help cater to the increasingly prevalent one and two-­ person households. These could be suitably located on brownfield sites being made available through technological and land use changes within existing metropolitan areas such as the grounds of relocated schools, old docks, ports and railway marshalling yards, relinquished or relocated military training areas and abandoned industrial and storage sites. These may sometimes involve remediation to remove noxious or polluting chemicals. Heights should be restricted to between six and eight storeys (20–30 m) to maintain human scale and harmony with existing tree canopies. Densities should be limited to 200–300 dwellings per hectare to ensure that individual and household access to open space and sunshine are safeguarded. Some new green field locations may be needed and these should be found in places selected for their appropriate positions in the regional systems of transport, open space, habitat, conservation and employment, rather than for their ease of land assembly, as is frequently the case at present. Their development should be based on the same principles of clustered growth, occupying land acquired at rates determined to be fair by public and accountable valuation authorities. Both existing and new settlements can be planned and managed to evolve as lively communities. Clustered cellular and compact local centres and neighbourhoods can be separated from each other by flood-­ prone creek corridors of nature conservation. Such new developments can be managed by development corporations with memberships drawn from people with established professional expertise and clear commitment to the public interest within the public, private, voluntary and academic sectors. Although the resulting settlement pattern would maintain much of the established suburban mixes of grid and radial streets, the form and social life of the evolving metropolis would be strongly influenced by linear ribbons of denser commercial, cultural and residential development along



tree-­ lined public transport boulevards radiating out from the decongested city heart. The shape and density of the resulting metropolitan regions could be described as similar to that of Big Top tents, highest around the central pole, but with lesser concentrations around the ring of secondary poles supporting activities further out, with the whole being secured and firmly pegged into green space at the periphery. This pattern, with the energising flow of information, products and people regularly rippling  back and forth between inner and outer nodes, is well suited to the decentralising energies of a modern world of instantaneous communications and increasing individual independence.

Conclusion: bringing places to life This chapter opened by indicating that even the most  accomplished design could not reclaim bad planning and that it is not possible to create beautiful spaces out of destructive or damaging activities. The beauty that people recognise intuitively in good designs results partly from appropriate forms responding to valued activities, fitting together to make harmonious patterns. Beauty, therefore, lies not only in the eyes of the beholders but also in their needs, wants and experiences. Over time good planning can become the parent of good design. This grounding of good design in individuals’ perceptions should influence decisions about the control and composition of developments. The logical conclusion is that local residents and users should be fully involved in design processes for their localities, starting from the earliest stages, using similar participatory techniques to those that Kevin Lynch and Randolph Hester applied in developing their vocabularies, describing how people experience and value their neighbourhoods and cities. A second conclusion about process is equally clear: neither architectural fashion nor engineering innovation has justifiable claims to exclusive rights to shape community spaces or structures, though they may both contribute to generating interesting options. People’s choices and decisions should precede and inform the designs, which give expression to them. For instance, choices affecting  the basic design issues of grain, density, form and spatial arrangement in Neighbourhood Plans should be parts of detailed discussions to reconcile and resolve objectives among residents, agencies and other participants. This logic demands that design be as much a bottom-­up process of consultation

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and discussion as a top-­down one based on professional inspiration and experiment. Communities should therefore be empowered to participate in design decisions concerning physical forms as well as the choices of activities of residence, work or movement that they will accommodate. Given opportunity, people often tend to favour different styles for different locations and urban design can reflect this diversity of scales and intensities by a matching variety of forms that will add interest and legibility to everyday places. We need, for instance, local living areas that are deeply reassuring, harmonious and sociable and other, more central, intensive and widely shared spaces that can be more dramatic and inspiring. Different design principles and patterns can provide the raw materials for this stimulating variety. Adopted as templates, innovative construction systems and abstract design patterns consign control to decision-­makers far removed from the actual locations being developed, reducing cities and neighbourhoods to the deadening repetition of the cookie cutter or the ant heap. Used as models of choice and palettes of portrayal, however, they can open our  minds to the possibilities of new combinations and innovations to match new situations. This logic suggests that design be as much a ‘bottom up’ process of consultation and discussion as a ‘top down’ one of individual inspiration and entrepreneurship. Opportunities for the required  participation and empowerment can be promoted by community forums and membership of Neighbourhood Planning Teams. Places for meeting and cultural expression such as community halls and compact local parks can themselves contribute to the discussions leading to planning and development that can continue to evolve in step with social and political change. Rather than a separate and specialist activity, design can again become an enlivening part of everyday life and discussion.

Endnotes i In his influential and imaginative A Pattern Language (1977), Alexander and his collaborators aim to identify options to help people confronted by design challenges to meet their needs and hopes, by illustrating patterns that have proved successful across space and time. They identify, discuss and illustrate 253 of them, starting with large scale ‘Independent Regions’ and concluding with ‘Things in Your Life’, many explored further in the companion volume, A Timeless Way of Building (1979). The four titles of his most recent series, Nature of Order, summarise the views that he has now

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come to hold: these title are: The Phenomenon of Life; The Process of Creating Life; A Vision of a Living World; and The Luminous Ground. He adopts the starting point that designed environments should aim to enhance and extend ‘lifefulness’, and he develops the 15 principles shown in Box 9.3, which are intuitively derived to achieve this end, centering around the enhancement of life and the creation of wholeness. As a mathematician by early training, Alexander has natural interests in science and structure, which have informed his inquiry the nature of order. He interprets this as consisting of repeated and self-­ sustaining relationships between greater and lesser systems and centres, occurring at sequences of scales, in an ever elaborating chain, from galactic constellations, through solar and planetary systems, down to the basic structure of matter, composed of molecules, consisting in their turn of atoms formed of protons and neutrons. Alexander reaches the conclusion that design needs to respect and promote this natural order through the formation of new wholes combining component systems and their centres, reflecting the complex but coherent chain that  ultimately unifies all life and matter. His argument concludes that the challenge for intentional design is to replicate the processes by which places and settlements naturally come into being, achieve life and continue to evolve, and which therefore underlie the nature of urban, as much as material, order. ii Under the provisions of the Maori Reserved Land Act of 1955, the Resource Management Act of 1991 and the Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993, Marae are owned in perpetuity by the Maori Iwi and are controlled by designated traditional custodians (Ministry of Maori Development 2022). iii The importance of public space in maintaining the political health of communities is strongly argued by the philosopher of communicative rationality, Jurgen Habermas (1984). Public spaces provide arenas for the informal politics of personal discussion and the possibility of public demonstrations of support or dissent. iv The large scale and long term ideas of Constantin Doxiadis are still attracting influential adherents and supporters (Burdett and Sudjic 2008). However, they can easily deteriorate into mere pattern making and elevate pursuit of the trend to support ambitious but insecure prophesies. They may also be used to justify schemes that actually require further mixed scanning and more detailed local analysis of their economic impacts and unintended social and physical consequences.

References Adams, R. (2009). Transforming Australian Cities for a More Financially Viable and Sustainable Future. Melbourne: City of Melbourne and Victorian Departments of Transport and Planning & Community Development. Alexander, C. (1964, reprinted 1979). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Alexander, C. (2002a). The Nature of Order, Book One The Phenomenon of Life. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environ­ mental Structure. Alexander, C. (2002b). The Nature of Order, Book Two, The Process of Creating Life. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, C. (2002c). The Nature of Order, Book Three, A Vision of a Living World. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, C. (2002d). Book Four, The Luminous Ground. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Appleton, J. (1996). The Experience of Landscape. Chichester: Wiley. Ascona/Locarno (2022). Market of Luino, Italia. https:// www.ascona-­l ocarno.com/en/commons/details/ Market-­of-­Luino-­Italia-­/2911 (accessed 14 February 2022). Bentley, I. (ed.) (1985). Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers. London: Architectural Press. Buchanan, C. and Partners (1968). The South Hampshire Study. London: HMSO. Burdett, R. and Sudjic, D. (ed.) (2008). The Endless City. London: Phaidon. Burgess, E. (1972). The growth of the city. In: The City, Problems of Planning (ed. M. Stewart), 117–129. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (1983). Calcutta Metropolitan Statistics, 1983. Calthorpe, P. (1993). The Next American Metropolis, Ecology, Community and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Calthorpe, P. and Fulton, W. (2001). The Regional City: Planning For the End Of Sprawl. Washington, DC: Island Press. Denes, A. (2003). Agnes Denes, Projects for Public Places. Lewisburg, PA: Samek Art Gallery. Doxiadis, C. (1968). Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. London: Hutchinson. Fishman, R. (1982). Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hall, P. (1977). The World Cities. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hall, P. (2014). Good Cities, Better Lives, How Europe Discovered and Lost the Art of Urbanism. London: Routledge. Hester, R. (1985). Subconscious landscapes of the heart. Places 2 (3): 10–22. Hester, R. (1989). Social values in open space design. Places 6 (1): https://placesjournal.org/assets/legacy/ pdfs/social-­values-­in-­open-­space-­design.pdf (accessed 6 April 2023). Hester, R. (2010). Designs for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heywood, P. (1969). Plangloss: a critique of permissive planning. Town Planning Review 40 (3): 251–262.



Heywood, P., Crane, P., Egginton, A., and Gleeson, J. (1997). In or Out? Out and About: Report on Young People in Major Centres. Brisbane: Brisbane City Council and QUT eprints https://eprints.qut.edu.au/215892/ (accessed 7 December 2022). International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) (1980). World Heritage Listing No 138, Mohenjo Daro. http://whc.unesco.org/archive/advisory_body_eval uation/138.pdf (accessed 7 December 2022). Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Jamieson, G., Mackay, W., and Latchford, J. (1967). Transportation and land use structures. https://www .semanticscholar.org/paper/Transportation-­a nd-­ Land-­Use-­Structures-­Jamieson-­Mackay/3545cf98f96cc 357af547845e819c06c8644e166 (accessed 31 July 2022). Kropotkin, P. (1974). Fields, Farms and Workshops of Tomorrow. London: Allen & Unwin  (first published, 1899, Boston). Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1961). ‘The Pattern of Metropolis’ Daedalus. Winter 90 (1): 77–98. Lynch, K. (1984). Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manley, B. (1996). The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt. London: Penguin. Manning, I. (1984). Beyond Walking Distance. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Menzies, C., Rogan, B., and Heywood, P. (1996). Social Planning Guidelines. Brisbane: Local Government Association of Queensland. https://au.search.yahoo . c o m / y h s / s e a rc h ? h s p a r t = m n e t & h s i m p = y h s -­ 001&type=type9097303-­spa-­4056-­84481¶m1=405 6¶m2=84481&p=Menzies%2C+C.%2C+Rogan%2 C+B.%2C+%26+Heywood%2C+P.%2C+1997%2C+Soc ial+Planning+Guidelines%2C+Brisbane%2C+Local+G overnment+Association+of+Queensland.++ (accessed 25 January 2023). Ministry of Maori Development (2022). Marae. https:// www.tpk.govt.nz/en/nga-­p utea-­m e-­n ga-­r atonga/ marae/oranga-­ marae/marae (accessed 7 December 2022).

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Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History, its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harcourt, NY: Brace & World. Nelson, J. and Dueker, K. (1990). The exurbanization of America and its planning policy implications. Journal of Planning Education and Research 9 (2): 91–100. Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (2020). Statewide planning goals. https:// www.oregon.gov/lcd/OP/Pages/Goal-­1 .aspx (accessed 16 October 2021). Puget Sound Regional Council (2022). Vision 2050. https://www.psrc.org/planning-­2 050/vision-­2 050 (accessed 7 December 2022). Queensland Government Department of Infrastructure & Planning (2009). South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009–2031. Brisbane: Author. Queensland Government Department of Infrastructure & Planning, (2017). Southeast Queensland Regional Plan, 2017 Shaping SEQ. https://www.data.qld.gov.au/ dataset/south-­e ast-­q ueensland-­regional-­p lan-­2 017-­ shapingseq-­series (accessed 17 February 2022). Roberts, B. (2014). Managing systems of secondary cities: policy responses in international development., Cities Alliance. https://www.academia.edu/16904361/ Managing_Systems_of_Secondary_Cities_Policy_ Responses_in_International_Development (accessed 11 November 2021). Thubron, C. (2007). Shadow of the Silk Road. London: Vintage. Walker, J. (2010). Human transit. http://www.human transit.org/2010/02/vancouver-­the-­almost-­perfect-­ grid.html (accessed 6 December 2022). Webber, M. (1964). The urban place and nonplace urban realm. In: Explorations into Urban Structure (ed. M. Webber), 79–153. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Webber, M. (1968). Planning in an environment of change, Part 1: Beyond the industrial age. Town Planning Review 39 (3): 179–195. Webber, M. (1969). Planning in an environment of change, Part 2: Permissive planning. Town Planning Review 39 (4): https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/ doi/10.3828/tpr.39.4.c058xp738v338600 (accessed 6 April 2023).

10

Community Governance and Participation Introduction: intentions and organisation of the chapter

Chapters 7 to 9 explored the ways in which the wide range of human activities, including housing, health, economy and transport, can be drawn together to create vital and interesting places. This penultimate chapter now turns to another, equally important, kind of wholeness, which is  involved in expressing community choices in political governance and management. In exploring the best possible quality and integration of all these diverse activities, the chapter is organised into the following six sections: 1. Governance, government and community participation 2. Roles and responsibilities in governance and participation 3. Issues of freedom and order 4. The roles of negotiation and partnership in resolving conflicts 5. The development and evaluation of policies, proposals and community initiatives 6. Scales of community and their roles in governance and control 7. Conclusion: The contributions of participation and governance to community life

Governance, government and community participation The widespread view that governance is simply a grand name for what governments do is far from true. Sustaining productive and fair community life has always involved far more than merely having representatives make laws to regulate common ground rules of behaviour. It extends to maintaining the active participation necessary to negotiate common aims and shared actions. For instance,

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

governments cannot achieve lasting peace if many people are unwilling to stop fighting, as happened for years following the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nor can they continue to prosecute a war if people are unwilling to fight, as occurred with United States citizens in the Vietnam War and ultimately in the prolonged conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan. As well as public opinion, voluntary associations and organisations also play influential roles in pluralist societies. In the United States, for example, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Audubon Society and in Britain, The National Trust, Ramblers Association and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) are highly effective players in national environmental policy and governance, and exert positive influences on legislation. Religious and charitable bodies, trade unions and business organisations also influence governance policies and are increasingly active in actually delivering public services for their members and the wider society, often attracting funding from governments for these purposes (Etzioni  2004). Similar allocations of roles also occur between official and voluntary organisations in activities ranging from housing and social services to education. At the global scale, organisations such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, World Vision, Medecins San Frontieres and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all exert beneficial influences on national and international policies. It would be a serious oversight to overlook their influential participation and to concentrate solely on the patterns and mechanisms of representation. Political events of the last 20 years in the USA provide further evidence that community participation can contribute to shaping important political outcomes, both positively and negatively. The 2008 and 2012 elections of Barack Obama to the presidency, for instance, owed much to the well-­ coordinated activism of the multitude of his community supporters and their individually



small but cumulatively very large financial contributions (National Post 2010; Obama 2008, 2020, pp. 98–100). By contrast, the lack of such a popular base vitiated the campaign of the established party stalwart, Hilary Clinton. Obama’s State of the Union speeches were largely directed to these community members, whose participation in health promotion, job creation, economic development,  education, progressive taxation and bank support, he was aiming to mobilise. Elsewhere, the lack of such effective civil society participation played important roles in the failure of the formally democratic regimes of Iraq following the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and of Afghanistan throughout the first two decades of this century. In both countries elected governments found the winning of assent and maintenance of law and order almost impossible to achieve in the face of impassioned opposition from large and disaffected minority groups and lukewarm participation from shifting majorities. At the urban scale, in multi-­ethnic communities in all continents, cities often struggle to find effective ways to maintain consensual government. In Copenhagen, in 2009, for instance, gang warfare flared between local right-­wing youth gangs and ethnic minority groups in open street battles (Joumaa  2009) and later in the year there were further street confrontations associated with the Climate Change Conference. In France, President Macron has struggled to maintain peaceful control of city streets in the face of the ‘Yellow Vest’ demonstrations and protests against perceived inter-­ class grievances. In Mumbai, conflict has simmered for years between Hindus and Muslims who have often been blamed for such acts of terror as the 2008 hotel attacks, which killed 179 people (Britannica  2023). In Urumqui in the Uighur province of Xinjiang, in Western China, the June, 2009 riots against exclusion of local people from equal participation with Chinese Han immigrants in the civil life of the region resulted in the death of nearly two hundred people and injuries to nearly two thousand (Li  2009). Later discontent of the Uighurs with imposed Central Chinese Government controls and suppression of their predominant Muslim religion led to mass passive resistance and imposed re-­ education activities that have attracted widespread international condemnation and continue to be a running sore on the face of China’s international reputation (Council on Foreign Relations  2021). The clear conclusion is that in issues of community governance, as much attention needs to be devoted to willing participation by individuals

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and communities as to means of implementing and enforcing the official policies of governing political parties.

Roles and responsibilities in governance and participation representation

Nevertheless, of the four widely accepted roles of government  –  agency to run affairs; services to meet social and individual needs; regulation to ensure standards and safety; and representation of citizens to validate the exercise of authority- it is the role of representation that is the most characteristic in contemporary society (Gunlicks 1981). It is certainly true that commitment to the honest selection of representatives enshrines democratic principles of the rights of electoral majorities to give and remove mandates. However, it also responds to the fascination with personality, especially in local and national politics, which is a continuing theme of the public life of contemporary society. Political contests are often shaped by insatiable appetites for such battles among competing interests and views. As an alternative to participation, society is offered periodic gladiatorial contests, in which the winner takes all, albeit for a limited period of time. The fact that this model of representative democracy may involve little continuing  active participation was recognised as long ago as the mid-­nineteenth century by one of the founding fathers of modern social democracy. In his essay, On Liberty, J.S. Mill wrote that, by contrast with prevailing practice, democracy should entail: every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called upon to take an actual part in that government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general (Mill 1983, p. 207). This ideal has never been entirely abandoned and is now strongly enacted  in the politics of community engagement and collaborative social enterprise, that is reflected every day in the voluntary activities of countless local communities. Urban farms, community meals, choirs, gardens, environmental and bush care groups and many others all play vital roles in free societies. Important links can develop between voluntary activities and representative government. For instance, in the initial 2000  Mayoral elections for the Greater

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London Council, Ken Livingstone’s successful campaign was originally allied with no major political party, but relied on the voluntary participation of individuals and local groups who supported his policies on such issues as strengthening local government participation in the provision of affordable social housing; maintaining public transport in public ownership and the development of London as an inclusive and welcoming World City (Wikipedia 2022). The Mayors of both Curitiba and Bogota similarly call upon the support and commitment of local groups in pursuing public transport policies that favoured the mass of the working population rather than the affluent, car-­owning elite (UrbanizeHub 2022; Uncover Columbia 2020; Netland 2012). The Roles of Leadership Such links between representation and leadership can be traced back more than two millennia to the three decades of Pericles’ repeated re-­election as the city’s Strategos or Civic leader in 5th Century  BCE Athens. In his hallmark funeral oration for warriors lost in the Peloponnesian War, he proclaimed that Athenians would always be victorious in such conflicts because their courage would be buoyed by their roles as free citizens in selecting the leaders of a democratic city, whereas the leadership of the traditional enemy of Sparta was a class prerogative, with the lives and interests of helots (serfs) being systematically discounted (Popper  1998; Fox  2008).i Athens was strong because she enjoyed equal commitments to both representative democracy (voting for the selection of Strategoi) and participation (performing roles as jurors and convenors of civic activities). Such combinations have numbers of advantages. They reinforce the healthy capacity for people to identify their own interests with those of the larger community and to exercise their voting rights to ensure the effective working of the system. Decisive action, often crucial in times of rapid internal and external change and threats, is favoured.ii Also, the roles of positive leadership in energising local community life are no less important. Strong leaders can confront electorates with the need to take choices and to create and contribute the resources for their implementation. Such authentic leaders, having themselves recognised the need to provide the means, once they have willed the ends, can also confront their electorates to do likewise. This role was well expressed by Gordon Campbell, later the Premier of British Columbia when as Chair of the Greater Vancouver Regional Council in the

welcoming speech quoted earlier in Chapter 3, to members of the ‘Council of Councils’ in Vancouver, he said ‘You can have anything you want. But you can’t have everything, and you can’t have it right now  –  you must take choices!’ (Campbell  1993). Such local and regional leadership is a crucial part of community governance. Selection of representatives In modern mass societies, often composed of communities of many millions of people, choosing representatives to take decisions on their behalf may appear to become a logical necessity. It is argued that resulting losses of direct personal agency can be justified by the gains resulting from being members of ‘Open Societies’, where discussion and challenge can create continuous social dialogue (Popper  1998). Representation of both electorates and ideas can be regularly contested, accepted, rejected or modified so that political debate can acquire the character of repeated conjectures, refutations and reformulations. Institutionally, it is argued, this should give rise to societies where freedom is guaranteed by the rights of electorates periodically to reject and remove representatives and entire governments that they no longer support. The familiar press and TV depictions of whole assemblages of former presidents or prime ministers gathered together in one room, alive and confident, but no longer empowered, should give us all cause for celebration. They have been removed from power by neither revolutions nor violence and are able amicably to reminisce and criticise their successors. Quantity and quality Representation also has very strong links with the issues of scale and measurement that are such strong skeins in contemporary society, which thrives on the counting of numbers and opinion polling and turns the arithmetic of popularity into dominating matters of media discussion and public interest. The recurrent dramas of elections and the counting of votes have been extended to include the regular reviews and reports of focus groups, providing further links between representation and participation and sensitising governments to the likely electoral consequences of adopting particular polices. Representative governments and political parties are increasingly using such opinion polling to test the popularity of policies before they are adopted, or to change them when the mood of public opinion shifts.



The operations of representative democracy Over the last three centuries, representative or delegated democracy has developed a number of useful mechanisms that have come to be accepted as necessary safeguards and best practices. These include the division and separation of powers; the rules of accountability; the integration of contemporary communications technology and the encouragement of volunteering. The familiar separation of powers between legislative parliaments, executive governments and independent judiciaries has become a standard principle. Montesquieu’s formulation of the doctrine, in his 1747 book The Spirit of the Laws, was based on his interpretation of the prevailing British system. He advocated adoption of its separation powers to ensure that each form of authority – legislative, executive and judicial  –  could act as an effective check on the others and thereby forestall the development of the absolutist centralised control that characterised the doomed French monarchical system of that time. First, elective legislatures representing many interests, should  frame laws informed by a wide range of information and values. Next executive agencies, bound by the powers conferred by these laws would need to devise programs for the good conduct and progress of their societies, requiring oversight of an independent public service sector including a law enforcement arm and a number of continuing departments to provide and regulate approved services. Finally, an independent judiciary would ensure that no one, neither government, business corporations, nor private citizens, would be above the law. This doctrine has been criticised by some twentieth-­ century leaders in Africa and Asia as being excessively conditioned by Western political traditions of adversarial individualism that are inappropriate to more cooperative and consensual societies (influenced, perhaps, by the ‘Monsoon Culture’ of necessary collaboration to manage the dramatic effects of annual monsoon floods and the need to maintain complex irrigations systems). The argument is made that there is a tradition of natural leadership in such societies, where everyone cooperates for the undisputed good of the whole community, which is the polar opposite of the doctrine, discussed earlier, of ‘conjectures and refutations’ as the levers of progress in western societies. Twentieth-­century leaders such as Premier Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, President Mahathir of Malaysia, and President Suharto in Indonesia, for instance, consistently argued along these lines. However, these ideas have not been

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well supported by the test of outcomes. President Suharto was discredited and superseded by a regime giving more respect to the separation of powers, and President Mahathir’s imprisonment of political opponents was overturned by subsequently elected governments. Meanwhile, the most successful economies and societies in East Asia include countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which aim to incorporate the separation of powers in their governments. The evidence is that these limitations over the powers of government exercised by independent judiciaries and legislatures provide an important balance, in whatever continent or stage of development they may be. They erect safeguards to protect the rights of individuals against the development of monopoly powers by central governments, which is missing in such authoritarian regimes as those of contemporary Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and the military regimes of Myanmar and Thailand (The Atlantic 2019). A more insidious threat to good governance is the tendency for actual power to be concentrated in the hands of unelected and often overburdened bureaucrats. This could be described as the doctrine of the ‘altruistic bureaucrat’ inherent in the case made out for representative government by Jeremy Bentham in the early nineteenth century. He argued that public servants – motivated by the ‘Pleasure/Pain Principle’ to achieve the best possible outcomes for the general population – would therefore seek to confer maximum benefits upon the wider society (Mill 1983). In practice, the growth of increasingly large and centralised bureaucracies has frequently resulted in the development of damaging social, psychological and physical distances between public servants and the people for whose welfare they are responsible, often compounded by the ‘tyranny of the template’. This process was tellingly satirised by Franz Kafka in the early twentieth century, in his novels America (reprinted  1949), The Castle (reprinted  1974), and The Trial (reprinted  1994), depicting individuals isolated, swamped and drowning in seas of circumstances dictated by distant decisions. Jurgen Habermas (1987) similarly warns against the displacement of the direct experience of the ‘lifeworld’ by the deadening formality  –  and often irrelevance  –  of the ‘systemworld’, that is often created by the operations of bureaucracies of large electorates (Habermas  1987). These kinds of critiques have led to the rapid rise, popularity and adoption of the important ‘Principle of Subsidiarity’, ordaining that control over activities should devolve to the most local level at which they can

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be effectively performed, in order to reduce the distance between decision points and action points and to involve local people both in decisions about their communities’ governance and in actually taking over significant parts of the delivery of services themselves (Law Explorer 2016). A further and particularly significant aspect of this is the recognition of the importance of the participation of voluntary organisations in governance, embracing the idea of ‘Third Way’ politics (Mawson, 2008). This aims to supercede total control by either state or market interests, to also include collaboration within and among communities to identify and meet their own needs collaboratively. The increasingly common term ‘social enterprises’ provides an accurate description of bodies as diverse as Housing Associations and Workers’ Cooperatives that aim to achieve social benefits rather than financial profits, and to do so with the energy and pride in performance often claimed for commercial organisations. ACCOUNTABILITY Safeguards over the responsibility of governments often take the form of measures of accountability for  administrations and officials. Commentators have pointed out the key roles that transparent processes and guaranteed publicity can play in reinforcing such accountability (Rawls  1971; Robertson 2009). In recent decades, this has been made both more necessary and more feasible by the dramatic spread of digital technology and rights of public access to information. A notorious breach of these requirements occurred in the 2016–2019 ‘robot-­debt’ fiasco in Australia, involving the automated attempt to collect AUD$ 1.2 billion of alleged debt from nearly 200,000 disadvantaged welfare recipients by the now superseded Morrison Government. Following a change of government, a Royal Commission has been established to investigate the circumstances surrounding the illegal establishment and continuation for three years of the scheme and its disastrous outcomes, including a number of suicides by  people wrongly accused of welfare fraud (Australian Government  2022; Thompson  2022). Although the 2023 Royal Commission has been successful in extracting admissions from senior public servants who suppressed advice on the illegality of the scheme because they knew that it would not be welcomed by responsible Ministers, this is occurring too late to bring back or redeem lost or shattered lives. Although requirements for the widespread and advanced dissemination of the aims, programs and intended outcomes of such schemes and community plans

can help to ensure that actual performance can be judged against clearly stated intentions and legislated standards, such  breaches may be revealed too late to prevent disastrous consequences. Early community consultation, participation and active involvement are also needed. Since their adoption in the mid-­twentieth century, the International Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights have laid out clear and effective overarching public expectations of accountability to encourage such early participation. At directly operational levels, specific statements of guiding principles such as Oregon’s Statewide Planning Goals and numerous health, education and workplace charters around the western world have proved highly effective in sensitising local planning systems to citizen rights (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2021). However, accountability, involving legal controls specifying rights of redress, restitution and removal will always can only  be the protection of last resort against excesses of elected governments and their administrations. Geoffrey Robertson (1999, 2005) points out that ultimate security against bad government and tyranny is strengthened by such  prospects of retribution. In future, leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Vladimir Putin and the perpetrators of mass killings in Rwanda and Sudan will need to be looking over their shoulders at those who may bring them to judgement against internationally accepted standards of human rights. In the same way, local communities who know and understand the principles and processes that should guide policy development and plan adoption are in a stronger position to participate in promoting their future health, amenity and prosperity. Accountability therefore can be seen as extending beyond the negatives of redress to embrace and support the encouragement of participation, giving rise to a variety of approaches to maintain the validity of decision-­making and personal choice, despite the increasing scale of modern societies, strongly influenced by the power of impersonal market forces. Forms of participation The search for such validating community  contributions has led to a number of different proposed solutions, including participatory democracy itself (Kropotkin  1974; Orwell  1938; Weill  2002); direct democracy (Fishkin  2011), deliberative democracy (Fishkin 2016) and most recently monitory democracy (Keane 2022). Direct democracy proposes the management and control of as many activities as possible



by local groups of directly involved people. It thus has strong links to the Principle of Subsidiarity, proposing that control of all activities be devolved to the most local level at which they can be effectively performed, inherited from the organising principles of various Christian Churches and identified by De Toqueville (2010) as already operating in many parts of nineteenth century USA. From the standpoint of Community Planning, this is highly relevant, providing a continuing criterion to ensure a maximum possible level of community involvement. Deliberative Democracy has much in common with the ideas of Jurgen Habermas, favouring the authenticity of face-­ to-­ face discussion around a table or discussion space, allowing participants to take account of each other’s ideas and to contribute their own responses in an upward spiral of understanding and development (Fishkin  2011,  2016). John Keane’s concept of Monitory Democracy (2022), which is linked to the  principles of accountability  discussed above, seeks to reclaim the growing scale, complexity and fallibilities of contemporary representative systems by ensuring accountability through the conscious monitoring and control of often remote governments by oversight of bodies such as independent judiciaries, Councils of Social Service and Environmental Protection Authorities. However, such organisations themselves need the  guarantees of representative legitimacy and local validation. Otherwise, they may offer little more than privileged commentary by self-­selected groups of enthusiasts or professionals. Like other forms of participatory democracy, Keane’s Monitory Democracy thus needs to balance the authenticity of maximum individual involvement with the validating processes of representative oversight. The two approaches of representation and community monitoring can both benefit from being combined in continuing and mutually respectful dialogues and partnerships. Flexible and innovative methods All systems of government stand to gain from thoughtful and flexible adaptation to social and technological changes. Renaissance monarchies, for instance, quickly incorporated the invention of the printing press and adoption of the use of gunpowder to expand the scope and scale of their control, encouraging the development of the nation states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similarly, the spread of mass literacy over the last two centuries provided better informed and more alert electorates, which advanced the introduction

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and practices of representative democracy. Now, the information technology revolution of the last 30 years offers prospects of more rapid and widely based participation in identifying public needs and preferences. Cell phones and tablets have become mini-­ computers, and well-­ sorted information is readily available to anyone with access to a phone network. We have seen in Chapter 8, Facets of Community that this may result in two-­way ‘tugs of war’ between the central control of technology by global scale communication giants such as Facebook/­ Meta, Microsoft, Google and News Ltd, and networks of more inclusive interest groups committed to causes like environmental conservation, social justice, open access and reduction of income disparities. Mediating between them are new agents of open access and sourcing like Wikipedia and the Wiki movement, based on the idea that good ideas will drive out bad ones through open posting of information, deletion and replacement. They aim to apply well-­established processes of knowledge development by publication, review and reformulation to ensure that the information they circulate through the powerful accelerator of the Internet is continually checked against standards of evidence and truth. Representative democracies can respond to such  opportunities to ground policy development directly in public preferences, making use of such techniques as rapid opinion polling, referenda and virtual community conferences to illuminate public concerns and priorities (Mackay  2021). Such approaches are supported by increasingly clear evidence that people of wide ranges of  education and attitude find information technology and social media enjoyable, which could transform their experience of conventional contemporary politics. For instance, the 2008 and 2012 elections of Barack Obama to the United States presidency, discussed earlier in this chapter, were assisted by these new techniques of more active mass participation. Throughout the country, people with community development interests pooled their support for a candidate who shared their commitments to both community development and community voice, using electronic fund-­raising networks to outweigh large corporate sponsorships. However, the later 2016 election of Donald Trump relied even more on the widespread messaging of social media and mass public recruitment to assemble support for opposing, populist interests in successive presidential elections, reaching a vivid climax in the 2020 storming of Congress by disaffected Trump supporters. Clearly, technology is neither inherently

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good nor bad for democratic governance, but a neutral tool amplifying the values and attitudes of its sponsors. It thus requires demands  prudent regulation by representative governments. Current concerns over the legitimacy and responsiveness of representative government It is easy to over-­estimate the proneness to venality, self-­seeking and extravagance of current representative systems. Commercial media operators, at least as prone to these vices as politicians, often enlarge on such themes with self-­righteous indignation, particularly when it is expedient to re-­focus public attention away from their own failings and those of national and international capital and banking systems in which the commercial media is itself heavily invested, as was the case at the height of the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. Nevertheless, democratic regimes do seem to be experiencing pervasive problems of political behaviour that can be both illegal and unapologetically self-­ justifying.iii Modern information and communication technology is increasingly revealing situations where politicians go beyond the normal range of human behaviour to exhibit failings that the community does not want to accept in public figures. The routine misappropriation of allowances by many members of the United Kingdom parliament, amounting in many cases to over 200,000 pounds sterling for a single Member of Parliament, and ultimately  resulting in the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, was not an encouraging development for English politics and the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ (Wikipedia 2018). Later, in 2020–2021, repeated scandals over rorting by Australian Government Ministers to favour their own constituencies for government programs led to widespread demands for a Commonwealth Government Integrity and Corruption Commission, resisted by then Prime Minister Morrison on the grounds that it would lead to a ‘Star Chamber’ that would infringe the personal freedom of federal politicians (Crowe 2021). The incoming 2022 Albanese government has now announced plans for the establishment of such a standing commission, during the course of 2023 (Australian Government Attorney General’s Department  2022). People do expect their leaders to set examples of financial probity, and failure to achieve these can result in voter apathy, abstention, non-­cooperation, or, in more extreme cases, demonstrative acts of political dissent and even violence.

Communities committed to maintaining representative democracy (perhaps on the Churchillian basis that however serious its failings, all the available alternative systems are evidently worse), may need to search for ways to improve the quality and performance of candidates for political office. A case can be made that, just as people need to qualify to practice as doctors, so we should seek evidence of the qualifications of candidates to stand for electoral office. One plausible criterion could be the performance of some period, possibly between two and five years, of voluntary community service, in such activities as access support, aged care, community education or engage­ ment, cultural promotion, environmental maintenance, social welfare or sports and recreation promotion. This would have the triple benefit of establishing the genuine interest of potential political leaders in community life and welfare; ensuring first-­hand knowledge of the dilemmas faced by disadvantaged groups; and providing the opportunity for future candidates to demonstrate capacity, honesty and public spirit. It would also provide an effective training ground in public affairs. Another beneficial requirement would be the systematic participation of elected representatives in public dialogues, in line with the ideas of deliberative democracy. People are entitled  –  and may be very interested – to learn the views on current controversies of their Member of Parliament or local Councillor. As societies, we are still awaiting the delivery of the ‘Technology Dividend’ of time saved by the power of automation and information technology, which is instead resulting in further and unequal material acquisition and multiplication of activities. It would be more beneficial to apply that increase in individual productivity to making time for participation in face-­to-­face dialogue and debate about the ends and means of shared community life, also including the active participation of local representatives.iv Volunteer activism Volunteer individuals and groups play increasingly widely recognised roles in the operation of representative democracies and are ideal partners to help governments of all scales develop and implement policies, ranging from regular support for the homeless to disaster recovery. Individual volunteer  involvement in such activities is  discussed in more detail in the next section, reviewing ‘Community agency’. Qualified by both knowledge and



commitment, their participation is a significant social advantage, increasingly an economic necessity and a potential political safeguard against centralist conformity, the dead hand of standardisation and the tyranny of the template. Community agency In Western societies, the balance between extremes of government involvement and abstention in the everyday activities of their societies has swung backwards and forwards over the last two and a half centuries.v As nationalistic mercantilism gave way to free market economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the view that ‘that government is best which governs least’ was used to justify minimal agency on the part of governments, largely restricted to defence, policing and promotion of trade among individuals and companies (Barber  1967). Education and social welfare were mainly left to religious and other voluntary groups. However, the results of these ‘laissez faire’ policies rapidly became unacceptable. Cholera proved to be no respecter of persons. Slum housing bred bad health and enfeebled workers. Duplicated and unsafe railway lines, competitively erected by private entrepreneurs, dislocated shared settlements, destroying regional landscapes long treasured by all classes. In England, public policy practitioners and Utilitarian philosophers and such as Edwin Chadwick and John Stuart Mill (1983) urged that governments should recognise the need for concerted action to achieve common goals of progress and productivity.vi In rapid succession, first in Britain, then in Germany, France and the United States, governments at national and local scales took on major roles in health, housing, education, public transport, public open space and cultural promotion. Reaction against these energetic and demanding roles set in by the mid-­twentieth century, with such prominent examples as Freidrich Von Hayek’s apocalyptic denunciation of the Road to Serfdom (1944) and Josef Schumpeter’s more cautious advocacy of the role of evolutionary capitalism in generating productive innovation (Schumpeter  1934). Milton Friedman (1962) argued that J. M. Keynes’ concern with ‘demand side’ regulation and stimulus would not maximise prosperity as much as ‘supply side’ policies that allowed for people’s predilections for consumption and investment to encourage maximum economic growth. The long mid-­twentieth-­century plateau of prosperity further encouraged governments to withdraw from welfare programs. As a result,

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public housing was sold, public transport privatised, and community spaces were commercialised within developer-­owned shopping centres. ‘Enterprise zones’, such as London’s Docklands, were established to allow developers to largely  make their own rules (Hall 2002). By 1992, Osborne and Gaebler were rationalising these developments by arguing for The Reinvention of Government where public authorities would be engaged in ‘not rowing but steering’. By the time the crest of this wave of self-­ confidence broke in the 2008 housing crisis in the USA and the consequent 2009 Global Financial Crisis, alternative approaches were already available and widely advocated. ‘Third Way’ policies were seeking to draw in the energy of communities and voluntary groups (Giddens  2001; Mawson  2008). Alternative theories of worker’s cooperation, associational economics and micro-­finance were being developed into sets of proposed policies, available to foster collaborative community partnerships (Whyte and Whyte  1989; Bornstein  1997; Cooke and Morgan 1998; Yunus 1998; Mondragon Cooperative Corporation 2022). These ‘Third Way’ options were timely. Working with not-­for-­profit voluntary providers in housing, transport, communications and with regional and national agencies for power and water, governments were enabled to retain public influence in the guidance of activities essential to national economic health but vulnerable to distortion by unmediated market control. Such distortions may result either from their being natural monopolies, which cannot be safely entrusted to privatised control, or because low-­cost provision or impartial controls are needed in the public interest. The option of partnering with voluntary and community organisations becomes increasingly attractive where state and local governments find their own roles restricted by decisions of citizen referenda limiting government expenditure, such as Proposition 13  in California, and various Citizen’s Initiatives in Oregon throughout the 1990s (Citrin and Martin  2010; Thompson and Green  2004). It is significant that Australia’s successful Financial Stimulus Initiative of 2008–2011 was more effective in finding partners for its new housing programs among the not-­for-­profit organisations than in the resurgent merchant banking sector. In both Europe and North America governments and community groups have developed these ‘Third Way’ approaches of delegation into even more positive ‘Fourth Way’ initiatives, with administrations actively collaborating with communities to share new and expanded roles. Van

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der Pennen and Schreuders (2014) and Hall (2014a) explore examples drawn from continuing implementation of the New Towns programmes in the Netherlands’ Ijsselmeer Polders. These have drawn governments to work with volunteer groups in the new towns of Almere, Ede and Lelystadt, to maintain and improve local environments. In Almere, in the relatively prosperous neighbourhood of De Weirden, the plans of local government to authorise construction of a high-­rise building on the site of a local woodland triggered the formation of community groups to oppose the proposal. The success of this protest encouraged the group to develop new ideas for maintaining public spaces, which in turn led to their entering into partnership agreements with the local government to regulate how future public space funds would be used, including allocation to the citizen foundation. In Ede, in the district of Schoonenburg, citizens active in a volunteer group developed the idea of building a footpath to link a number of the neighbourhood’s more scenic locations, including a ‘social sofa’ to encourage community contact. Van der Pennen and Schreuders describe how this evolved into collaboration with the local government: ‘Citizens and institutions worked together as partners in the larger programme of renovation because this was the way to get the best out of both groups’. The community group took over maintenance and improvement of the scenic footpath and other public open spaces, using funding and materials provided by the Provincial Authority, thus affording a good example of ‘Fourth Way’ collaboration between representative governance and local group participation. In Lelystad, in the largely social housing district of Atolwijk, local government had originally envisaged a programme to encourage local people to maintain their rental housing better and improve their contribution to maintaining incidental public spaces. Initial interest from the local community was limited, so the emphasis shifted from persuading local people to do more for themselves to discovering what were their own most important issues  –  a shift from top-­down to bottom-­up goal-­setting. Then, local residents began to organise self-­help and clean-­up groups to achieve some of these goals themselves, demonstrating that a ‘Fourth Way’ develops most readily where it is nurtured by both a supportive state and collaborative local communities. These successes contributed to the later development of the national project Self Organisation in New Towns (Van der Pennen and Schreuders 2014).

In the United States, New York City’s renewal of its decaying old inner city housing in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn (discussed earlier in Chapter 2, The Lives of Local Communities) provides another example of wide-­ranging and actively supported partnerships, on a larger scale and over a longer period (Wolf-­Powers  2014). A further example of collaborative ‘Fourth Way’ community involvement can be found in the current encouragement in the UK for community-­based preparation of Neighbourhood Plans by volunteer committees working in collaboration with, but independent of, local Councils. One such example, the Hadley Woods Neighbourhood Plan, has recently been prepared by the local Neighbourhood Planning Committee in the Enfield area, located in the north western portion of the London Green Belt. Objectives include preserving the existing green character of the area and protecting the Green Belt from intrusions, while ‘promoting the  “Good Growth” that protects the natural environment and views that define much of the character and setting of Hadley Wood’ (Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Planning Forum Committee  2022). While acknowledging that additional housing is needed in the borough, the committee believes that that can be accommodated without release of land from the Green Belt in and around Hadley Wood. The Plan, which avoids any changes to the Green Belt boundaries, will proceed to a local referendum to decide if it should be adopted. Although not mandatory, the committee believe that ‘Our Neighbourhood Plan policies, alongside national, London and Enfield policies and guidelines, will be used by the Council when they assess planning applications for Hadley Wood’ (Hadley Wood Neighbourhood Planning Forum Committee 2022). The logic behind this approach is that community involvement can and should influence the outcomes of development, but in the last resort, cannot entirely supercede or replace the established processes of planning approvals by duly elected representative local governments. It remains to be seen how effective such informal and parallel approaches to collaboration will prove to be.

Issues of freedom and order In considering governance and participation, issues of freedom, order and choice inescapably arise, bringing with them concerns over consent, negotiation and partnership. All government inevitably constrains individual freedoms to some degree, giving rise to concerns about the extent



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to which general rules may intrude on opportunities available to individuals. For example, the maintenance of law and order, which is one of the prime purposes of government, may involve some curtailing of individual freedoms in the interests of safeguarding life and property. Negotiation will be required to ensure that people who share resources, space and urban facilities can come to terms to maintain the social fabric that they all share with each other and with the city as whole. Mutual recognition, discussion and negotiation are needed to balance such concerns. In considering these issues, judgment can be guided by their likely impacts on people’s ability to live full and rewarding lives. Martha Nussbaum advocates a Capabilities Approach that gauges the legitimacy of actions and proposals according to how far they impinge on individuals’ abilities to engage in significant aspects of daily life, including bodily integrity, physical and emotional health, choice, affiliation and leisure pursuits (Nussbaum  2006). Table  10.1 below considers the ways in which the contrasting demands of freedom and order may impact on such daily capabilities. How, for instance, do new proposals affect people’s ability to make full use of their natural endowments of speech, movement, faith and association and their expression in community planning outcomes? Later, Table  10.2 considers how policy development, evaluation and implementation outcomes interact with these concerns of partnership and negotiation.

free speech

Free speech is one of the most treasured human rights and is widely regarded as the guardian of social justice and guarantor of scientific truth (Popper  1998). In its absence, communities may rapidly deteriorate into assemblages of servile subjects like those of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1952). Nevertheless, there are limits: civilized societies need to provide protection against incitements to hatred, ridicule or contempt, which can be determined in processes of open trial. There is also a need to redress wilful and malicious publication of misinformation. As long ago as classical Athens, Plato warned of the ability of lucrative and self-­serving plutocrats to shape public opinion to serve their own interests. Today, the much-­expanded power and reach of the mass media have further increased the dangers of these abuses. Redress against misinformation or wilful distortion needs to be secure and severe enough to discourage media owners and editors from wilful propagation of untrue hearsay, intrusions into personal privacy and unsubstantiated allegations, especially as affecting people’s private lives, and at critical moments of political campaigns. The most positive way to constrain the powers of lucrative media ownerships to control public information and opinion in their own interests is to ensure the existence of alternative secure means of publication of independent information and

Table 10.1  Contrasting community planning implications of liberty and order. Aspect

Liberty

Speech

Freedom of Expression

Movement Information

Belief and Observance Assembly Choice

Order

Individual protection from incitements to hatred, ridicule and contempt Rights to unfettered individual Rights to secure enjoyment movement across land, of safe movement in public water and skies spaces Public and private access to Prevention of criminal or public information demeaning publications or performances, and redress for intentional mass misinformation. Equal and unfettered rights to Prevention of hate religious and cultural beliefs publications, campaigns and and practices actions Rights of free assembly and Preservation of life, property demonstration and prevention of riot Rights to unconstrained Prevention of actions individual and community infringing human and action; and fair and free property rights of others; election to representative and guarantees of respect positions for government decisions

Community planning outcomes Guaranteed public rights to access, discuss and contest information Secure and safely regulated public and community access to spaces for meeting and exchanging Open sourcing and freedom of information, with guaranteed rights of publication, debate and access to non-­abusive matter. Promotion of the contributions to community life of legitimate interest, cultural and faith groups Provision of open access to public places and spaces at all scales Provisions of resources for both community participation and political programs of elected governments Devolution of roles to local groups and communities in line with Principle of Subsidiarity

224 Planning for Community Table 10.2  Applications of negotiation and partnership in achieving community planning outcomes Aspect

Negotiation

Development of policies and proposals

Early consultation of partnering Transparent allocation of communities roles Continuous contact and Appreciation of each others’ continuity of dialogue knowledge and expertise Human relationships within processes Role of engagement in Stakeholder engagement and planning and place negotiation. making Upward spiral of Community involvement in • Action social and environmental • Practice impact studies • Reflection  

Continuous evaluation and problem-­solving

Community Initiatives

Partnership

Community planning outcomes Collaborative Planning arrangements and processes Community Boards, Neighbourhood Associations and Planning Teams Self-­management and implementation by different types of communities Development of consensual ‘policy communities’ and national planning doctrines

• Process •  Revised action process. Charettes and Enquiry by Design. Early communication and Positive listening and Implementation of programs information dialogue Sharing of powers and funds Mutual understanding and Recognition, encouragement Collaborative provision of cooperation and funding support from shared support services governments

opinion. Responsibilities and rights to explain, explore and debate significant issues affecting the current and future life of societies can be advanced by media controlled by not-­ for-­ profit commissions and corporations, responsible to transparent governing bodies operating at arms’ length from national governments. Throughout the world, there are many examples of such good practices at all scales from the open websites and newsletters of many voluntary organisations, through the guaranteed independence of such non-­market institutions as The Guardian  newspaper (2017), to national broadcasters such as The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The United States Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Community planning issues are normally well covered by such organisations. The spread of blogging practices can also assist rights of comment, with free access to cyberspace and open sourcing becoming important aspects of community life. Procedures of challenge and review can both help  remove obscene and misleading material and stimulate dialogue to expand the scope of community awareness and  evaluation of proposals. Wikipedia and Wikimedia are also powerful tools to support access to the best available knowledge, enhancing capacities for both community participation and democratic governance. Nevertheless, cybersphere can be a dangerous place that demands careful regulation by representative governance. Freedom of information involves open access and distribution via well-­ maintained public records, including  the rights of individuals to collect and

distribute true or honest information. Both can provide support for consensual decision-­making and inclusive community planning. However, this right to publicise information and views should not extend to licensing the abuse of the rights of others, including personalised pornography, advocacy of gratuitous violence or techniques of terrorism. In a mixed economy, it is obvious that many things that are personally profitable may not be publicly beneficial. Freedom of communication in community life should therefore be directed to guarantee public access to material needed for fully informed public discussions and decisions and should not extend to personal attacks or vilification.vii The ideal guarantees for such access to information concerning community planning are  sets of Planning Principles such as the Oregon Statewide Planning Goals, which are incorporated in the State’s Land Use Act Goal Number One, Citizen Involvement. This stipulates that a comprehensive plan shall adopt and publicise a program of citizen involvement that clearly identifies the procedures by which the general public will be involved  .  .  .  including continuity of citizen participation and of information that enables citizens to identify and comprehend the issues (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2021). These mandatory goals provide a salutary example of the positive effects that judicious regulation may have upon the enhancement of community life and practical freedoms. This right to information is part of a broader field, termed by Habermas (2008) ‘The Public Sphere’, the health of which depends upon the well-­informed and reflective commentary on current issues of the



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‘the quality press’ and independent radio and television. In the mixed economy which Habermas favours, much of this press may fall under the control of market investors and media moguls and he discusses ways in which the resulting  dangers of bias and distortion in pursuit of personal interests may be avoided or minimised. He advocates incentives for the quality press which must combine inclusion, that is the equal contribution of all citizens, with a more or less discursively conducted conflict of opinions.  .  .. because it also involves criticism of false arguments and value judgements (Habermas 2008, p. 138). Such incentives, Habermas argues, may include tax concessions for media outlets such as The New  York Times and the Washington Post and Die Zeit and Der Speigel, and funding support for broadcasting bodies responsible to independent boards of people appointed for their knowledge and experience, like the British Broadcasting Corporation, the USA’s National Broadcasting Company and the Australian and Canadian Broadcasting Commissions, providing open access for a wide range of views and informed commentary and debate. Social media may pose further and increasingly significant threats with abuses of truth, honesty and decency that may be perpetrated under the anonymity afforded by instant worldwide transmission of inadequately mediated opinion, afforded by the unprecedented reach of the world wide web. This is clearly a case where prudential regulation is required in the interests of safe and healthy community life. The problem then arises of how to avoid abuses of such regulatory powers by repressive governments, reminding us once again that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. freedom of movement

Freedom of movement is scarcely less crucial to participation in the life of active and sociable communities.viii Open pathways across continents, oceans and skies have always attracted those seeking self-­expression and adventure (Exupery  1966; Roesdahl  1998). At a more local scale, civil society has been strengthened by reclaiming traditional rights of way, especially along river banks and coastal foreshores. Nevertheless, there are limitations to unrestricted free public access, which should not be extended to license individuals or official trespassers into private homes or personal spaces. Community planning, therefore, needs to distinguish between public, private, shared and reserved

spaces, with guaranteed free access to homes being limited to their rightful owners and users, or police in possession of a legally certified warrant. There is a third category of shared spaces, where user needs to be regulated, to ensure the essential movement of people and goods. Public rights of way along railway lines, roads, harbour entrances and air spaces are prime examples. Restrictions or charges for the use of such corridors may be justified for reasons of safety, to meet the expenses of their maintenance or to control over-­use and forestall congestion or accidents. Peak hour road pricing, for instance, can help to reduce city centre congestion and increase levels of vehicle occupancy for daily rush-­hour journeys to work in crowded city centres. Reserved spaces, such as marine parks and fish breeding grounds, discussed in Chapter 4, Human Values and Community Goals, are a further case where global and public interests justify limiting individual freedoms. The management of freedom of movement emerges as a field demanding the evaluative processes of community planning, limiting the freedom of individuals to intrude upon the basic rights of others. freedom of  belief and observance

The past 500 years have seen a revolution in societies’ attitudes to faith across  many parts of the world. Unquestioning commitment to the virtues of orthodoxy and piety is giving place to more widespread acceptance that belief is a matter of personal choice. However, since shared beliefs and values remain powerful sources of energy and action, we still need to consider how community planning should embrace matters of faith. Liberty demands unfettered rights of religious belief and observance and cultural and ethnic expression. Order requires that activities stop short of permitting hate campaigns perpetrated by one group against another or interference with such rights as other people’s cultural practices, particular styles of building, or personal self-­presentation. More positively, creative community planning can encourage and support the roles of legitimate faith and cultural interest groups by involving them as partners in community organisations and programs of community visioning and policy development. A good example of this is the decision of the current Australian Government to conduct and support a referendum in the course of 2023 to approve a constitutional change to incorporate a representative First Peoples’ Voice to Parliament to comment on all proposed legislation affecting indigenous communities (From the Heart 2022). Freedom of assembly and association holds a particularly significant place in the evolution of

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democratic community life, as was indicated in the preceding chapter on Places, Spaces and Community Design. Historically, command of the streets has been crucial to regime maintenance and change.ix The importance of public space as the arena of free political debate is emphasised by Jurgen Habermas, the philosophical champion of communicative action (1987). He emphasises its role of providing places where people can gather to discuss the issues of the day, listen to dissenting views and seek converts to alternative public policies. It is significant that democratic societies from Periclean Athens to the United States of Barack Obama and Joe Biden succeeded in integrating the rights of free public assembly and demonstration while still maintaining general support for the overall legitimacy of their regimes. It is a sign of stable societies that they can accept and promote free assembly in public places. However, there are limits. The 2021 storming of the United States Capitol in Washington by supporters of Donald Trump, was not only an act of intended armed insurrection but also a flagrant breach of civil order and human rights, and as such its perpetrators were dispersed and have rightly been subsequently convicted of criminal assembly and riot. In similar ways, streets and squares should not be given over to such licensed thuggery as Hitler’s Nazi Blackshirts during the Cristal Nacht of 1938, attacking Jewish businesses and homes, or the 2005 riots on the beaches of Sydney’s Cronulla, against people of Middle Eastern origin or appearance. Public places need to be policed to preserve rights of free passage and legal assembly. The implications for community planning are  both that individual rights in private spaces should be respected, and that public spaces with guaranteed access and rights of peaceful assembly and demonstration are essential for the continuation of healthy community life at all scales  –  from community gardens, through neighbourhood parks district centres and city squares and parks to regional open spaces. Neither governments nor any particular community group should be able to claim exclusive rights to their use and control. They belong to everybody and they should be equally available to all for any legal use. freedom of  choice

Personal liberty implies the right not only to vote in free and fair elections to select representatives to take decisions on their our  behalf but also individual rights to pursue legitimate personal

or group aims, in line with the Principle of Subsidiarity that all government functions should be delegated downwards to the lowest level at which they can be effectively performed. This raises questions about how best  to establish the legitimacy of interest groups, seeking to advance the interests of their own members. Restrictions on collusive or criminal organisations intending to harm others for their own advantage require careful attention and regular scrutiny. These are issues that collaborative community planning cannot avoid. Gary Miller in his telling and prophetic book on the abdication of responsible government in Los Angeles County in the 1970s, Cities by Contract, showed how conferring powers of planning and property taxation upon self-­constituted, self-­ serving and privileged small groups, led to major break downs in social justice. Such ‘cities by contract’, incorporating themselves as local governments, created injustices that prepared the ground for later civil disorder.x There are, of course, effective and practical solutions to these dilemmas of authenticity. The model evolved over a period of four decades by the City of Portland in the state of Oregon, the Office of Civic and Community Life (OCCL), offers one particularly suitable approach. Neighbourhood and community organisations are registered and organised into 7 District Coalitions that are supported by the OCCL and receive financial, organisational, information supply and role-­sharing benefits. In return, they accept basic requirements for open and democratic selection of office holders and regular and recorded meetings (City of Portland, Office of Civic and Community Life  2021). Each Association consists of groups of volunteers committed to act on issues affecting the liveability and quality of their neighbourhoods, including community engagement, information supply and referral, residential siting review, crime prevention, disability and diversity support, graffiti abatement, liquor licensing and mediation programs. There are currently 94  Neighbourhood Associations, organised into the 7  not-­ for-­ profit District Coalitions with which the City contracts to provide support to all member Associations. Portland allocates an annual budget to support these programs, which constitute a useful practical example of the application of the ‘Principle of Subsidiarity’, which states that all governance functions should be devolved to ‘subside’ to the most local level at which they can be effectively performed, thereby increasing the opportunities for freedom of choice and increased levels of local participation.



The roles of negotiation and partnership in resolving conflicts One of the most significant ways in which participatory governance differs from representative government is the greater opportunity that people are offered to negotiate outcomes for themselves and therefore to become partners in the shaping of events. Table  10.2, identified some of the more important ways by which negotiation and partnership could help to develop, evaluate and implement policies and proposals, which are now explored in more detail in the following paragraphs.

The development and evaluation of policies, proposals and community initiatives Where communities are facing pressures of major change, early involvement of constituent groups and stakeholders can help forestall rancorous conflicts and shape sustainable outcomes. Throughout New Zealand, for instance, 110 Community Boards now operate within local authorities in both urban and rural areas, providing local representation and advocacy at the grassroots level and exercising powers delegated to them by local governments. Any electoral division may vote to establish a Community Board, which consists of 4–12  members, a majority of whom must be elected. They have mandates  to communicate with local community organisations and special interest groups and are encouraged to contribute to decisions affecting their areas (Local Government New Zealand 2021). Although an earlier government-­sponsored survey indicated some limitations in the level of partnership offered by some local government councils, two-­ thirds of Community Board members surveyed thought that the Boards did a good job of representing and promoting local interests. This participation does not always need to be official or programmatic. In The Deliberative Practitioner (1999), John Friedmann discusses negotiations involving people as diverse as harbour masters, community development workers, rural health officials and educational administrators, as well as city planners and architects in cultures as varied as Norway, USA, Mexico, Israel and Brazil. He explores how they engage, using imagination, sympathy and improvisation, with others whose contributions are essential to mutually successful outcomes (Forester  1999). He shows how cumulative collaboration can lead from suspicion and

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opposition through discussion to the partnership, which is necessary to achieve acceptable results for each of the participants, developing at the same time their ethical awareness and capacity for moral judgement. Another celebrated example is the involvement of neighbouring communities in the negotiations that laid the ground for the 1993 extension of the Westpoint Sewage Treatment Plant on Puget Sound. By spending US$ 32  mill on improving existing neighbouring shoreline access and facilities identified as desirable  by local groups and residents, the Seattle city government gained the support of affected local communities (Municipality of Metro Seattle  1993, p.  1; Heywood  1997, p.  196; King County 2022). The scheme cemented good relations while costing Metro Seattle far less than would have been involved in the alternative of establishing a new plant. Other situations may involve delivery of sponsored  services by professionally skilled and widely respected voluntary organisations tackling such activities as homelessness, aged care, drug treatment and cultural engagement, which are widely recognised as valid. In such cases, participation is often enhanced by increased mutual trust, while  transparency and clear role allocation remain essential safeguards against misunderstanding and unrealistic expectations. Another effective collaborative approach is to involve existing and  newly formed community organisations in representation on steering committees for the preparation of community plans. As we have seen in Chapter  1, this worked well and acted as a circuit breaker of deadlock in the case of Brisbane’s Norman Creek corridor, further  explored in Chapter  3. Brisbane City’s more recent experiments in this field, however, have attracted widespread criticisms from community groups that they are based more on co-­ option than true community involvement. For instance, memberships of Neighbourhood and Community Planning Teams, working with council officers to oversee Neighbourhood and Local plans are decided by self-­nomination and council selection, on occasion including large property developers with current interests in the area under review and the outcomes of the schemes (Brisbane City Council  2022). Members are also required to sign a carefully worded commitment to confidentiality,  even though communication with local people should be a major role of the Planning Team members. Teams are disbanded once the plan is adopted. None of these conditions favours wider and continuing community engagement or partnership of the kind that has been established in

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Portland, New Zealand or Amsterdam. Nevertheless, Brisbane’s ‘Community Planning Team’ approach has potentialities to evolve to embrace more inclusive roles. If developed to become more genuinely accountable, participatory Community Planning Teams could provide both outreach and involvement.xi In the long run, this process could contribute powerfully to both mutual understanding and the collaboration on which progress and prosperity ultimately depend. evaluation and problem-­solving

If it is to respond effectively to the certainty of external change, planning should be a cyclical activity, with regular review of schemes and monitoring of outcomes to prompt continuous evaluation and problem-­ solving. This process embodies the upward spiral of the cycle of Action > Practice > Reflection > Process > Revised Action described in Chapter 5, Ways and Means. Such planning methods stimulate reflection and provide positive frameworks for techniques such as community Charettes, Enquiries by Design and John Mongard’s Set Up Shops, discussed in Chapter  9, Places, Spaces and Community Design, to promote collaborative evaluation and problem-­solving across activities and sectors. These techniques involve prescribed periods of intensive discussion and collaboration –  normally lasting one or two days  –  among different stakeholders, including and supported by architects, planners and graphic designers. They aim to produce outcomes and sketch designs that can resolve potentially conflicting preferences and combine ideas in integrated schemes.xii As a result, their outcomes are at their best in developing unifying visions of desirable futures rather than sets of action-­ready policies and proposals, which can follow later. Enquiry by Design applies this collaborative approach by involving more systematic preparation and integration with processes of governance. Time and resources are provided for exploration of unintended consequences, engaging a wide range of stakeholders and often extending over three or four days. Staged investigations of one or more options for an area or for a scheme explore both what different stakeholders can contribute and what they may stand to gain or lose. The process is well suited to support collaboration, and also to test feasibility and impacts. Members of wider ‘policy communities’ may be suitable participants, as long as the participation of other more directly affected parties, such as local residents and current and prospective users of the area is also ensured. One of the advantages of this

approach is its capacity to test the viability and impacts of draft proposals in line with standards of verification by testing  xiii (Popper 1998). Another aspect of this capacity of negotiative participation to improve policies is highlighted by an interesting case also in Brisbane. This involved a proposal to build a ‘green’ or public and active transport, bridge to provide ink across the several hundreds of metres of the Brisbane River, to a large university campus, with a combined workforce of staff and students of 40,000 people. The bridge was intended to link the campus directly to a public transport catchment of a million people (half of the university’s total commuting hinterland) thus ending the need for those using public transport to have to traverse the city centre, removing many personal peak hour trips and bus journeys every day from the city centre and simultaneously significantly reducing travel times. Nevertheless, the university’s initial response was non-­ committal, uneasy about city council intrusion into their prerogatives of campus planning and fearful that the penetration of the campus by buses would damage the campus environment and be the thin end of a wedge for subsequent opening of the bridge to private vehicles, thus flooding the academic environment with queues of private cars taking short cuts between the south of the city and destinations in the north, west and east. The project director, a transport planner with qualifications in land use and community planning, established an advisory committee and invited a number of senior university representatives to join. One by one, concerns were discussed and recognised as being important and valid, but all were shown to be capable of being resolved by feasible policies and practical concessions. Through-­movement and penetration by buses into the campus proper could be prevented by creating a cul-­de-­sac turn around for buses at the university end of the green bridge. Subsequent escalation of the use of the bridge could be prevented by structural limitations, closure of road access to private vehicles and university control over campus planning of roads and car parks. All of this could be included in protocols signed by both parties. During the course of negotiations, both parties became increasingly attracted by the possibilities of improvements that could result. The university architect started to see the bridge as his idea  –  which in a sense it had become as one by one his objections resulted in major design improvements and amplifications. Not surprisingly, the result has been an outstanding success and a lasting improvement to the aesthetic and



functional quality of the formerly somewhat suburban campus. This new entry to the university is quite different from the old one, strewn with an inheritance of multi-­storey car parks and decades of assemblages of academic buildings that until the 1990s had never been given adequate thought to relate them to each other or to shape pleasing open spaces. The previous and rather dreary suburban road access remains, though now it is less congested. The new entry for pedestrians, bikes and buses across the Green Bridge affords stunning views of the forested river banks. The Green Bridge entrance now brings university staff, students and visitors into a welcoming planted space from which pathways lead off to riverside walks, educational buildings, campus shops and offices, playing fields and the swimming pool. Paths wind up through cool and elegant gardens and shrubberies to conveniently close destinations. Some traverse the shores of the university lake. Others skirt heavily planted rain-­ forest gullies. People arrive at their destinations calmed and in states of heightened harmony compared with those hurrying in from the hot and crowded car parks of the old road entrance. The sense of ownership by the university hierarchy is an important guarantee of their continued support. It is also a tribute to the negotiative planning skills of the project director and the capacity of collaborative planning to create sustainable environments. community initiatives

Negotiation is also a key ingredient in the development and content of community initiatives, which have often evolved from origins in rejection of unwanted proposals. Negotiation can help develop more positive contributions to community life and governance. Successful innovations often follow the sequence of: Opposing Agendas > Conflict > Negotiation >  Resolution to produce positive outcomes, as was the case with both the Norman Creek Waterway Park and Brisbane’s Southbank Gardens, discussed earlier in Chapter  3. However, if any party believes that it has access to a more advantageous BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), the sequence may not be allowed to unfold, and may end in stalemate or the imposition of a scheme leaving one party harbouring a permanent sense of grievance and feeling deprived of living space, livelihood or treasured environmental resources. Such damaging outcomes do not have to occur.

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More collaborative processes can be mandated through legislation and achieved by negotiationxiv (Fisher and Ury 1991). For community initiatives to be successful, a dialogue has to be established and maintained both within the community and with power-­holders in government and business. A particularly positive example of this is provided by Kolkata’s long running Bustee improvement program, which has been continuing since the late 1970s. As has been described in the preceding chapter, Places, Spaces and Community Design, this brought together the engineers of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) and local neighbourhood groups to identify areas for upgrading of services, including the location of community standpipes and latrines. The program benefitted from using local labour, materials and products and the whole enterprise became a shared endeavour. Communities that had vigorously opposed the CMDA’s original proposals for massive clearance and re-­location in slab blocks on the city fringes, now became effective partners in a consensual rolling program of community improvement, achieving benefits going beyond shelter to include economy, recreation and governance. dialogues and partnership

This advancing of negotiation into dialogue and partnership was anticipated by Kurt Lewin in his three principles of contact, continuity and democratic decision making, dating from the 1940s (Lewin  1997). Once established, there are numerous ways in which the process can be strengthened and enhanced. Recognition can be provided through publicity and prizes, such as those made by the annual Awards for Excellence of the American Planning Association, the British Royal Town Planning Institute and the Planning Institute of Australia, each of whom has been promoting best planning practice for many decades in a number of categories and with regional as well as national awards. Funding and support for implementation can also be highly effective ways to consolidate partnerships. Council contributions to the running costs of neighbourhood associations, creek catchment coordinating committees and community engagement groups can help to give recognition and vital institutional continuity to bodies whose energies might otherwise be severely challenged by the taxing demands of simply maintaining their existence. Governments that provide such funding to voluntary organisations to run sensitive programs such as supported accommodation for homeless people, are both bolstering and

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benefitting from collaborative community planning and action, in the best spirit of ‘Fourth Way’ approaches  discussed above in the subsection  on Community agency. Australia’s Landcare program has developed over the last four decades to provide an interesting example of the success of such delegated approaches, applying in a practical way the three principles of contact, continuity and democratic process. Growing out of an initiative originally criticised as being merely therapeutic, it now includes thousands of local groups of rural people prepared to develop and implement small and medium scale schemes of community development, environmental reclamation, conservation and improvement (Kilpatrick, Willis and Lewis 2014; Landcare Australia  2021). It has spread its scope to include no fewer than seven programs, ranging from Watercare to Coastcare and Dunecare, which are proving powerful local partners in the Commonwealth Government’s national program to improve land and water conservation (Landcare Australia 2021). Community planning based on this kind of partnership can lead to fully collaborative relations with local groups and networks assuming responsibility for significant portions of community life, ranging from open space management, urban farms, creek catchments and local parks, through economic activities of industrial incubators, mentoring programs, transport innovations such as carpooling schemes and bikeway promotion, to community festivals that celebrate the diversity and self-­expression of different cultures.

Service activities of local government The traditional roles of local government are no longer limited to ‘Roads, Rates and Rubbish’. Parks and public gardens were early additions to council responsibilities because they required local design and maintenance. In the evolution of local governance, public health was not far behind, with the introduction of roles such as ‘Medical Officer of Health’, answerable to either local or state governments, to protect communities against insanitary practices, which might threaten public health, and to oversee the conditions in private and charitable hospitals and clinics, which have since been integrated into National Health Systems to achieve system-­wide organisation and integration. Education is another function that is administered at different levels in different countries. In the United States, School Boards with their nation-­ wide total of 85,000  members (Dye  1988, p.  425),

often form the most local level of representative governance, while elsewhere, as in England, primary and secondary education tends to be allocated to counties or similar middle tier authorities. Elsewhere again, as in France, systems are more centralised. Worldwide, national governments are mandating national curricula and thereby raising issues of harmonisation  between national standards and content, state or regional coordination and local management and delivery. It is clear that none of these activities can function at their best under exclusive control by only one tier or sector of society. Links are required, for instance, between public, private and voluntary methods in providing health services, emphasising the need for collaborative planning and system management. In most countries, direct relations with patients assist local healers and doctors to take responsibility for running their own practices within general guidelines of medical ethics, though often with funding support from central governments. Regulation of hospitals may be either regional or central. Management may be either by public service models as in Australia, or borrowed from contemporary business performance practices as in the UK. The situation is similarly complex in education where public, market and charitable foundations all contribute and may all adopt different and unrelated methods of governance and accountability. Energetic and rapid market innovations in childcare centres and tertiary education also demand careful consideration to governance, control and integration within other educational and social systems.xv In transport, too, there is a need to relate national systems, policies and funding with regional coordination and local delivery. Generally speaking, the most successful public transport systems are those where most thought has been given to coordinated governance, as in the cases of Transport for London (TfL) and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), with its integration of bus, subway, street car and rapid transit transport, allowing it to survive the disbanding of the metropolitan government that had originally established it (TTC 2022). In summary, four aspects need to be reviewed and evaluated in the governance of community services: first is their role in contributing to community well-­ being and prosperity; second are the often competing advantages and disadvantages of provisions by public, private and voluntary sectors; third is the extent to which governance arrangements can coordinate systems internally and externally and fourth are the conditions required to achieve acceptable levels of problem-­solving and accountability.

contributions to  community well-­being

Many of the ingredients of human, social and cultural capital, which are being increasingly recognised as crucial to the success of community life, depend heavily on such community services as education, health, housing and recreation (Putnam 2000, 2004; Hutchinson and Vidal  2004). Putnam et  al. (1993) have shown, for instance, how traditions of civic responsibility and cultural transmission in Tuscany, Veneto and Emilia Romagna have contributed to the economic successes and social stability of those regions, compared with the less active public life of the conflict-­ridden regions of the Mezzogiorno further south. In Australia, too, the greater economic prosperity and social stability, as compared with that of many South American countries in the second half of the twentieth century, has also been ascribed to the country’s higher levels of commitment and investment in public education, health and housing programs (Pusey 1991). Between them, health, housing and education do much to shape the human resources that build successful communities, at scales ranging from the local to the national and global, characterised by  such organisations as UNESCO, Medecin sans Frontiedes and Habitat. public, private and community provision

When  arguments concerning the value of public, private and voluntary provision of community services are evaluated, it becomes increasingly clear that each has valuable roles to contribute, and that these need to be integrated within coherent systems of governance and accountability. Some basic principles will assist. In representative democracies, it is clearly the responsibility of national governments to fund and ensure equitable provisions of health, education and access, involving the planning, provision and delivery of public systems. Individual, commercial and voluntary initiatives can often make valuable contributions to meet these needs, and performance levels will be required to ensure that this does not result in failures of quality or loss of consistent standards. As has been seen earlier, in Chapter 8, Facets of Community, the commitment and energy of volunteers and voluntary groups can provide innovation and outreach. Educational innovations, for instance, frequently come from imaginative individuals such as Maria Montessori, Freidrich Froebel, Rudolf Steiner and A.S. Neil. Later their insights can be integrated into wider and more official systems. Health is now big business in many societies and the private sector is often eager to invest large sums in such activities as vaccine

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development, radiology, diagnostics and elective and cosmetic treatment, which may well contribute to later improvements offering wider availability, including within the public sector. However, these must be carefully regulated to avoid abuses. coordination of  systems

Similarly, in education, national curriculum, literacy and numeracy polices and examination standards need to be related to and informed by the lived educational requirements and potentialities of local communities and to take account of such special needs as those of isolated indigenous communities and recently arrived migrant groups. Such collaborative planning can also be a very useful step towards achieving responsive and coherent system governance. quality assurance

In discussing the complementary contributions of participatory and representative governance to achieving quality assurance, the pressing question emerges of how best to guarantee access, convenience and quality of services to individuals and communities. For health, Local District Boards have been proposed to bring governance back closer to action points, but these have been criticised as not reflecting the expanding scale of settlements and personal mobility. Wider Regional Boards have been proposed to meet these criticisms, but they have often been not well-­liked by central administrators who see them as potentially challenging and dissident bodies, and criticise them as lacking grassroots legitimacy. In order to achieve fitness for function, questions of representation, validity and authority will have to be resolved and it will be helpful to explore appropriate forms of governance to deliver best possible outcomes of organisation and delivery. A general pattern of integrated delivery of health, education and work systems in clustered hubs has been outlined in Chapter 7, Facets of Community and it will be useful to explore the governance implications of this approach. One model for multi-­service agencies developed in the 1990s in the Canadian Province of Ontario, to provide a full and integrated range of health services for populations of about 200,000, provides an example of how this might be done within the fields of community development, social services and health (Province of Ontario Ministries of Citizenship, Community & Social Service and Health 1993).xvi This model, illustrated below, within Figure  10.1, An Integrated Model of Health

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NATIONAL

District Hospital Networks

Local doctors and dentists Nurse Practitioners Diagnostic Services Physiotherapists and other specialists GP Superclinics

Emergency and chronic surgery Elective surgery and sub-acute beds Epidemiology and treatment Scientific and medical research In-service training

District Health Boards Primary Care (GPs) Hospital Management Home Community and Aged Care Mental Health

Facilities Planning and Location Assessment and Referral systems Information and E-Health Sectoral Coordination

Home, Aged and Community Care

Mental Health

Home visit and support services One stop shop and aged care Wardened accommodation Day care centres Home meals services etc

Early intervention services Youth friendly mental health programs Mental health nurse training Community living support

Line of Accountability and Governance

General Practice and Primary Care

National Commission on Policies, Standards and Performance National Funding and Costing Human resource development and training Wellness promotion and community development Electronic information Participation and Consultation systems REGIONAL/LOCAL District Health Boards (Medicare Locals) Voting memberships: - Consumers - Caregivers - Volunteers and NGOs - Co-opted advocates and academics

Figure 10.1  An integrated system of health governance and delivery.   Sources: Province of Ontario, Ministries of Citizenship, Community & Social Services and Health (1993), Partnerships in long term Community care: a New Way to Plan. Manage, & Deliver Community Support, Toronto; and Australian Government (2010), A National Health & Hospitals Network for Australia’s Future, Canberra.



Governance and Delivery, is particularly well suited to match the functional mix involved in the ‘hub’ approach, creating governance boards combining caregivers, service providers and representatives from government departments together with consumers and clients from hinterlands defined by accessibility catchments. Control of such ‘Medicare Locals’ would thus rest in the hands of bodies combining providers and consumers of services drawn from the public, private and voluntary sectors. The principle could be extended to incorporate cooperative planning and management among contributing systems. The hallmark of this approach to the governance of services is its introduction of democratic principles to fields where in the past inadequate attention has been given to this aspect of governance. It is also collaborative in situations where very important gains can be achieved by linking the planning of space, support services, access and information exchange. regulation

Most aspects of governance involve some form of regulation. For instance, in most contemporary societies, taxation laws regulate individual contributions to the funding and upkeep of community life. School attendance regulations and standards aim to ensure that learning is universal and adequate for the transmission of knowledge and skills. Health standards are normally safeguarded by controls over medical qualifications, building construction and workplace conditions. Environmental quality is protected by public nuisance laws and waste disposal rules for households and businesses. Building regulations and inspections protect current and future generations from poor design and inadequate materials and workmanship. Development assessment and controls protect public interests, amenity and neighbourhood rights and test proposals for environmental and community impacts. Licensing of public premises safeguards neighbours’ rights, and user safety. The test for validity of all of these regulations is how well they balance maximum possible benefits for the wider community with minimum necessary intrusion into the rights of individuals. Lack of such regulations can result in loss of amenity, opportunities and even lives. Excessive regulation, on the other hand can impair individual initiative and originality. It is clear that regulations should pay careful attention to the values that they are designed to protect or promote and should not trespass beyond these

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boundaries to intrude upon the rights of individuals. Values of order, freedom, equity and prosperity are all demonstrably crucial to both individuals and society. Regulations define not only what people can’t do, but what, by implication, they may do without permission. They imply equality before the law because all citizens are equally obliged to obey them irrespective of wealth, birth or power. The clear conclusion is that in all matters strongly affecting others, we need regulations to provide robust dividing lines beyond which individuals may not trespass, whether concerning fair payment of workers, acceptable impact on the environment, safe treatment of children or appropriate messaging on social media. These individual and social rights and limitations gain precision and effectiveness when they are expressed as quantified measures, which should be reached or which may not be exceeded. For example, speed limits, noise levels, length of stay in a parking area, tensile strength of a beam, levels of public open space and minimum lot sizes for construction of dwellings all need to be specified and enforced. The limiting case for such regulations is provided by the arguments of John Rawls (1971) that people should be wary of imposing excessive regulation on each other because they should expect the same rules to be applied to themselves in the unpredictable world of future events. In summary, order demands that regulations be identified and enforced; equity that they apply equally to all and liberty that they be regularly reviewed to ensure that they make minimum necessary inroads into people’s personal choices. Good regulations can increase overall liberty by preventing some people from having too much freedom at the cost of others having too little and can promote justice by ensuring that rules only restrict others in ways that we would be willing to accept for ourselves. Another aspect of regulation is the exemption often bestowed upon themselves by higher levels of government from the jurisdiction of lower ones (rather like a modern survival of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ to do as they like in their own jurisdictions). This approach can ride roughshod over the community life and good planning of local communities. For instance, a high proportion of the worst and most insensitive buildings in modern metropolises will be found, on inquiry, to have been erected by governments and their departments, because they have exempted themselves from the processes of local development control by which proposals are normally improved or rejected, thereby

234 Planning for Community

avoiding the testing for unintended consequences involved in social and environmental impact assessments. Particularly dangerous evasions of regulation occur when senior governments pass on such exemptions to commercial buyers for profit. In Australia, major airports previously owned by the national governments have, in recent decades, been sold to private corporations, conferring the same legal exemptions from development control or liability to comply with regional, city or local plans, as if they were being operated by elected governments. As a result, they are neither directly nor indirectly accountable to anyone but their own, often international, shareholders.xvii Good planning legislation, like that in Oregon, would specifically remove such exemptions by making state government departments comply with regional, city and local plans once they have scrutinised and ‘signed off’ on them (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development 2021). Nonetheless, dangers of over-­regulation are ever present and need to be scrupulously limited. Such excesses have been vividly demonstrated in totalitarian regimes throughout the twentieth century, in the concentration camps and forced labour policies of both Nazi and Communist regimes. Bater (1980) explores the ‘Propiskaya’ system of permits, which for 30 years regulated where soviet workers could and could not live and work, which Solzhenitsyn also describes in harrowing detail in his accounts of the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ (1978). Similar regulations, operated at the same time in the Republic of South Africa, compounded and permeated by brutal racism. Such excesses certainly can often give regulation a bad name. The best tests for validity of regulations are those of John Rawls (1971) that they can be shown to contribute to the sum total of human choice, and that only limitations that individuals would willingly accept for themselves should be imposed on others. Rules of prudential behaviour, accountability and transparency, therefore, need to be debated and regularly reviewed to provide strong safeguards for individuals and communities in an era of increasingly dominant global economics. Local and national communities, for instance, need to be able to embark on participation in global trade in the confidence that they can protect their community’s ownership of the factors of production of land, labour and capital and prevent overseas operators from stripping their assets, colonising their workforces or buying out their resources of land and food production (Hall 2014b; Heywood 2006).

Both regulation and deregulation have therefore legitimate and important roles to play in governance. Regular review is required both to prevent and rescind any unacceptable interference in individuals’ rights of religious belief and freedom of speech and publication, and equally to protect others from being victims of any associated hate speech. Equally, governments and their advisors should constantly consider the need to introduce new regulations to meet emerging problems of technological and social change such as polluting emissions, the need to establish and maintain transparent records for adults entrusted with the welfare of young people and regulations to control the use of high impact innovations. Community and voluntary organisations can also play important roles in reviewing and proposing regulations. Environmental Associations may assist in proposing appropriate standards in such matters as carbon emissions and access and activity regulations in national parks, down to the details of design and dimensions of bikeways and walking trails. A pressing current case of the requirement for new regulations is the need for local and state governments to produce and enforce appropriate controls to govern the management and use of the electric scooters that are rapidly becoming a popular form of local travel and recreational movement throughout western countries. This is a particularly clear case of the need for prudent regulation, because, properly integrated and provided for, these compact and convenient forms of urban movement offer important long-­term benefits to urban mobility and amenity throughout cities. However, while their hiring companies currently pay governments large licensing fees, their use and appropriation of docking and storage spaces on footpaths and cycleways goes dangerously unregulated. Left, as they too often are, with neither specified circulation spaces nor specific regulations controlling use, they are becoming a mounting source of conflict and danger to themselves and others with whom they currently have to share movement channels. ­ Useful roles as watchdogs to remind governments of the costs in time and money of excessive and inefficient regulation can also be played by private enterprise organisations  and  prudent rules. One good example in the field of urban planning is the introduction of ‘deemed approvals’ for proposed developments if no decision has been reached after the elapse of specified times for their consideration. Public regulation is both a necessary watchdog to oversee human agency and a field that needs



to be kept under constant review to achieve the right balance between effectiveness and preservation of individual rights. Regulation and rights can be balanced to combine the direction and energy to shape communities where no one individual or group will be able to lay exclusive claims to advantages that should be equally open to all or impinge unfairly on the basic rights of others.

Scales of community and their roles in governance and control It is clear that communities at all scales from local to global are based as much on shared interests, prospects and values as on shared physical spaces. Figure  10.2 below indicates six different levels of governance, which correspond to the different levels of community life discussed in Chapters 2 and 3: these scales are the local, urban, regional, national, supranational and global. In each case, governance is a complex activity, consisting of the inter-­twining of the three strands of representation, group interests and voluntary agency and advocacy, each pursuing separate and sometimes conflicting values and commitments. At the local scale community representation can take varying  forms: organised Community Boards in New Zealand, Gram Shivas or community councils in India and Neighbourhood Associations, in Portland Oregon and Greater Amsterdam. These may be integrated within local electoral units, or form more free-­standing neighbourhood associations. They may have originated in response to a variety of negative and positive reasons, before subsequently growing to achieve recognized roles in representing the interests of their localities. The 94  Neighbourhood Associations of Portland, Oregon are one well-­known example, but there are numerous others in all six continents in countries such as Canada, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States and India . They are all well-­positioned to relate to existing City and District Councils and their day-­ to-­ day governance. Other groups representing and promoting more specific local interests such as Parents and Teachers, Progress, and Residents Associations may also play legitimate roles in defining local policy and planning objectives, particularly as affecting their own fields of concern. Other local groups may be based on religious bodies, environmental action associations, creek conservation, heritage protection and mutual aid activities such as bulk food buying. Community planning can benefit greatly

Community Governance and Participation 235

from recognising and involving these local groups in consultation and community action programs ranging across environmental maintenance and improvement, traffic monitoring, school support and discussion of development proposals. Such local groups possess the great advantage of regularly engaging in the deliberative democracy of round table discussions, where people can both contribute and re-­formulate their own views in the ways outlined by Habermas (1990,  2008), Fishkin (2016), and Keane (2022). Their interests and priorities are both authentic and transparent. At the urban level, City and District Councils represent one of the longest and most firmly established of all forms of governance. Their executive departments now undertake a wide range of roles. These include, as well as the traditional ‘roads, rates and rubbish’, such crucial community functions as culture and festivals, parks and open space, physical planning, public and active transport and social activation. In some administrations, they play important roles in running and managing education; elsewhere they may provide social housing; and they are often the most active of any level of governance in promoting community development. Their links to the strongly entrenched urban interest groups of chambers of commerce, development associations and trades councils in many instances date back hundreds of years to the activities of medieval guilds, but nonetheless, it is important for these connections to be held accountable to public information and opinion. City Councils may, for instance, develop links with business and promotional groups that may want to influence new policies or changes of emphasis or direction, to favour their members. This is particularly the case in matters of planning and development. For all these reasons, issues of transparency and independence from undue social or economic influence are very important in the governance of urban communities. Independent media and continuous debate within the public sphere are essential for the healthy conduct of affairs within urban communities. (See Habermas, 2008). Regional government based on direct election has long historical traditions in many European countries, including Spain, Italy and Germany, where regional assemblies can provide longer-­term and wider-­ranging perspectives to steer and balance future development. In more recently developing metropolitan regions, representative oversight at this scale is often based on indirect election, with members of constituent cities and districts working together to oversee such regional functions as

236 Planning for Community

INTERESTS

REPRESENTATION

ADVOCACY

WORLD GOVERNANCE

GLOBAL ADVOCACY GROUPS

World Trade Organisation, Global Corporations (Meta, News Ltd, etc) .

United Nations. Human Rights & Heritage Organisations United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Networks advocating Environmental Conservation, Social Justice, Wildlife and Information Rights.

SUPRANATIONAL INTEREST GROUPS International Lobbyists for Multinational Corporations and Economic, Communication & Tourism Interests

SUPRANATIONAL ORGNISATIONS European Union (EU) North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Organisation of Economic and Community Development

GLOBAL NETWORKS

NATIONAL INTEREST ASSOCIATIONS

NATIONS STATES

CONTINENTAL ADVOCACY GROUPS Environmental, Social Justice, Nature Conservation and Cultural Advocacy and Planning Groups.

NATIONAL PROMOTIONAL GROUPS Voluntary groups promoting Social Justice, Economic Equity, Environmental Quality, Housing Affordability and Standards

National Associations promoting established interests in Trade, Investment, Transport, Business and Professions

National Governments with full sets of powers and agencies

REGIONAL INTEREST GROUPS Regional Chambers of Commerce, Special Interest Groups – Mining, Fishing, Agriculture, etc

REGIONAL AGENCIES Regional governance of public transport, regional parks, economic promotion, housing management and strategic planning.

REGIONAL PROMOTION GROUPS Regional Councils & Committees of Health, Environment, Social Justice, Culture, Education, Shelter and Open Space etc

URBAN INTEREST GROUPS Chambers of Commerce, Urban Development Associations, Trade Union Councils Rate Payers Associations

DISTRICT & CITY COUNCILS Council Committees of elected members running council services Advisory Committees, Executive Departments

URBAN & DISTRICT PROMOTIONAL GROUPS Associations to promote transport, environmental, character and protection, shelter, recreation, urban and ethnic culture, etc.

LOCAL INTEREST GROUPS Progress & Protection Associations, Traders Associations Community Development Corporations

LOCAL REPRESENTATION Community Boards, Neighbourhood Associations, Service Centres, Community Associations

COMMUNITY GROUPS Community Associations and Action Groups Parent Teacher Associations, Walking Buses, Car Pooling, Urban Farms and Community Gardens

Figure 10.2  The global context: six levels of governance and participation.



strategic planning, environmental management, public transport, water and power supply and regional scale health coordination. Both types may prove effective. The successes of Metro Portland, which is directly elected, and Metro Vancouver, (indirectly elected) are both  well known, as are those of Metro Toronto (1953–1998), which since 1998  has contracted to being a single-­tier metropolitan region with a current population approaching 2.8 million. Over the preceding 45 years, Metro Toronto had successfully presided over a tripling of the metropolitan population, largely due to the successful integration of large numbers of migrants (Lemon 1995; Heywood 1997). By contrast, the administrative ingenuity of approaches such as the Greater London and Bangkok Authorities rests heavily on the election of high-­profile mayors responsible for developing a vision and strategies for the future of their metropolitan regions, while most other functions remain with the constituent small and locally elected councils. Both sorts of regional governments are well positioned to liaise with regional interest groups concerned with business, economic promotion and advocacy bodies promoting matters such as shelter, transport, environment, social justice, culture, health and education. The regional scale offers clear advantages  for consultation between representatives, interest groups and advocate organisations. Even in the days of Facebook and Twitter, there is much truth in the aphorism, ascribed to T.S. Eliot, that the only true cultures are regional ones, because localities are too small to contain a full cross section of interests, and nations are too large to allow face to face meetings, whereas regional associations allow people to meet and exchange ideas and interest in a number of different fields. Without diminishing the importance of the local and national scales, regional communities are a very effective tier for engagement and planning. National parliaments remain the most effective representative bodies in the contemporary world because of their combination of law-­ making, enforcement, taxing and funding powers and cultural association and expression. Nations constitute large and often diverse communities, where policies and programs can be planned within the context of overall community benefits, and where unequalled powers provide the most significant control of outcomes for communities at each of the regional, city and local scales. Diverse interests of investment, business, the arts and professions all find powerful voices within the national arena, but so do the promotional groups tirelessly concerned with environmental conservation, social justice,

Community Governance and Participation 237

affordable housing and educational quality and justice. Various theorists of collaborative planning have demonstrated how national scale ‘policy communities’ of people who know and trust each other and understand each other’s needs and ideals can be very powerful shapers of community planning at all scales (Faludi 2005; Healey 2006, 2007). Legislation guaranteeing transparency may be required to prevent this from deteriorating into collusive and exclusive self-­serving by entrenched power holders, but, at its best, this kind of consensual cultural commitment can provide continuity and promote a climate of successful negotiation. Supranational organisations like the European Union, the North American Free Trade Area and the Association of South East Asian Nations are playing ever more significant roles in building new communities at continental and sub-­ continental scales. They celebrate common cultural traditions and are reforming centuries-­old preoccupations on competiting with their neighbours for roles and influence. In much of Europe, the accumulated burden of past name-­ calling, demonisation and determination to exact retribution for old grievances has recently evolved towards a more rational examination of shared development prospects and recognition of the economic advantages of mutual aid and exchange. In this respect, no continent has a darker or bloodier history in terms of internecine strife, mass persecution and attempted extermination of minority groups. Now Europe is leading the way in supra-­national community organisation, spanning political inclusion, cultural promotion and economic support for temporarily ailing national economies, as well as providing a common front to resist the unprovoked Russsian invasion of Ukraine of 2022–2023. These new and emerging continental scale communities of Europe, the Americas and South East Asia are showing impressive adroitness in overcoming the obstacles to shared development posed by different languages and the large scale of multi-­national activities. They represent very real communities of interest, with capacities to forestall recurrence of old conflicts and to confront those which do occur. Their style and organisation are marked by a commitment to inclusive scoping and rational planning as means to obtain mutual benefits. However, the effectiveness of this problem-­ solving approach to international governance is being dramatically challenged by the events of 2022  involving the crises of invasion, bloodshed and return of great power chauvinism demonstrated in the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops and the mass bombardment

238 Planning for Community

of the country’s most populous cities by rockets and missiles, vividly illustrating the obstacles that supranational polity may have to confront. Ironically, it is claimed that it is the very success of the European Union  –  and fear of the capacity of NATO forces to safeguard its members – that has triggered these invasions by an irrridentist Russia. The swelling tides of refugees driven into the neighbouring countries of Poland, Moldova, Rumania and Slovakia by the mass bombardment by rockets and missiles of the country’s most populous cities highlights the need for international action and conciliation. At the time of writing, strong economic sanctions and provisions of military support by members of the European Union, including not only Germany and but also the UK, have been extended to the provision of tanks and rockets and restriction of imports of Russian oil and grain that  indicate the strength of commitment to combat this violation of international law. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has announced an investigation into the sustained and escalating attacks by the Russian military on civilian targets throughout 2022 and has flagged the indictment for war crimes of an unrepentant President Putin (PBS News Hour 2022). The scope of the inquiry would extend to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Similarly, the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Gutteras, has repeatedly drawn attention to the criminality of the Russian invasion but has been prevented from taking action because of the blocking veto power of Russia on the Security Council. The ultimate outcome of the 2022 crisis will provide telling evidence of the capacity of supranational alliances and organisations, like the EU and UN, to constrain the actions of rogue regimes like Putin’s Russia, to disrupt the lives of continental and global communities. a global community

The growth of global communities of shared interests has been strongly stimulated by recent developments in technology, communications and trade. The explosion of communications technology, the spread of a global economy, universal concern over the impacts of environmental change and the need to coordinate responses to the spread of pandemics have lent urgency to the concept of an emerging global village. As we have seen earlier, commentators like George Monbiot (2003) and Jurgen Habermas (2008) argue powerfully that these challenges mandate the introduction of matching global

governance. Unlike Habermas, Monbiot does not believe that this can emerge from the United Nations, because of the ingrained structural control and powers of veto of the Security Council, by its five original superpower members, built into the organisation at the time of its establishment in the mid-­twentieth century  –  currently illustrated by the use of Russia’s veto to prevent effective UN action to bring an end to the invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, there is no doubting the organisation’s significant contributions to peacetime global governance, with its sponsorship and support for bodies such as the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Habitat and many other such invaluable bodies, which practice valuable global governance in many spheres. Links of information and cultural exchange are being forged, as well as ones of economic interdependence. Membership of the emerging global community is open to all who acquire the knowledge and skills to make use of modern communications technology. Each of these six ascending scales of communities reflects the earlier definition at the beginning of Chapter 2 of ‘groups of people who experience and acknowledge significant links, expectations and responsibilities towards each other’. Such mutual acceptance of shared destinies is the ultimate basis not just for community planning and governance, but also for the community life that they exist to promote.

Conclusion: the contributions of participation and governance to community life The concept of community itself implies issues of participation and governance because people who experience and acknowledge significant links and responsibilities towards each other have to be able to agree ground rules for how these links are to operate. In part, this can be resolved by representative governance, performing activities of agency, service, regulation and of course, representation itself on their behalf. In part, however, individual and group participation will be required to ensure that such representation responds accurately to people’s actual intentions and priorities and to give direct expression to their needs and values. Issues of direct, deliberative and monitory



democracy will be involved. Such matters of individual choice in turn raise issues of how to balance concerns for individual freedom and social order. Personal capabilities to do what individuals believe to be right need to be balanced to ensure that they do not degenerate into the exploitation, injury or even death as is happening with increasing frequency with the unregulated freedom to produce, buy, own and bear arms in the USA (Gal et al. 2022). Negotiation and reconciliation will be continually required, both as general approaches to progressive problem-­solving and as a means to reconcile opposing positions before they can turn toxic. Questions of the appropriate level of decision taking of such issues are best tested by the application of the Principle of Subsidiarity, discussed earlier, stating that issues should devolve to the lowest level at which they can be effectively managed. Concerning gun control, for instance, issues of freedom of movement throughout nation states clearly indicates that this must involve legislation at the national scale, in turn requiring regulation concerning governments’ integrity and freedom from undue influence. At the most active end of the spectrum of governance, practices of partnership will offer the prospect of full personal and community involvement and shared control of activities such as promotion of urban farms, community gardens and cultural festivals, as well as disaster management and mitigation. Such processes have been termed ‘supportive subsidiarity’. These may extend from the supranational and global  to the urban and local. They can maintain and promote culture and participation in ways that bring together local action, urban structure, regional environments, national policies and global awareness. Any one of us may find ourselves simultaneously active at several of these scales. Such multiple roles may produce strains, but the same principles of communication, participation, negotiation and careful definition of roles and responsibilities can assist in each situation and level. The need for this interaction of spheres and scales was identified more than a decade ago by Jurgen Habermas (2008, pp. 167–168). In an essay entitled ‘Political Communication in a Media Society’, he discerned the interaction of the three essential public spheres of political parties, local realities of civil society and the mediating role of public opinion. He observed that each of these were much influenced by a mass media dominated by interest groups, lobbyists and proprietors such as the Murdoch family and the late Robert Maxwell. Identifying the harmful effects of the control of

Community Governance and Participation 239

such media moguls, he feared that their political and commercial interests at the supranational and global scales were damaging the health of democracy and local community life. He warned of the ‘personalization of serious debates, the dramatization of events, the simplification of complex matters and a polarising exaggeration of conflIcts’, which led him to concerns that the European project might falter and fail unless actions were taken to achieve and regulate a healthier balance among the spheres of politics and community life and the performance of mass media (Habermas 2008, p. 180). This has proven to be partly prophetic, in the case of Britain’s departure from the European Community in 2020, influenced by the powerful combination of the Murdoch Press and the public opinion of geographic and class communities who felt themselves to be disadvantaged by a supranational authority with whose interests they did not identify. Nevertheless, the overall European Union has not only survived but has prospered and expanded to a current membership of 27 nations, holding together in the face of the fierce challenges of Putin’s post-­Soviet Russia. From its earliest days, the EU has been concerned to foster local vitality and health, especially those of lagging rural communities. In addition, many of the electoral democracies of the states that compose its membership have proven sensitive to the values and interests of their own multiple communities. While worldwide the fortunes of many representative democracies have been faltering  –  for instance in Myanmar, Philippines, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and briefly, in Brazil  –  European democracies have in the main weathered these demanding times well and energetically, and have, as Habermas hoped, paid conscious and careful attention to the messages from the public sphere of their quality journals and publicly funded but independently managed broadcasting media of radio and television, simultaneously maintaining the health and energising the grassroots of their local communities. This enlivening interplay among different scales of community has recently been illustrated on the other side of the world in the outcomes of the Australian federal election of May 2022. Although the government changed from Liberal-­ National Party (LNP) to Labor, the votes of both these major political parties declined as a result of gains by The Greens, who quadrupled their representation to four seats, and a group of Independents, nicknamed ‘Teals’ (because they were seen as combining blue and green political attitudes) who won no fewer than six inner metropolitan seats, all now represented by independent-­minded professional

240 Planning for Community

women – many of whom come from families who were formerly prominent LNP supporters. Both the Greens and the Teals campaigned on a portfolio of community issues of Climate Change action at local, national and global scales; the improvement of local health and aged care services and the introduction of a National Integrity Commission to monitor and discipline national political behaviour. Although the Labor party won a narrow overall majority of seats in the House of Representatives, the balance of power in the Senate is now firmly in the hands of the Greens and the Teal Independents and the new Labor government is already proclaiming its intention of adopting a greener future with a more rapid transition to renewable energy (Clean Energy Council 2022). Some political commentators have already concluded that this marks the end of two-­party domination of Federal politics in Australia (Rimmer 2022). The significance of these events for the interaction of different levels of community governance is that in these key inner-­ city seats, local impacts of global community concerns have proven decisive in a national election. Infused into the public sphere of representative federal politics, they have overcome the consistent messaging of the mass media in favour of the former Liberal National Party Government, which had ruled the country for almost 10 years. It seems that widespread community concerns and participation have played significant roles in restoring the vitality of the country’s overall representative system. Fears that electoral democracy might become a ‘faltering project’ may well be allayed by such developments of social inclusion and local authenticity. In this way, community governance and representative government can interact at all scales from the local to the national  –  and perhaps beyond  –  in a world of increasing interpersonal and informational communication, to create healthier and more responsive outcomes. This infusion of energy and responsiveness from community participation into representative democracy should not surprise us. Values  of participation and governance are deeply embedded in the very concept of community. People who experience and acknowledge significant links and responsibilities towards each other are bound to seek ground rules for how these links are to operate and achieve outcomes. In part, this can be through the activities of agency, service provision and regulation provided by representative governance, provided it is maintained in good health. Nevertheless, individual and group participation are also needed to involve people more directly and to ensure that representation remains

responsive to people’s actual intentions, priorities and values. Of course, such matters in turn raise issues of how best to balance concerns for personal agency, freedom and order, with the need to ensure that such freedoms do not degenerate into activities of exploitation or bullying of others. Negotiation will be constantly required, both as a general approach to social relations and as a patterned process to reconcile opposing positions before disputes can turn toxic. At the most active and local end of the spectrum of governance, practices of partnership will offer the prospect of full personal involvement and control in such activities as community festivals, urban farms and gardens, cultural events and entertainments, as well as rights of consultation and commentary on planning applications. Each one of us may find ourselves simultaneously active at several of these levels. In matters requiring action at much wider scales than local community life, inclusion and activism can prove highly effective and can help to forestall the dangerous feelings of exclusion and resentment that, even in the most long-­established democracies like the USA, may otherwise fuel the fires lit by dangerous populism, demagoguery and manipulation. In this way, the two parallel streams of participatory and representative democracy can contribute to maintaining the flows of each other’s health and vitality. Although the balancing of such multiple roles may produce its own strains, the same principles of communication, participation, negotiation and careful definition of roles and responsibilities can serve to assist in all situations and at all scales. As the philosopher Mary Midgley (2003, p. 87) observes: Morally, as well as physically, there is only one world, and we all have to live in it. To do so well and constructively, we must participate responsibly in its governance and that participation implies a like role for others and the whole process of conscious community engagement.

Endnotes i A similar case of a leader regarding himself as responsible for the good government and welfare of his people is provided by the Indian King Asoka of the third century BCE, (273–232). Following bloody wars of conquest, he ordained peace throughout his kingdom and erected numerous still-­surviving stellae enjoining tolerance, justice and social cohesion on all communities. While not democratically elected, Asoka represents an early example of the



charismatic leadership on which representative systems may also rely (Rawlinson 1970, p. 707). ii In modern times, representative government has continued to rely on such strong and decisive leadership as that of Abraham Lincoln in the divided USA of the American Civil war and Franklin Roosevelt, steering the country to recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s and through the challenging times of World War 2. There are numerous other examples of the importance of strong leadership to representative democracy. Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Pandit Nehru in India and Charles de Gaulle in the turbulent France of the 1960s, divided between militant returned Algerian colonists and radical young left-­wing reformists, all succeeded in combining roles of representation and leadership. iii For example, a former Queensland cabinet minister, Gordon Nuttall who subsequently served a long prison sentence for actively seeking out corrupt payments, perjury and interfering in the course of justice expressed no contrition, and made statements suggesting that he was an innocent victim of circumstances, reported in the newspapers of the time (Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission  2019). No Australian state system has been free of major corruption scandals in the course of the last three decades. Worldwide, few jurisdictions have. The newly elected Federal Australian Government of 2022  has now passed legislation to establish an independent National Integrity Commission to scrutise  political behaviour at all levels. iv Community Boards on the lines of those discussed earlier in New Zealand or Neighbourhood Associations, like those officially mandated in Portland, Oregon can support activities within their communities and perform such independent roles as organisation of community transport and festivals and provide commentary and advice on planning applications and open space policy. Other initiatives worth considering include the convening of Youth Councils of young activists selected by their peers and Chambers of Elders, composed of people of acknowledged experience and achievement able to refer matters for the attention of legislatures and to comment on proposed legislation. There are interesting similarities with the proposed Australian First People’s Voice to Parliament, which will be the subject of a referendum in the course of 2023. v What public education there was, was organised by voluntary groups, such as religious bodies. Health was a largely private matter between individuals and whatever medical attention they could afford. Industrial policy consisted in enforcing Combination Acts against workers. Housing was a mix of mutual aid by Building Societies and mass production of cramped rental housing for the industrial labour force, financed by market investors. vi Novels such as Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Emile Zola’s Germinal, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and A.J.

Community Governance and Participation 241

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

Cronin’s The Stars Look Down, have provided vivid descriptions of what human misery can be produced by unregulated market control in cities driven solely by economic imperatives. Later, the cautious reforming regulation of social democracy did much to reduce these problems and bequeathed the methods and results to contemporary mixed-­ economy democracies. Good order and personal protection also require prevention of publication of libels and slanders. Such criminal activities as recording and distributing performances of indecent acts, especially where these involve minors and disadvantaged individuals, can also claim no legitimate support from commitment to individual freedom. Freedom of information should thus be limited to public interest matters and not confused with license to distribute material that degrades or exploits others. Although the distinction is obvious, it needs to be re-­stated to distinguish open governance from the fallacy that the distribution of material based on hate, vengeance, profiteering, grievance or self-­ interest can safely be left unregulated to impact on the future of individuals and communities. The freedom of serfs to leave the demesnes of their lords  and move to work in the more productive and open towns and cities contributed significantly to Europe’s evolution from restrictively regulated feudal communities into the civil societies of medieval cities (Fisher 1956). The 1789 storming of the Bastille in Paris and the destruction of the Berlin Wall two hundred years later both spelt the end of exhausted regimes, and the mass shooting of the youthful protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the same year by the Chinese People’s army announced the intention of the Communist Party not to relax its grip of centralized power. Miller identified, for instance a number of local governments that had been incorporated by special interest groups exclusively in their own interests. These included a number of ‘cities’, with huge land values but very small populations-­amounting in the case of an authority named City of Commerce to less than 1000 people. By incorporating as separate and independent local governments, such very wealthy areas were able to freeload and avoid contributing to the costs of the necessary services of transport, education, policing, culture and health, which were instead supplied by far poorer but more populous surrounding local governments where their employees often lived. By such means, opulent communities and industrial owners were able to opt out of necessary service funding, while imposing exclusionary zoning to keep others out of their own localities. This is particularly significant in cities like Brisbane where the most local level of representation involves wards with averages of more than 50,000 people. In such circumstances, it is especially important to link

242 Planning for Community

locally grounded community planning with local community and neighbourhood organisations. xii These design workshops are named after the French word for the wheelbarrow that was used to rush architecture students’ final designs through the streets of Paris to the class’s end of term display of work. They retain both the strengths of urgency and the weaknesses of often poorly resolved issues inherent in this approach. iii An interesting example that occurred recently in x Queensland’s capital city of Brisbane involved a proposal by the state government to partner with a large developer to redevelop the North Bank of the Brisbane River, which was dominated by a branching set of aerial freeway lanes and access roads effectively separating the city centre from the river frontage. The government proposal was to promote development of the riverside land for office, hotel and residential towers and water front recreation and tourist activities by linking the city to the riverside over the concrete spaghetti of the braided freeways by elevated structures and walkways. The open ‘Enquiry by Design’, held over a period of four days to examine the proposal, became the focus for widespread professional and public unease. A number of serious objections emerged, including the hydrographic dangers of narrowing the Brisbane River by amounts variously estimated between 30 and 50 m at a time of increased flooding due to climate change; the traffic generation implications of introducing several tens of thousands of new workers and residents to the already congested traffic flows of the city centre and the insurance requirements and costs of constructing extensive pedestrian pathways over multiple lanes and access links of a busy freeway. The scheme was abandoned following the Enquiry. However, a decade later the State Government quietly gave permission for one of the nation’s biggest casino resorts, due for completion and opening in 2023, to occupy the entire riverside site, towering over Parliament House and the Queensland University of Technology and the many state government departments lining the city’s major administrative focus of George Street. xiv Utilitarian considerations of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ are often cited to justify and over-­ride costs incurred to significant minorities because of larger benefits generated elsewhere. However, these gains should justify compensation in cash or alternative provisions, which can then be paid out of the gains accruing  to the greater public interest (Prest and Turvey 1965). This approach has the advantage of acting as a truth test for the assertion that the proposed sacrifice of minority rights is justified by benefits to the greater good. If the majority is obliged to pay just compensation, their representatives and members should be led to weigh alternatives more carefully.

xv For instance, in the first decade of this century, ABC Learning Centres in Australia (no connection with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), experienced a meteoric growth based on the combination of government subsidies and parental payments, but collapsed through over-­ ambitious and excessively rapid expansion, threatening many tens of thousands of families with sudden cessation of child care arrangements. Also in Australia, shady practices by a number of Australian tertiary education market organisations claiming to provide education for overseas students were unmasked at this time as providing largely worthless courses and ‘qualifications’. xvi This proposal was worked out in administrative detail and was ready to be introduced. However, due to a change of provincial government, it was never implemented. The ministries responsible for health, social services and citizenship had combined to produce a strategy to integrate all twenty one of their separate health, human services and community development programs and deliver them jointly from regional ‘Multi Service Agencies’, the design and organization of which is reflected in Figure 10.1. Although funded by the provincial government, the 40–50 regional Multi Service Agencies would have been controlled by Boards composed of representatives of their community, consumers and volunteers and accountable jointly to their voting memberships and the Provincial Government. These proposals, abandoned by the incoming Coalition, remain a promising model for integrating functions, levels of governance and social and physical aspects of service provision. This coordination and co-­location of related services has much in common with the ‘service hub’ concept of human services planning advocated by Dear et al. (1994). In low income parts of Los Angeles County’s cities of Venice and Santa Monica, a number of services, including subsidised accommodation, food supply, day care, psychiatric and medical support and employment training have been clustered close to safe outdoor meeting areas. Government and voluntary agencies have combined to upgrade a former ‘skid row’ area to create a kind of low income ‘mainstreet’. xvii This is the case with the sale in the early years of the current century by the Australian Commonwealth Government of Brisbane Airport to a newly formed international body, the Brisbane Airport Corporation. The new corporation has developed a substantial ‘airport city’ of offices, industry and a sprawling retail facility (termed the ‘Direct Factory Outlet’) six miles to the east of the existing city centre in a wetland area of extremely sensitive environment. The development bears no relation to the SEQ Regional Plan or Brisbane’s City Plan (Brisbane Airport Corporation 2020). Instead, it runs counter to many of their proposals for distributing regional traffic flows and establishing a hierarchy of centres.



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11

Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow

Introduction: organisation and intentions of the chapter Throughout this book, I have aimed to emphasise the importance of bringing together the full range of ideas, activities, people and places that combine to shape our richly varied communities and to demonstrate how this can be best accomplished in inclusive community planning. In these ways, I believe, we can match and manage the rapidly expanding range and complexity of these driving forces to create more inclusive and happier communities, at scales ranging upwards from local neighbourhoods to contribute to national and even emerging global communities. These Conclusions therefore, consist of two parts: first, themes, roles and future directions; and second, the prospects for the future of community planning.

Themes, roles and future directions: inclusion, negotiation, adaptation and invention In aiming to create sustainable and fulfilling futures for the full range of its members, community planning needs to include and reconcile their many interests and concerns. Opportunities offered by new developments and technologies will have to be monitored, adapted and integrated. This is particularly important in these times  of rapid and competing innovations and unpredictable events  which extend across climate, health, resource use, political systems, local and global communications and international affairs. As well as meeting these newly emerging challenges, planning processes will need to adapt existing arrangements to solve long-­ standing problems. The four resulting themes, strongly linked to each other, are social inclusion (from Chapters 2 and 3, Communities of Locality and Interaction); negotiation (from Chapters 4 and 5, Human Values and Goals and Ways and Means); adaptive capacities (from Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Chapters 7–9, discussing Activities and Actions and Homes and Community Design); and inventions of new problem-­solving policies and practices (from Chapter  5, Ways and Means). A cumulative logic connects all these concerns: inclusion demands negotiation to enhance adaptive capacity, which in turn becomes a key element in developing the necessary problem-­solving policies. inclusion

For community life to be soundly based and sustainable, it needs to reflect and embrace the ideas, activities and interests of the widest possible range of its members. People of differing incomes, ages, cultures and lengths of residence need to feel, and to be, equally included, requiring original thought and ideas to  keep pace with the results of accelerating social and physical mobility. Constituent groups will have their own social and promotional organisations, which  should be involved to help identify problems and objectives. Contributions from different perspectives can be acknowledged and integrated through the mutual recognition and communicative techniques of group problem-­solving. The values and wants discussed in Chapter 4, Human Values and Goals, offer a common currency that can help participants recognise each other’s equal rights and then to negotiate shared aims, in order to produce plans that reflect wide-­ranging concerns and command popular support, because they reconcile and integrate a range of values and goals. By contrast, exclusion of critical ideas and views would generate opposition and hostility from those whose support is needed if the plans are to succeed. Chapter  5, Ways and Means, identifies how such common objectives can be developed, options evaluated and likely outcomes reviewed. Where there are conflicts, their resolution may itself help to generate new ideas and solutions. Such socially inclusive planning is favoured by the objective-­based methods described in that chapter. In a world of mounting mobility, inclusive techniques that can equally engage established residents and recent arrivals can also help to integrate newcomers. In such developed countries as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, this is especially important because many of the



current population have only arrived at their present addresses in the past five years, often from elsewhere in the city, the nation or the world (Australian Bureau of Statistics  2018). This proportion can only be expected to grow, as international migration increases in response to climate change, sea level rises and desiccation of marginal agricultural areas. The future health, vitality and contributions of these newcomers will be strongly affected by how well they are integrated into existing community life. Where large numbers are involved, success could produce a similar flowering of new ideas, cultures and inventions to those that were achieved in the seventeenth-­century Netherlands, eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century Britain and nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century United States (Mumford  1961). Failure could result in more of the kind of conflict and bloodletting that followed the breakup of the old Yugoslavia and the refusal of its former members to accept equal rights for all ethnic groups to choose their governments and plan their own futures (Robertson  2000). Similar problems have bedevilled many aspects of life in the last two decades in Kashmir, Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan. Because segregation is neither desirable nor feasible in dynamic contemporary societies, thoroughgoing inclusion remains the most viable option. The methods of community planning outlined in this book are well suited to advance this inclusion through purposeful consultation and systematic engagement of all groups, irrespective of how recently they have arrived; where they have come from; how prosperous or impoverished, well-­established or isolated or articulate they may be. For instance, targeted consultation and the use of interpreters can assist in the inclusion of the linguistically disadvantaged.i mutual support between social inclusion and healthy governance

One particularly important aspect of inclusion, forming a major theme of Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation, is the relationship between participatory and representative governance. Conventionally, these have often been seen as alternative or even opposing paths to accountability. Nevertheless, the cooperative doctrines of such Syndicalist thinkers as Kropotkin (1939, 1974), Jose Arizmendi (Whyte and Whyte 1988) and Mahomed Yunus (Bornstein 1998) provide convincing illustrations of ways in which the two approaches of participatory and representative governance can each contribute precisely what is lacking in the other to create stable, just, and inclusive governance.

Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 247

Local participation by elected representatives and candidates can maintain connections with democracy’s grassroots at the same time as helping to nurture new generations of potential representatives. The subsidiarity and devolution of powers discussed in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation, can delegate responsibilities and funds down to their most local effective levels, encouraging individual participation in activities ranging from open space management, through cultural expression and community transport, to workers’ control of enterprises. Reciprocally, the healthy conduct of individual and group participation can be maintained by the need to collaborate and seek  recognition and funding from representative local governments, responsible for distributing public funds, maintaining oversight and enacting laws to protect individuals from coercion or populist manipulation. The support and scrutiny of overarching representative democracy can, for instance, exert necessary societal oversight over the activities of the many proselytising and quasi-­religious groups who may be rapidly formed and sometimes develop exploitative practices concerning their members, including children (Learn Religions 2021). As indicated in the conclusions to Chapter 10, participation and representation should be viewed as not so much alternative approaches to the management of democratic societies as necessary partners to keep each other healthy, lively and well-­informed. negotiation

Negotiation is an essential component – and facilitator – for successful community planning, destined to become ever more significant over the next few decades. Its well-­tested theories depend on offering potential stakeholders, including dissident or disadvantaged groups, the likelihood of outcomes that will be superior to any conflict-­based alternatives (termed BATNAs or ‘Better Alternatives to Negotiated Agreements’) that might otherwise suggest themselves (Susskind and Cruikshank  1987). Such negotiations inherently involve recognition of others and can provide continuing opportunities to reconcile long-­standing differences among conflicting parties and viewpoints. Successive phases involving objectives, options, evaluation, adoption and cyclical review will all provide ideal opportunities for this kind of conflict resolution and should, in turn, maintain and enhance communities’ social and cultural capital. In discussing what should happen in the future, dialogue can be promoted between groups who would normally find no reason or

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opportunity to talk with each other in the present.ii Because everyone has stakes in its outcomes, community planning should be an inherently public activity, providing a conveniently accessible forum for healthy public debate.iii Community Visioning, Futures Workshops and Enquiry by Design all present ways to access and expand latent resources of personality and place. In such ways, community planning can become a ‘Sum Plus’ activity, where everybody gains because of the productive advantages of collaboration over conflict. At the local scale, these positive approaches can enrich the negotiative development of future visions and ‘desired future character’ statements to guide the design strategies of resulting community and neighbourhood plans. Such activities promote participation and community voice, through negotiations among people who may have come from different places, had different experiences and hold different priorities  –  but are nonetheless destined to share and care for common social, economic and physical spaces and endow them with the vitality that makes for good community life. In contemporary inner-­city communities, often confronted by proposals for large-­scale and intensive redevelopment, typical issues that may need to be aired and compared may include the density, height, access, vistas, educational and health services, open spaces and heritage values of permissible development. If discussions are to be fully effective, there also need to be places around the tables for spokespersons of city policy, environmental concerns and commercial interests as well as local residents. When they are included, outcomes will gain realism and up-­ to-­date information. Problem-­solving can prompt inventions that can empower communities to achieve new and durable successes. For example, in the Netherlands, policies have been developed and adopted that both retain the country’s ‘Green Heart’ in its heavily developed centre and west and also set appropriate densities and fair housing opportunities for everyone through local government participation in the supply of housing land in surrounding communities (Faludi and Van der Valk 1996). British commitment across the political spectrum to similar Green Belt policies, discussed in Chapters 2 and 9, has exerted no less significant and beneficial effects upon the qualities of life and health throughout that country. In these ways, local negotiations can not only resolve immediate issues but also lay the basis for longer-­term and more widely adopted policies. adaptation

In the rapidly changing contemporary world, such collaborative approaches not only help

existing communities adjust to evolving conditions. They can also prompt radical innovations in response to cascading changes at all scales and in many fields, reflecting the ideas of Karl Popper, discussed in Chapter 5, Ways and Means, of cycles of problem-­solving as the mainspring of effective method. These ideas of progressive adaptation align well with the design theories of Christopher Alexander, also discussed in that chapter, and of Randolph Hester (Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design), intending to unfold new solutions from existing situations, including people’s well-­loved features and ‘sacred places’. Such adaptive methods are stitched through the contributions of community planning, whether in the stable conditions of the rural English countryside and traditional Indian villages or in the heavily pressured inner city housing areas of the Bronx and Harlem, where community housing associations have transformed derelict areas into collaborative communities (Wolf Powers 2014) and such contemporary great cities as India’s Kolkata and Delhi, discussed in Chapter 5, Ways and Means. In contemporary circumstances of rapid and challenging technological and social change, community planning, with its inherent acceptance that each person should count and count equally, offers an open path for  the necessary bonding goals of recognition, inclusion and adjustment. Participation by members of recently arrived minority groups within such consultative bodies as Neighbourhood Planning Teams, discussed in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation, constitutes one  form of  such recognition that can provide a useful first step to better mutual understanding and more widespread social inclusion. Flexibly applied, the community planning methods described in Chapters 5, Ways and Means, and 6, Activities and Actions, also offer effective ways to help people adapt to emotional and cultural change and solve existing problems including use of such innovations as new communications technologies. Once people have heard their own needs and ideas voiced in public debates, they are more likely to be able to recognise that the views of others should also be aired and taken into account, and even that their own ones may need to be adapted to rectify inconsistencies or contradictions. invention

Community planning is well suited to invent collaborative  solutions to acknowledged problems. Both material and social problems can be tackled, working across the wide fields of the basic issues of everyday life before ascending to shape



more general and strategic policies. This approach, discussed in Chapter  5, Ways and Means, applies imagination to invent and integrate sequences of solutions reflecting wide arrays of community objectives, advanced by different and possibly competing stakeholders and participants. Successive cycles of problem-­solving can resolve initial conflicts to achieve coherent overall strategies. No individual objective should be ignored, because all can be integrated into a solution framework, where progressive problem-­solving from the bottom upwards accords priority to the more widely held and prioritised aims. This will involve using mental models to produce the good solutions that in earlier and more stable epochs were created by the winnowing effects of the passage of time.iv One currently common example of this process of progressive and adaptive problem solving working upwards from the grassroots of community objectives is the way that community farms, gardens, planted verges and reclamation of redundant road space with trees and roadside gardens (discussed in Chapters 1, Problems and Promises, and 7, Homes and Communities) are being produced by local initiatives throughout the world. While introducing the saving grace of nature, greenery, sociable activities and carbon capture throughout many towns and cities, they also avoid the economic and political costs to local governments of contentious compulsory acquisition of more specialised spaces. This approach could be extended by repurposing redundant road surfaces, clearing sites awaiting redevelopment and scraps of formerly unsightly unused or derelict land. At the same time, such actions would fulfil the more strategic and general aims of mitigating climate change – and thus enhancing their level of priority in the hierarchy of policy development. Similarly, social and community housing associations can take advantage of opportunities provided by land-­use changes that are making available numerous old school sites, marshalling yards and disused port areas for new social housing, as described in Chapter 7, Homes and Communities. The power of social inventions to help solve existing problems is well illustrated by the reforming zeal of the Garden City movement, responsible for contributing much inspiration for the construction of affordable and social housing in the developed world throughout the last century. This idea was regarded by its originator, Ebenezer Howard, not as a town planning theory, but as his most important ‘invention’. It has now entered the mainstream of contemporary community planning in the form of hundreds of new towns and suburbs that continue to be established every year in all six continents.

Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 249

There can be few better examples of how progressive problem-­solving can lead to the triggering of invention than the microcredit arrangements of the Grameen Bank, originating in Bangladesh in the early 1970s (see Box 1.2). This invention was stimulated by the need to resolve the superficially separate goals of enhancing local community life and organisation and reforming the economic system that kept local families impoverished and debt-­ridden, particularly those headed by women. Resolving these two problems produced Mohammed Yunus’ transformative invention of an initially quite simple system of microcredit, where local community groups replaced the crippling individual burden of producing economic collateral by replacing it with the social collateral of trust and mutual support among members of the local group (Fugelsang and Chandler  1993). No less significant have been the inventions of workers’ cooperatives achieving widely acknowledged successes, starting in Mondragon in the Basque region of Northern Spain in the second half of the twentieth century. These have continued to thrive and expand under a variety of political regimes, ranging widely from Franco’s fascism to contemporary representative democracy and in locations throughout Spain and around the Western World (see Box 1.3). Insistent questions arise of where such social inventions are to come from in the future and how they can be encouraged. The spiral of problem-­ solving and values-­ based community planning can start from identifying crucial problems, ideas and desired directions; proceed through review of existing and proposed activities; and continue to produce alternative new solutions that can be tested to see how well they fulfil the original goals and values. Energies, funds and personnel for implementation can come not only from government and market stakeholders but also from the rapidly growing array of voluntary movements, which already include housing associations, recycling cooperatives, community transport, cultural organisations and local employment initiatives. In addition, the global reach and instantaneous exchange of information offered by cell phones and the worldwide web can frequently match needs with capacities, to promote new solutions to solve problems, both old and new.v integrating themes: the  roles of  mixed scanning

Community Planning, with its integration of the many scales of contemporary life, relies heavily on the ‘mixed scanning’ discussed both at the end of Chapter  3, Communities of Interest, and in

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other chapters throughout this book. This capacity encourages comparisons across different scales and time horizons, comparing immediate solutions to long-­ term goals, and drawing together intertwined local  problems and widely distributed resources, in keeping with the dictum Only Connect, with which E.M. Forster prefaced all his celebrated novels. Problem-­solving skills and new social inventions can then be applied to produce the final pieces in the community planning jigsaw, assembling and relating individual proposals to fulfil consistent overall visions. People’s passions for such widely held values as liberty, justice, abundance and conservation, discussed in Chapter 4, Human Values and Community Goals, can thus be recognised and related to local options to provide secure directions for collaborative planning. Detailed responsive proposals can then be produced for whole communities over unfolding time horizons.

The future of community planning Looking to the future, the combined skills of mind, spirit and practical action can offer positive prospects in all four themes of inclusion, negotiation, adaptation and invention, discussed above. This final section now proceeds to examine what each of them can be expected to contribute to the unfolding future of community planning. inclusion

Globally rising levels of literacy, education and access to information should enhance people’s capacities to participate in decision making and self-­ management of local activities, accelerating the impact of the Principle of Subsidiarity, discussed in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation, supporting delegation of control of activities to the most local at which they can be effectively performed. Sound planning processes and collaboration can ensure that such initiatives do not conflict, but support each other. More widespread adoption of the successful methods of inclusion of local groups in the governance systems of great cities, pioneered by such metropolitan authorities as those of Portland (OR), Auckland and Amsterdam and discussed in Chapter  10, Community Governance and Participation, should provide an invaluable impetus for such inclusive community planning. The general decentralising trends evident throughout contemporary life can be greatly assisted by such responsive innovations.

Increased individual agency and inclusion is also favoured by the flattening and broadening of information networks resulting from the universal reach of the worldwide web and the matching spread of cell phones. The promotion of community life and planning at neighbourhood, city and regional levels can play useful roles in resolving the tug of war, discussed in Chapter  10, between highly centralised control of investment in information networks and the universal spread and access of their consumers. To make the valid and nuanced use that we should of contemporary electronic communications and satellite technologies, we must balance the access they offer to ever more vast stores of information, with people’s informed capacities for analysis and interpretation. Social inquiry and focus group methods developed over the last eighty years will continue to produce important insights into human needs and preferences that allow us to better interpret the wealth of statistical information, becoming increasingly available (Mackay 2021). Mackay emphasises that empathy and emotional intelligence are also needed, as well as the good habits of active listening. Well-­judged community events can have a large role to play, including promotion of cultural fiestas and food-­based festivities. These can both draw people together in enjoyable self-­expression and exploration of new flavours of all sorts and can be parts of continuing programmes of community engagement and consultation that can breathe life and meaning into the potentially overwhelming array of available statistical information. Examples of suitable fields for collaboration and mutual support are the reclamation and inclusion of such under-­used or derelict spaces as New York’s Highline Parks along the abandoned Elevated Rail Line and the countless similar spaces, especially redundant road spaces, being freed for repurposing by social and technological change across urban areas. Collaborative local community plans can play a useful role in identifying such areas and in establishing provisions that encourage local participation in their reclamation and management. Inclusion of wider ranges of relevant skills and specialisms is also likely to become more feasible as increasing numbers of previously isolated specialists recognise the links between their own and others’ contributions and activities within the wider community. Valuable contributions to community engagement can thus be drawn from contributors working across governments, voluntary agencies and the private sector, sharing skills, methods and community contacts. Friendships and trust relations across these boundaries can help hold together the widening field of inclusion.

negotiation

The challenges of successful inclusion highlight the need for good negotiation, as more minority and marginalised individuals and groups gain the confidence to claim a share in policymaking, seek seats at the decision-­making tables and add their agendas to the range of concerns, which have to be resolved. The place of negotiation should increasingly be brought forward from resolving conflicts between established adversarial positions to shaping discussions that can actually forestall disagreements by developing consensual initial objectives, taking account of everyone interests. Professionals who may be skilled at their jobs and at problem-­solving in their own areas may also need to acquire new skills to  facilitate  inclusion, which often involve active listening rather than fluent expression. Good facilitators, for instance, may need to limit their own explanations, in order to evoke the fullest possible contributions from other members of their groups. They will even need to accept silences while each participant reflects on his or her major concerns or interests, before encouraging group members to contribute in an organised sequence, so that everyone’s voice and interests are heard, before giving way to more free-­flowing discussion. Dedicated public officials may have to learn to resist the temptation to engulf the views of other participants with which they may not agree  –  or which run counter to their current intentions – with exhaustive and elaborate justifications of existing policies. Such emotionally demanding skills require experience, practice and training, whether acquired in tertiary education or through in-­service programmes. Once acquired, such practical abilities can enhance inclusion, helping the spread of understanding and information face-­to-­face and across networks. Consultation is then deepened to become participation. People who respond to online questionnaires can volunteer or be enlisted to become members of visioning and community planning teams and other engagement and activity groups. Both exchange of information among professionals and transparent feedback with communities can also be promoted and assisted via websites. Because communication can be instantaneous, these tools can often engage people who would otherwise be too busy or preoccupied with daily events. Information technology can also help in processing responses to combine many thousands of apparently conflicting individual preferences, to form ranked and integrated expressions of community preferences into practical hierarchies of

Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 251

objectives, in ways described in Chapter  5, Ways and Means. Such processes are advantaged by rising levels of literacy and numeracy throughout the world, increasing both people’s demands for places at decision taking tables and their capacity to make good use of them. These communities of interest can benefit from electronic as well as face-­to-­face contact, but there are limits to the uses that can be made of electronic means of inclusion and the operations of the cyber world. Fully valid and nuanced applications of new mass communication techniques require the balancing of numbers with more searching insights and interpretations. Focus group methods developed by social and market researchers over the last three or four decades continue to produce important insights into needs and preferences (Mackay, 2000, 2021) and can also be part of continuing programs of community engagement and consultation. Empathy and emotional intelligence will be involved as well as the good habits of active listening. Significant roles can also be played by popular community events including promotion of cultural fiestas and festivities centred around music and food, which can draw people together in both creative self-­expression and exploration of new ideas and experiences. Such activities can recognise that healthy communities need to incorporate, celebrate and harness the energies of difference. Such personal contact can infuse invaluable intensity into communication. Because the powers of electronic messaging can pose insidious problems of impersonality and loss of meaning resulting from distance or inappropriate categories and the tyranny of the template, it is regrettable that much community consultation is being shifted away from public meetings that enable dialogue and face-­to-­face exchange of opinions to seeking online responses to predetermined questions. Respondents may well feel frustrated and alienated by such control of content by templates, but there is not much they can do about it except abstain from responding. People in all aspects of community planning need to be aware of this danger, confine their use of electronic consultation to secondary roles of information and option supply and avoid substitution of electronic communication for matters that demand the responsiveness and immediacy of face-­to-­face contact and interpersonal negotiation. These will include exploration and evaluation of ideas, problem-­solving, solution development and visioning. Nevertheless, the two modes of direct and electronic contact are, in fact, highly compatible

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and there are many situations where they can be combined to contribute usefully to each other. For instance, distribution of information on background concerns, trends and existing policies can be made available before public meetings are held; similarly, the follow-­up to public meetings or problem-­ solving occasions like Charettes or Enquiries by Design can include opportunities for participants to go online to review, comment on and add to summaries of draft outcomes. Websites may provide invaluable contemporary versions of the traditional community notice boards and act as sounding boards for community responses, without being miscast as substitutes for creative participation. In times of pandemic-­caused lockdowns, Teams and Zoom conferences and well-­composed chat rooms can help to maintain community dialogue and discussion until more engaging face-­to-­ face contact can be resumed. Prospects of successful negotiation can also be enhanced by genuine human fellow feelings and the desire to reconcile past misunderstandings and perceived injustices. A large part of successful negotiations is played by the capacity to recognise and practice this emotional empathy  –  realising that if one person experiences certain emotions and needs, it is probable that others will, too. These capacities will become increasingly important as communities at all scales find themselves having to incorporate growing numbers of people from different cultures and traditions. Negotiators will also need to adopt the language of people’s emotions and feelings, rather than economic jargon. These efforts are well worthwhile because successful negotiations can transform initially negative sentiments or interpretations into prompting discoveries of new options and opportunities that promote positive adaptations to meet new conditions. adaptation

In this current phase of very dynamic changes, communities will need to be empowered and assisted to make use of repeated and rapidly occurring innovations, including the impacts of new technologies and rising levels of mass literacy and numeracy, and to face the challenges of global warming, sea level rises, and increased pressures for entry of displaced persons for refuge. In doing this, the robust problem-­solving and open inquiry methods of critical rationalism, discussed in Chapter  5, Ways and Means, and the remarkable cultural resilience of the ‘monsoon cultures’ of the Global East should both have important roles to play. Free-­flowing exchange of ideas and

information is required, to make full use of the wide range of knowledge and ideas now becoming available through near-­universal access to the cyberworld of global communications, gathering people into discussion spaces where they can both hear and be heard. No role of community planning will be more important to everyday life than assisting adaptation in evolving appropriate settlement forms, as past trends towards concentrations in central areas are modified and ultimately reversed by the decentralising demands of resource conservation, climate change and expanding global information networks, discussed in Chapter  1, Promises and Problems of Community Life. As more people work at home or in local cybernetically connected centres, the more balanced and widely distributed central places identified in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design will create opportunities for networks of more locally centred and interactive communities (Hall 2014; Heywood 1998). This evolution is ideally suited to the adaptive methods of community planning developed  in this book, involving the introduction of controlled densification of settlement around public transport nodes, in clustered communities set within networks of environmental conservation and benefitting from reduced exposure to flooding. Adaptation of spaces is also required to manage changing land uses. One example is provided by recent developments in settlement patterns brought about by changing technologies in all forms of movement. Rapid transformations in the scale and organisation of air travel and transport provide a particularly vivid example. The dramatic impacts that the recent growth of airports has exerted on the form and life of major metropolitan centres such as New  York, Amsterdam, London, Sydney and Tokyo, briefly discussed in Chapter 1, Promises and Problems of Community Life, are cases in point. Current developments in global travel, environmental impacts, climate change and fossil fuel depletion are likely to heavily influence their future scale, profitability and urban integration. The rapid growth rates of the recent past may well be curtailed. The increasing incidence of mutating global pandemics, for instance, may reduce the volume of international air traffic that has to be managed. This could well result in consequences parallel to those that transformed the inner areas of many coastal metropolises in the second half of the twentieth century, following abandonment of old inner-­city docks and port areas resulting from the downstream movement of seaports to deeper water.vi Advance thought should now be



given to alternative integration of spaces currently reserved for future airport expansion, in the possible event of their long-­term decline and contraction. Far-­sighted contingency plans may be needed. Alternative uses may include residential ‘new-­towns-­in-­town’; new mixed-­use suburbs; locations for industrial promotion incubator areas; city farms; and locations for experiments in sustainable living initiatives. invention

Human capacities for invention offer the best causes for confidence in the future as much in social as in scientific spheres.vii Some heartening examples have been discussed in earlier chapters: Howards’ ‘invention’ of the Garden City; the development of city farms to bring life and nature back into the inner areas of the most crowded metropolitan areas; and the invention of ‘wiki’ techniques of collaborative knowledge development to make use of the universal access afforded by the Internet. A further example is the remarkable rise of renewable energy, rapidly developing to span both economic and environmental spheres, including the capacity for households to feed electricity back into power networks and therefore simultaneously gain income and diminish the demands on more resource-­consuming and carbonising forms of generation. Such economic and technical possibilities to adapt changing situations to meet future needs and possibilities will be frequently raised by participants in community planning processes. In a process involving so many cycles of inclusion and mutual adjustment, it is not surprising that communication plays an essential role. Continuous community dialogue, linked to the exploratory programmes of action research discussed in Chapter 5, Ways and Means, will lead to richer social communication, better opportunities for participation, and more time and stimuli for further problem-­solving and invention of new solutions. Many of the inventions that community planning can pursue in the next decades have already been pioneered. Social and political examples include the integration of Community Boards and Neighbourhood Associations into the regular operations of governance that have been pioneered in Oregon, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Economic initiatives such as the networks of workers cooperatives of the Mondragon Workers Cooperative and the spreading empowerment of Grameen Microcredit System have already achieved global recognition and influence. Their examples of passing power down to local levels at the same time

Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 253

as maintaining the benefits of widespread global cooperation provide inspiring models of the virtues of community involvement. Similarly, the energising impetus of collaboration and sociability illustrated in the ideas of Hilary Putnam, Richard Florida and throughout the Microcredit movement, discussed in Chapter  8,  offer particularly relevant directions for the future of employment planning, linking it to patterns of planned social and educational provision at scales ranging from local incubator clusters to regional concentrations of higher education. A wealth of environmental inventions are also available, extending from creek corridors combining increasingly essential flood ways with accessible areas for nature conservation and recreation to increased use of reservations to protect wildlife. In the vulnerable world of mounting human impacts on our own and other species, many more such creative solutions will be needed, often involving new ways to diminish conflict and promote the remarkable problem-­solving capacities of collaboration. ways forward

Future community planning must recognise the overriding importance of communication with, and participation by impacted communities. The old prescription of ‘Less talk and more action!’ has produced many disastrous results of premature commitment, narrow-­ minded agendas, design without integrity, environmental destruction and isolated and stigmatised communities. Instead, we can help empower communities to collaborate in developing responsive policies, contributing to the definition of their own needs and vulnerabilities. Such community planning can assist in promoting continuous adaptation, as well as the major innovations that current rapid change demands. These methods of social interaction should also provide richer opportunities for participation, more time and stimulus for social problem-­solving, and more innovative and constructive use of scarce resources of human energy and physical materials. Such attention to collaborative planning should foster the social energy and improved harmony among the many individuals and groups brought together by rapid change, which is needed to create and continue healthy community life for today and tomorrow. As practical first steps, I urge readers to think about what you, yourself, most enjoy and value in your own life and in that of your community, both as you experience them today and as they might be envisaged for tomorrow. What activities would you most like to see promoted

254 Planning for Community

to help fulfil these values, and what actions can you and others  together take to set these steps in motion?

Endnotes i Ladders of participation can provide access to the major platforms and thoroughfares of community life. If energetic action is taken to integrate newcomers into the lives and cultures of their new homes, the paths trodden by successive waves of Armenians, Jews, Palestinians, Kurds, Vietnamese and Afghanis in European, North American and Australasian societies over the course of the last century could well be followed by other groups over the next few decades, to their lasting benefit as well as that of their host communities. History suggests that such immigrants can be relied upon to assist their own economic integration as they work hard to establish themselves and their families in their new homes. But where they or their children feel socially or politically excluded, some of the most energetic of the younger generation will inevitably become alienated or hostile in ways that no community should contemplate with complacency. By contrast, the rewards of successful integration encourage energizing surges of cultural, creative and inventive energy, while failure can result in the loss of the social mandate and mutual trust on which communities ultimately depend. ii The impressive achievements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in the Republic of South Africa and Timor Loro S’ae are examples of these healing roles of public speech, channelling community energies into positive outcomes. iii Techniques of negotiation can also be expanded beyond the boundaries of dispute resolution. Methods such as Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond and Royal  1998; Cooperider  2008) avoid the very idea of conflicting values to encourage participants to identify their own strengths and those of their colleagues, with aims of opening new pathways to create new successes in positive negotiations. iv Such approaches, often termed ‘multiple criteria planning’ and discussed in Chapter  5, Ways and Means, forge coherent strategies by recognising and successively resolving numerous individual concerns and roles to create coherent overall outcomes. They have been well developed for contemporary use by Christopher Alexander (1964, reprinted 1979). It is interesting to note that earlier examples of such decentred and inclusive practical decision taking extend back two and half millennia to the invention of democracy in Athens, promoting potential inclusion of the whole citizenry by conferring responsibility for such civic roles as justice, defence and urban maintenance upon individual citizens, chosen by ballot or lot. Personal responsibility was thus harnessed to serve the needs of the overall

community, reversing the earlier tradition of the autocracy of the city states of Egypt, Mesopotamia and elsewhere in Greece, in city states such as Sparta. Later again, the Anglo Saxons developed the institution of the Folk Moot to reach community decisions to assist in establishing settled and collaborative communities in their new homes in Britain. A parallel social invention allowed the Ibo tribes of the Anambra, Cross and Lower Niger River basins to develop an effective system of land use development control. Meetings of the Village Elders allocated sites on the fringes of existing settlements for young couples forming their first households to build their new homes (Pers. comm., Nwoga, 1964). Later as the encroachment on the agricultural lands surrounding the village became too severe, ‘Umu’ (child of) settlements were established to maintain traditional links within the clan and tribe that would allow new localities to be developed to provide necessary housing sites, maintaining the coherence of the overall community. Individual needs and overall coherence were being integrated in progressive cycles of decentred problem-­solving. v A case in point, in my own field of teaching, to solve existing problems and achieve valuable advances, is the opportunity to use information technology to increase interaction within teams of students working together in planning practice projects to improve exchange of information. Programs such as Dropbox, Wiki Networks, PB Works and Blackboard allow groups of people to store information in virtual files, offering instantaneous access to all members. Ideas can be developed, tested, adapted, and then incorporated or abandoned in developing common work in progress. Team members can enjoy the comfort of their own homes, access to their bookshelves and electronic files, surf the web for information and buzz their developing ideas around the team networks. The inherent power and playfulness of modern electronic communications can add a great deal to the long-­established synergies of teamwork. vi While impacts of ‘Peak Oil’ global warming, carbon taxing, global pandemics and international terrorism will increase the costs and constrain the scope of international air travel, there is likely to also be a longer term reduction in ‘pull’ factors resulting from diminished need for travel and transport associated with increased use of teleconferencing and communication techniques such as Zoom, Teams and Skype, and more equitable international division of labour between different world regions. vii There are many prime examples of the extraordinary capacity of people to solve existing problems and create new solutions, which transcend existing conditions and create new possibilities for individuals and communities. Readers will think of many of their own, as well as Faraday’s discovery of the electro-­magnetic generation of electricity; Edison’s use of filaments to create and emit electric light;



Conclusions: Community Planning Today and Tomorrow 255

Fred Hollows’ low-­cost laser-­based mass removal of cataracts for whole communities of under-­ developed societies; the collaborative evolution of the microchip and miniaturisation techniques over the last three decades; Ventner and Watson’s genome sequencing; and the collaborative and cumulative creation – by many practitioners – of the Internet.

References Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form, reprinted 1979. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018). Understanding internal migration in Australia. https://www.abs.gov.au/ ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071 .0~2016~Main%20Features~Population%20 Shift:%20 Understanding%20Internal%20Migration%20in%20 Australia~69 (accessed 7 January 2023). Bornstein, D. (1998). The Price of a Dream, The Story of the Grameen Bank and the Idea that is Helping the Poor to Change their Lives, Mt Colah, Sydney, Grameen Books, Australia. Also Dhaka: Bangladesh Grameen Publishing. Cooperider (2008). The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, [electronic resource]. San Francisco: Berrett-­Koehler. Faludi, A. and van der Valk, A. (1996). Planners come out for the Green Heart. Journal of Economic and Social Geography 97 (5). Fugelsang, A. and Chandler, D. (1993). Participation as Process  – Process as Growth. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Grameen Trust.

Hall, P. (2014). Good Cities, Better Lives, How Europe Discovered and Lost the Art of Urbanism. London: Routledge. Hammond, S. and Royal, C. (1998). Lessons from the Field. Plano, Texas: Practical Press. Heywood, P. (1998). The Emerging Social Metropolis, Progress in Planning. Oxford: Elsevier. Kropotkin, P. (1974). Fields, Farms and Workshops Tomorrow. London: Allen & Unwin first published, Boston, 1899, Faber. Learn Religions (2021). Children of God Cult. https://www .learnreligions.com/children-­o f-­g od-­c ult-­4 165811 (accessed 5 January 2022). Mackay, H. (2021). The Kindness Revolution. Melbourne: Allan & Unwin. Mackay, H., Maples, W., Reynolds, P. et  al. (2000). Investigating the Information Society. Milton Keynes, UK: UK, The Open University. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New  York: Harcourt Brace. Nwoga, I. (1964). Pers., Comm., Onitsha, East Nigeria (Innocent Nwoga was then a District Officer in the Eastern Region of Nigeria). Robertson, G. (2000). Crimes Against Humanity. London: Penguin. Susskind & Cruikshank (1987). Breaking the Impasse, Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes. USA: Harper Collins. Whyte, W. and Whyte, K. (1988). Making Mondragon: The Growth & Dynamics of a Workers Co-­operative Complex. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

Index

A action–practice–reflection process cycle, 103 action-­reflection process, 100 activities and land uses analysis and causation, 125 definitions, 124–125 impulsive planning, 126–130 interpretations of, 124–125 perceptions, 125 problems as windows on values, 125–126 shelter creation, 131 understanding and analysing, 130–131 activity systems analysis demand factors, 133 housing in Greater Brisbane, 132–133 human use of natural resources, 136–137 project demands, 133–135 supply factors, 133 transport system, 135–136 adaptation, 248, 252–253 administrative reorganisation, 6–7 Aerotropolis, 3 affordable rent schemes, 147 Alexander, Christopher (1936–2022), 101–103 ‘Alt Right’ movement, 3 American Pragmatism, 6 American Pragmatists, 5 art and creativity invention of forms, 99–100 in rock art and cave paintings, 98–99 Aviopolis, 3 B Better Alternatives to Negotiated Agreements (BATNAs), 247 Black Lives Matter movement, 9 Brisbane Housing Company, 150–151 Brisbane’s West End, 34–35 brownfield land, 132 Building Societies, 146 C cabinet making, 111 Central Italy in, community collaboration, 166–167 Chicago School of Urban Sociology, 13 city communities integrated environmental design, 56 subsidiarity, 56 urban containment, 56–57

Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

City Farm and Community Gardens movement, 10 city shapes grid cities, 205–206 linear settlements, 206–208 radial concentric development, 204–205 sheet and galactic settlement forms, 208–209 clash of civilizations, 2 coalition, 16 coherent planning, 1 collaboration practice movement and transport, 24 natural environment, 22–23 place management, 23–24 production, exchange and economy, 24–25 shelter, 22 collaboration, roles of, 21 collaborative planning, 9–10 collective spaces, 190–196 commercial spaces, 195–196 communal spaces, 190–196 cultural and religious, 193–195 example of, 192–195 shared activities, 191–192 communication and community, 18–19 Communicative Action, 5, 6 communities development community initiatives, 229 dialogues and partnership, 229–230 evaluation, 228–229 problem-­solving, 228–229 community agency, 221–222 community development corporations (CDCs), 35, 38 community governance, 214–215 accountability, 218 community agency, 221–222 development and evaluation, 227–230 flexible and innovative methods, 219–220 forms of participation, 218–219 freedom and order, 222–226 leadership, roles of, 216 legitimacy and responsiveness of, 220 levels of, 236 negotiation and partnership, 227 operations of representative democracy, 217–218 representation, 215–216 representatives, selection of, 216 roles in, 235–238 scales of community, 235–238 service activities of, 230–235 volunteer activism, 220–221 community intervention case for community involvement, 163 levels of government involvement, 163–164

258 Index community participation, 214–215 accountability, 218 community agency, 221–222 community planning and, 117–120 development and evaluation, 227–230 flexible and innovative methods, 219–220 forms of participation, 218–219 freedom and order, 222–226 leadership, roles of, 216 legitimacy and responsiveness of, 220 levels of, 236 negotiation and partnership, 227 operations of representative democracy, 217–218 representation, 215–216 representatives, selection of, 216 roles in, 235–238 scales of community, 235–238 service activities of, 230–235 volunteer activism, 220–221 community planning adaptation, 248, 252–253 Alexander, Christopher (1936–2022), 101–103 applications of communication, 20–21 art and creativity in, 98–100 and communicative action, 19 and community participation, 117–120 creating wholeness within new, 101 critical rationalist approach, 107 and existing communities, 101 four phases of, 104–105 human and social progress, 107 implications of liberty and order, 223 integrating themes, 249–250 invention, 248–249, 253 levels of, 65–67 logic of scientific discovery, 105–107 and management, 14 mistakes, 107 negotiation, 247–248, 251–252 planning as a craft, 103, 109–117 political control, 117–120 problem-­solving, 107 roles of art, 98 science and craft in, 98 scientific vs. planning method, 108–109 social inclusion, 246–247, 250 values-­based methods, 120 written word, 100–101 community problems, 16 community scales, 235–238 community transport, 45 community values, 87 conflict models, 16, 17 Congressional investigation, 3 Contract of Association, 12 Covid-­19 pandemic, 2, 4, 7, 26, 64, 92, 175, 176, 178, 180 legislation of 2020, 17 craftsmanship, 103 Creative Class, 19 Critical Rationalism, 5, 6 critical rationalist approach, 107 D debt redemption, 41 deconstruction, 5 deliberative democracy, 218, 219 direct democracy, 218 direct factory outlets (DFOs), 3 directional grid, 206

E economic fluctuations, 3 edge city developments, 40 education learning links of, 176 learning system, 174 methods and issues, 172–173 provisions, 173–176 re-­shaping the world, 171–172 significance of, 171 standard educational provisions, 175 Ekistics, 206 Emissions Trading Schemes (ETSs), 137 employment nodes, 170 enquiry by design, 228 environmental and social activism, 2 ethnic cleansing, 14 F Federal Bulldozer, 15 Frankfurt School of Critical Method, 5 freedom and order freedom of belief and observance, 225–226 freedom of choice, 226 free speech, 223–225 freedom of assembly and association, 225–226 freedom of belief and observance, 225–226 freedom of choice, 226 freedom of information, 224 freedom of movement, 225 free market, 40 free speech, 223–225 friendly association, 7 funding shelter affordable rent schemes, 147 community housing and development, 151–153 government support for social housing enterprises, 149 housing affordability, 146 housing costs and funding, 145–146 inclusionary zoning, 148–149 planning infrastructure, programs and subsidies, 148 public–private partnerships, 147–148 social housing enterprises in UK, 149–151 social market housing policies, 147 G G20 Rome summit (2021), 3 galactic settlement forms, 208–209 garden design model, 129 global communications, 8 global communities, 63–65, 238 Global Financial Crisis (2007–2008), 2 glocal communities, 2, 63 grain, 35 greenfield land, 132 grid cities, 205–206 H health governance and delivery, 232 health services, planning and delivery global health trends, 178–179 health provisions, 179–181 health system, 177 links to other systems, 180 practical methods and techniques, 179–180 housing affordability, 146 housing costs and funding, 145–146 I impulsive planning, 126–130 inclusionary zoning, 148–149

Index 259 information and communications technology (ICT), 2 innovative problem-­solving, 6 integrated community planning interactions through space and over time, 68 local and wider issues, 68 psychology of spatial comparison, 68–69 integrated environmental design, 56 inter-­communal violence, 4 International airports, 3 international relations, 4–5 J job need projections, 168 job planning, 167–168 L Lagos’ Ebutte Mette, 126–127 leadership, roles of, 216 liberty, impacts of, 89–90 liberty, value of charters of rights, 76–77 personal liberty, 76 and self-­expression, 76 linear settlements, 206–208 local communities community organisation, 38–39 community participation and governance, 47–50 contact and cooperation, 33–34 density, 36–38 durability of, 50 free market workings of, 40 mix and meeting, 34 physical patterns, 35 planned communities problems, 39–40 planning places, 43–47 scope and scales of, 33 settlement structure and activities, 35–36 social justice strategies of, 40–43 spatial inequity, 40 spatial justice, 39 local community governance groups and voluntary organisations, 48–49 official representation, 49–50 personal participation, 47–48 local community participation groups and voluntary organisations, 48–49 official representation, 49–50 personal participation, 47–48 local government, service activities of community well-­being, 231 public, private and community provision, 231 quality assurance, 231–233 regulation, 233–235 systems coordination of, 231 Local Ward Community Boards, 49 Lorinzetti’s allegory of good government, 8 M Madrid Citizen’s Movement, 16 meta narratives, 5 metropolitan spatial structure, 128 Microcredit, 11 Mondragon Workers Cooperative, 12 monitory democracy, 218 N national communities, 59–62 national parliaments, 237 negotiation and partnership applications of, 224

community planning, 247–248, 251–252 roles of, 227 Norman Creek, 65–66 P Parish Planning, 119 participatory democracy, 218 Pattern Language, 199 Peak Population, 141 permissive planning, 208 placelessness, sense of, 205 place-­making, 44 access, 44–47 case study in Atherton tableland of North Queensland, 201–204 in inner Kolkata, 186–187 organisation and distribution of, 43–44 in Salford Quays, 188–189 space shaping, 44 places design and, 196–200 and their properties, 185–190 of values in planning, 72 planning as a craft, 103 stage 1: appraisal of character, problems and prospects, 110 stage 2: aims and initial objectives, 110–113 stage 3: information collection, analysis and projection, 113 stage 4: resource analysis, 113–114 stage 5: action research, 114 stage 6: policy development, 114–115 stage 7: alternative strategies and evaluation, 115 stage 8: phased, costed and integrated proposals, 116 stage 9: coordinated and funded implementation, 116 stage 10: monitoring and reappraisal, 116–117 planning, definition of, 25 policy table, 5 political change, 4 political control, 117 place of community participation, 117–120 Post Structuralism, 5 precautionary principle, 79 private spaces, 190–196 private transport, 46 problem-­solving communities development, 228–229 community planning, 107 innovative, 6 prosperity, impacts of contributions of, 87–88 social justice on, 88–89 vs. sustainability, 89 prosperity, value of combination of energies and skills, 74 communities as seedbeds of innovation, 74–75 creation and transmission of productive skills, 74 public–private partnerships, 147–148 public transport, 46 punctuated equilibrium, 1 Q quality press, 224 quantifiable descriptive, 135 R rationing, 86 reclamation, 86 recycling, 86

260 Index regional communities cities and their regions, 57 metropolitan region, 58–59 natural resource and valley regions, 57–58 regulation, 86–87 rehabilitation, 86 representative democracy, 219 legitimacy and responsiveness of, 220 operations of, 217–218 selection of, 216 reservation, 86 responsive planning, 1 reuse, 85–86 right to information, 224 risk economy, 7 rust belt, 1 S SARS, 64, 178 scientific discovery, logic of, 105–107 scientific method as measurement, 104–105 vs. planning, 108–109 settlement structure, local communities, 35–36 7 Rs of resource conservation, 85–87 sheet settlement forms, 208–209 shelter creation of new households, 141–142 current policy options, 154 demand factors, 153 to family and community life, 140 homes and communities, 154–156 population challenges, 142 supply factors, 153–154 shock of the new, 2 sink estates, 42–43 Social Darwinism, 13 social housing enterprises government support for, 149 in UK, 149–151 social inclusion community planning, 246–247, 250 vs. healthy governance, 247 social justice bidonvilles and shanty towns, 41–42 impacts, 90 reception areas, 41–42 refugee camps, 41–42 sink estates, 42–43 and transit zones, 42–43 social justice, values of balancing the rights of individuals and communities, 78–79 community life, 79–81 social life, 163 social market housing policies, 147 social sustainability, 83–84 spatial inequity, 40 spatial justice, 39 subsidiarity, principle of, 50, 56 supranational organisations, 237 supranational political communities, 62 Surrey Docks City Farm, 10 sustainability demands, 90–91

prosperity vs., 89 social, 83–84 sustainable communities and environments, values for continuity and transformations, 84–85 7 Rs of resource conservation, 85–87 social sustainability, 83–84 systems thinking, 132 T technology changes, impacts of construction technologies, 145 electronic communications, 144 elevators and tall buildings, 143–144 power generation and transmission, 144 rail locomotion, 143 roads, wheels, wagons and motor vehicles, 143 summary of, 145 tunnels and underground development, 144 water supply, storage and recycling, 144–145 transit-­orientated development (TOD), 47 transit zones, 42–43 U UK’s Homes and Communities Agency, 7 ULGOR, 12 urban containment, 56–57 urban design defined, 185 and its principles, 185–190 urban footprint, 134 V values, 72 formation, 72–73 of liberty, 75–77 in planning, 72, 73 problems and shape, 91–92 of prosperity, 73–75 of social justice, 77–81 for sustainable communities and environments, 81–87 values-­based methods, 120 Vision of Bad Government, 8 Vision of Good Government, 8 Vocational Education and Training (VET), 154 volunteer activism, 220–221 W work locations, 165–168, 170 work planning and organisation autonomy and personal agency, 165 changing nature and locations of, 165–167 creativity, 164–165 employment nodes, 170 experience of, 165 job need projections, 168 links with other activities, 171 planning and providing jobs, 167–168 productivity, 164 purposes, 164 work locations, 168, 170 work provisions, 168–170 work system, 168 work provisions, 168–170 work system, 135, 168

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