Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City

By Jennifer Mack and Michael Herzfeld

A collection of ethnographic case studies of urban planners and their practices

Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Their choices can determine how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic or how it will meet a demand for thousands of new dwelling units as quickly and with as little avoidable damage as possible. Life Among Urban Planners considers planning professionals in relation to the social contexts in which they operate: the planning office, the construction site, and even in the confrontations with those affected by their work. What roles do planners have in shaping the daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and alter their expertise to meet the demands asked of them? The essays in this volume emphasize planners' cultural values and personal assumptions and critically examine what their persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and preserve the past.

Life Among Urban Planners explores the practices and politics of professional city-making in a wide selection of geographical areas spanning five continents. Cases include but are not limited to Bangkok, Bogotá, Chicago, Naimey, Rome, Siem Reap, Stockholm, and Warsaw. Examining the issues raised around questions of expertise, participation, and the tension between market and state forces, contributors demonstrate how certain planning practices accentuate their specific relationship to a place while others are represented to a global audience as potentially universal solutions. In presenting detailed and intimate portraits of the everyday lives of planners, the volume offers key insights into how the city interacts with the world.

Contributors: Margaret Crawford, Adèle Esposito, Trevor Goldsmith, Mark Graham, Michael Herzfeld, James Holston, Gabriella Körling, Jennifer Mack, Andrew Newman, Lissa Nordin, Bruce O'Neill, Kevin Lewis O'Neill, Federico Pérez, Monika Sznel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297164

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Living Life Among Planners

Jennifer Mack

Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Planners’ choices attempt to direct issues like how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic network, how a squatter community can be transformed into the legitimized residents of an area, or how a current demand for thousands of new dwelling units will be met as quickly as possible without engendering negative consequences.

While it may appear that the work that planners do is dictated purely by abstract logic, in this volume we argue that they operate largely out of personal, internal, and cultural logics and the everyday demands of particular social and cultural contexts. Today’s planners are frequently tasked with both policy and design assignments, an expansion of their historical role that focused mostly on city form. This has happened even as urban designers—often working in architectural offices rather than for municipalities—have increasingly been given the most high-profile design assignments. In the wake of these concomitant professional expansions and losses for planners, they have nonetheless continued to rely on visual models to explain their work because of their demonstrable power in achieving (often uncritical) political support. Sometimes, the forgotten logics of the modernist past—with its emphasis on the universal—are reassessed as comforting, guiding forces for planners who feel lost in the confusion of more specific demands arising as the local has achieved greater prominence in their work.

In professional settings from municipal or national governments to private design firms to NGOs, a degree in urban, community, regional, or town planning produces specialists who shape the city in a variety of ways. They may restrain patterns of growth and operate with rhythms, time scales, and schedules that extend well into futures both imagined and, at least in some cases, repeated. Defined as experts on urban welfare and development, urban planners work from the bird’s-eye view down to the specification of materials to be allowed in new structures to the footprints of the buildings that will occupy new development sites.

With the power of planning also come, clearly, opportunities for less heroic activities, such as the displacement of informal settlements or the stigmatization of certain neighborhoods as they are defined to require renovation. Planners often participate in the making of urban tragedies, intentionally or not.

With these loaded power structures and practices in mind, we collectively approach the production of space (Lefebvre 1974) and spatiality by treating planning as a set of critical cultural acts that are both controversial and, in many cases, contested. Planning—and, as this volume places in focus, planners—can then be considered in relation to the social dynamics of the contexts in which they operate: in the planning office, on construction sites, in sometimes violent confrontations with those at whom they are directed. What roles do planners have in shaping the social dimensions and daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and reshape the expertise assigned to them for that purpose? The essays here critically examine what planners’ persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and represent and preserve the past. We are particularly concerned with the social contexts in which planners produce their work, including their cultural values, personal assumptions, social pressures, and beyond.

As planners ignore, acknowledge, and describe the transformations of their own professional practice, they adapt it from its initial legitimization as a profession through the development of university curricula and licensing. The planning process is unlike that of many other professions in which practitioners are required to achieve similar forms of official definition. For many of the world’s planners, in fact, the process of professionalization began just a century ago.

As planners have contended with the temporal, political, and economic limits of their abilities to act on the city, perceptions of failures have sometimes come from the very communities they have reshaped. The profession has had particular difficulty in contending with the legacy of the many grand plans or master plans enacted in the name of urban renewal and modernism in the mid-twentieth century. These plans have left their imprint, not only on the cities in question, but also on planning itself. Unlike power broker Robert Moses in New York’s 1960s (Caro 1974), the planners of the 1970s and 1980s found themselves in a depleted professional position with a loss of public trust and support, a stance that continues, in part, into the present.

Shaping the city, urban planning professionals use urban analyses, historical trends, and statistical data to draw sometimes-unwarranted conclusions about the demographic and economic directions that will arrive at the places in which they operate. Approaching planners with ethnographic eyes opens up a new perspective on how today’s planners contend with this conundrum.

Planners in the Anthropological Eye

The city has recently become the locus of many of the most important themes in contemporary anthropology. While many anthropologists work under the rubric of urban anthropology, the authors in this volume prefer to think in terms of an anthropology of the urban. In this, we heed Ulf Hannerz’s caution that urban anthropology has been so broadly defined that it is often taken to include all the studies where the city is the locus rather than the focus (1980, 3; see also Herzfeld this volume). We instead explore urban space as the physical product of the complex forces that planners both employ and try to control as they act on the city, but also of the social forces acting on the planners themselves, as members of their own (or host) societies. We treat the making of the city as an act of negotiation in a context defined by social and cultural specificities. In this regard, while following on the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974), Michel de Certeau (1984), and others on the production of space and on spatial practice, we specifically focus on the daily practices and lived environments of the planners themselves as a critical and culturally and historically specific counterweight to planners’ more generalizing aims and claims.

Our overall aim in proposing such an anthropology of the urban—and especially in focusing attention on the cultural and social dimensions of the planners rather than only of city residents—is to examine relationships among planners, nonplanners, and the city, and to explore how planning may at times involve seeing like a city, to paraphrase James Scott (1998).

In the case studies presented, the legibility (Scott 1998) that planners have often worked to enable travels through various acts of opposition and transformation, all of which raise crucial questions about the omniscience presumed to underlie the planning act. At the same time, the views into planning practice that we offer in this volume do not produce a conventional, rigid account of top-down hegemony versus bottom-up resistance. Instead, escaping such facile dualisms, the cases presented here illustrate how planners and nonplanners work in ongoing tension, conflict, and dialogue to make the city together.

As planners find the tools with which they were trained to act on the city increasingly in tension with the realities of the everyday worlds in which they operate, this also raises critical questions about the cultures of urban expertise in the planning profession (Mack 2019). Approaching city making from the planners’ perspective allows a unique view into the how these professionals regard their roles in the development of a future society and its spaces. This joins an emerging field of studies of the cultural and social underpinnings of expertise (Boyer 2005 and 2008; Eyal and Buchholz 2010).

To examine this topic with the widest possible theoretical implications, we take a global perspective on urban planning and explore practices and politics of professional city making in a wide variety of contexts, including a wide selection of geographical areas from five continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. These studies emphasize that the issues raised around questions of expertise, participation, and the increasing interactions between market and state forces in the development of the city increasingly transcend the specifics of planning laws, regulations, and the history of the discipline in each society. If the city has new symbolic and political weight in the context of economic globalization (Holston and Appadurai 1999), these close and intimate portrayals of the everyday lives of planners offer key insight into how the city interacts with the world.

From the Cosmos to the Problem of the Present

Ethnographic perspectives on how planners are operating in and on a wide range of cities around the world allow comparisons among the shaky technocracies from which planners operate, whether they work in Bangkok, Barcelona, Bogotá, Brasília, Chicago, New York, Niamey, Paris, Rome, St. Louis, Siem Reap, Södertälje, Stockholm, or Warsaw. In these diverse sites, we examine questions of social practice, history, urban form, economy, and the politics of place making, among other topics. Certain planning practices accentuate their specific relationship to a place, while others are to be sold to a global audience as supposedly universal solutions.

Here, we resituate planning practice through intimate looks at how planners consider, conflict, and collaborate with other actors: politicians, immigrants, developers, landscape enthusiasts, squatters, and dignitaries. We investigate users and experts, participation, the top-down and the bottom-up, and how the role of planners has been transformed as their right to make and remake the city has been contested. Here the anthropologist sometimes becomes the planner, gentrification and neoliberalism meet urban design, users and residents are revealed as planners in their own right, and the supposedly generic toolbox that planners use is translated through the many divergent cultures of planning offices and cities the world over.

If planning is a practice emphasizing the creation of particular futures, we also consider what this means for the role of historic preservation and its relation to the urban fabric and for the way in which people live in the present. Indeed, planners are frequently asked to conserve the existing urban environment (and its attendant power structures). Such tasks can transform planners into agents for interpretations of history that further empower society’s already most prosperous and privileged members.

In Part I of the volume, Social and Cultural Contexts of Planning, we present cases involving critical frameworks for planning practice, as professionals increasingly find their strategies from the desktop questioned on the ground. Starting out with this theme of the values that planners and citizens both share and dispute, Michael Herzfeld explores the problem of efficiency and the cultural specificity of planning practice in both Bangkok and Rome. Planners in these cities often contend with residents’ largely unofficial but powerfully felt cosmological interpretations of space as they shape and reshape plans (cf. Herzfeld 2015 and 2017); they thus discover that they partly share common understandings of space and time with citizens protesting over land rights, zoning, and historic preservation. Far from being a merely secular activity at the sole behest of professionals, then, planning for cosmologically loaded cities like these produces complex dialogues over urban futures where even adversaries subscribe (if selectively) to common logics.

Also engaging with the ways in which the past infiltrates the present, Margaret Crawford examines historical critiques of modernist planning in the early twentieth century. Decades of self-critical reflection within the planning profession followed, leading to today’s emphasis on participatory and other citizen-oriented methods. From her position as a planning theorist, historian, and educator, she argues that planners still depend on abstract, usually quantitative information, rendering their knowledge about those for whom they plan extremely limited and placing many such professionals in highly contradictory situations in their daily work. She argues that anthropology may offer new insights into this opaque professional world, inverting the generic notion of best practices currently dominant in planning.

Also drawing attention to the ethics and politics of design, Andrew Newman delves into the legacy of the landscape architecture of parks and gardens in Paris, where form has long been congruent with republican notions of citizenship and essentialist ideals of national culture. There, contestations over the management and design of two parks in Paris’s largely West African and Maghrebi districts demonstrate that fraught discussions about garden design, horticulture, and park use include much more than mere technical issues. Instead, these parks provide a spatial articulation of ongoing struggles over citizenship, national belonging, and the definition of Frenchness.

In Part II of the book, we contend with the increasingly sticky ethics of urban planning, as grand plans and their discontents meet: in person, and often on a daily basis. Adèle Esposito Andujar investigates two figures of planners who have worked to reshape Siem Reap over different periods. Despite their radical dissimilarities, both used zoning as a means to act on the site in the service of international aid organizations. The projects demonstrate the importance of political support for zoning, since foreign planners’ goals have frequently been usurped or revised when the local government accepted aid but rejected many of the intentions of the plans that came with it. Esposito demonstrates how the apparent hegemony of functional zoning as an imported and seldom-questioned planning tool loses its force as it travels through often-recalcitrant local contexts.

In a similar vein, Federico Pérez examines the Bogotá Planning Department’s failed attempt to modify the city’s Territorial Ordering Plan. By following the daily routines of the planners in charge of the plan’s revision, Pérez considers their struggles to reenvision planning practices and urban realities, as they move from a planning logic aimed at creating futures ex nihilo to a mode of pragmatic planning rooted in the complexities and instabilities of sociopolitical life. Ultimately, this study of planning failure makes visible the fragile networks through which policymakers exchange knowledge, build alliances, and negotiate the overlapping realms of technical and political practice.

Gabriella Körling offers another approach to the social and cultural contexts of planning in her study of informal urban settlements around Niamey, the capital of Niger. There, residents themselves have carried out what might otherwise be regarded as the exclusive activities of planning professionals: zoning and land allocation, laying out streets, and providing public services. These residents—despite their operations outside the structures of official expertise—follow planning norms like gridiron street plans. Körling shows that it is not informal settlement alone but the differing social status among residents that dictate their fates. These planners (without the title) operate in a context where the state—manifested in investments, infrastructure, and urban plans—is otherwise absent.

In my own paper, I explore the limits of planning regulations and deregulations in the Swedish town of Södertälje, arguably the contemporary capital of diasporic Syriac Orthodox Christians. While Syriacs historically resided in standardized apartments in high-rises built in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that more recent Syriac-dominated neighborhoods of custom-designed, single-family houses have required Swedish planners to relinquish traditional tools for formal control and to rethink strategies of regulation. They also challenge a central tenet of contemporary Swedish planning that assumes that the geographic distribution of immigrants is the best way to integrate them. As the boundaries between users and experts are blurred, negotiations about neighborhood aesthetics and rules become new opportunities to debate nationalism, class, and professionalism.

In Part III, Resituating a ‘Universal’ Praxis, we explore how planning draws on tools designed to be transported across municipal and national boundaries but discovers, again and again, that the contingencies of the local require new interpretations. Together, Bruce O’Neill and Kevin O’Neill offer a prescient analysis of the case of St. Louis, Missouri—one of the most violent, racially segregated, and polarized city-regions in the United States—from a moment just before these tensions famously boiled over. They study the failed passage of Proposition M, a ballot measure put forward by city planners to expand the city’s bus and light rail systems further into the suburban region, which suburban residents read as dangerous and voted against. O’Neill and O’Neill argue that this exercise in individual rights (successful as it was) ultimately belies what urban planners in St. Louis understand more generally as regional responsibility, where city-regions forcibly embed residents into a series of relationships that cannot be ignored.

Trevor Goldsmith carries these questions of praxis to Barcelona, where he explores how quality became a key term for understanding urban planning success among both professionals and citizens. Goldsmith argues that the use of quality urbanism in a project to redevelop the working-class neighborhood of Trinitat Nova complicated the role of planners, disempowering them and devaluing their role in relation to the politicians for whom they work. Rather than having the integrated technical and political power of the past, such planners now operate in the city but lack the authority to make significant decisions. If their plans have power, it stems from political approval gained before planners were involved.

Likewise, Monika Sznel worked with an NGO to involve residents in participatory planning projects in Poland. She shows how this method—intended to challenge to earlier top-down, modernist planning—ultimately still failed to address residents’ needs and desires. She details her discomfort and dismay as an applied anthropologist working with an NGO to recruit residents of working-class neighborhoods to a project that seeks to offer greater opportunities to influence planning practices but finds residents’ ideas co-opted instead. While participation is presented as a means for increasing public influence, the use of this approach in Warsaw suggests that participation can also be levied as a tool of neoliberal politics, with highly unpredictable results. Critiques of citizen participation under earlier political and economic regimes, in other words, remain relevant today. As Sherry Arnstein argued in 1969, consultation with citizens without a mechanism for including their opinions or their participation in later parts of the process is a sham and merely a form of placation (219 and 220).

Universalism is also a key theme in Mark Graham and Lissa Nordin’s study of the everyday practices of the planners behind Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, a neighborhood internationally known for its holistic planning approach to sustainable urban development. Planners attempted to translate solutions developed within the specific setting of Swedish planning praxis and for one local environment into a universally applicable, virtual model known as SymbioCity, focusing on technical, noncontextual solutions, such as eco-cycle recycling. As politicians and industry request standardized planning solutions for climate change, the Swedish flavor of this generic menu permits entry in a competitive global market.

Drawing together the several strands of our collective efforts, James Holston describes the problem of the present in both anthropology and urban planning. Anthropology uses ethnographic, comparative, and historical methods designed to problematize present circumstances by focusing on their assumptions and contradictions. He argues that the discipline’s focus on the present means that its practitioners often fail to develop anything approaching true critique, much less suggestions for policy. Conversely, the predictive impulses of planners render place their praxis within a seemingly naïve utopianism, even as they often remain seemingly blind to everyday social and cultural life. Centrally, Holston considers how the two disciplines might develop a productive conversation about their own shortcomings and their views of the future.

A New Theory of the City

Ultimately, we address the critical practice of urban space production with a particular emphasis on how planners work, how they talk about the city, and how they conceive of their professional and social roles as experts who intentionally—and with a notion that their visions will actually become reality—alter the future of the city. Cities have increasingly become a focus of scholarly interest across a variety of social scientific and humanities disciplines, yet the official act of making them through planning and urban design has received far less attention. Together, we reconsider some of the theories and debates around the process and practice of city making at a time when the social and cultural dimensions of urban conglomerations are at the forefront of interest in fields such as geography, anthropology, sociology, diaspora studies, global studies, and, of course, the design professions and their theorists and historians.

We build here on ethnographic studies of the planning process that have been directed at the hubris of planners or that unpack the plights and perils facing their supposed clients (Fennell 2015; Ghannam 2002; Holston 1989); but we also include the voices of planners as a complement to their plans and the complaints these have provoked. Groundbreaking studies have emphasized planning in relation to questions of neoliberalism and gentrification (Herzfeld 2006 and 2009; Low 2003; Zhang 2010); infrastructure (Larkin 2013); and the intersections of planning and temporary uses of public space (Duneier 1999; Stoller 2002). Setha Low (1996, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2017; Low and Smith 2006) has long been a critical mediator of the relationship between the practice of urban planning and its discontents, including gentrification, security and insecurity, and the militarization of urban public spaces. Her recent edited volume (Low 2018) shows how widely her vision is now shared among numerous interrelated disciplines, while her own personal commitment to engaged anthropology (Low and Merry 2010) continues to drive that vision, meshing with and further inspiring the work of some of the authors represented in this volume. Here, we focus particularly on neighborhoods, cities, and regions in connection with acts that are meant to reshape space permanently: a new housing development or tram line, the erasure of inconvenient communities. We contextualize these seemingly localized acts in relation to whole cities through long-term ethnographic research.

The volume also complicates typical descriptions of planning as a perfunctory act following strict guidelines about zoning and building permission, speaking to the field of the ethnography of expertise (represented in the seminal work by Dominic Boyer on that topic [e.g. 2005, 2008] and seen, for example, in studies of medical doctors [Petryna 2002], biologists [Rabinow 1996], and investment bankers [Ho 2009]). As such studies have amply demonstrated, professional expertise does not render experts uncritical agents of their training. Urban planning, too, is often a much more ambivalent practice than the usual stereotype suggests (Mack 2017, 2019). Ethnographic approaches to planners offer fine-grained views of how practitioners perceive and describe their own experiences of the making of urban form. This also balances the predominant ethnographic focus on people who lack the power to defend themselves against the hegemony of planning by asking more questions about the planners’ own predicaments and dilemmas. While studying planners both up (Nader 1969) and sideways (Hannerz 1998, 2006), we argue that their practice is a matter of ambivalence because cultural and social values are more deeply implicated in what are taken as objective assessments than their authors are sometimes able or willing to realize.

The cases also complicate the monolithic picture of planning’s own past, particularly as recounted in the histories of major urban design projects in the United States and Western Europe (Boyer 1983; Choay 1969; Wright 1981) or in works that seek to relate this history to the professionals themselves or to larger global contexts of planning practice (Sanyal 2005). We also develop a dialogue with social histories that examine the transformation of the city through planning (Blackmar and Rosenzweig 1992; Harvey 2006; Scobey 2002). With our emphasis on how planners envision plans not yet realized, however, we bring a social analysis of urban form making into the present and the future.

Despite the relative youth of the planning profession itself, early and mid-twentieth-century planners across the world quickly shared homogenized urban forms and professional practices. These internationalized, mostly modernist standards provided them with a distinct expertise that they then used to insulate and buttress their work when developers, politicians, and everyday people made attempts to resist grand plans.

Today, planners everywhere try—ever more desperately—to follow these predecessors by drawing on techniques, design standards, and priorities that classify their plans as professional. In this volume, we specifically offer case studies from across the globe to illustrate that international planning expertise is now remodeled, revised, and reinvented as it travels through cities across the world. A dilemma central to this collection is therefore whether all planning is now locally situated rather than—as it once was (at least ostensibly)—more monolithically global. We find some clues in the unexpected identities of planners—such as squatters who nonetheless lay out their streets on the gridiron and immigrants who import materials from their homelands but also from international television programs (cf. Watson 2005).

We also find that planners themselves recognize a new international mode of practice: to demonstrate (or try to demonstrate) deepened sensitivity to local players and their concerns and to make the outcomes more particularized in the process. Participatory planning, for example, purports to promote engagement and empowerment, but studies of its outcomes find that nonplanner participants are often meant to be placated (Arnstein 1969) or neutralized (Tahvilzadeh and Kings 2015, 96) instead. As nonplanners enter invited spaces for participation, they find both the rules and the outcomes underpinned by logics and norms framed by politicians and administrators (Tahvilzadeh and Kings 2015, 95). Often, in other words, the new rhetoric of sensitivity reveals that planners are, regrettably, not always particularly sensitive, and mechanisms for turning opinions and ideas from local residents into concrete actions are mostly lacking.

Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives (1979), a shift that has sometimes placed professionals operating through ideas of universalism in a difficult new position. As planners move into new modes of practice, they have found it necessary to abandon their own ambitious narratives in the form of grand plans. Across the divergent settings included here, we see that urban planning has shifted from a modernist, standardized practice to a postmodern one that explicitly addresses locality and difference, even if it often does so awkwardly or ineffectively. If European colonial administrators used top-down, modernist planning tools, local planners operating in their own urban contexts draw on their own culturally intimate knowledge (Herzfeld 2015), often facing internal and external struggles about, for example, whether to retain or replace the urban fabric.

Curiously, some of the central components of the modernist planner’s toolbox have been retained in these processes, and in those that have transformed the physical and professional infrastructures of welfare states (such as urban planning) into tools for neoliberalism’s onward march. One tool in particular recurs globally: zoning, a key tenet of early modernist Functional City planning that remains exceptionally potent even in the twenty-first century. As an ideal, zoning requires planners to envision the city as a composition of varying functions to be distributed geographically, and rationally, so that industrial zones and their pollutants, for example, are separated from domestic ones. But, as many of the chapters demonstrate, fissures appear as local planners interpret zoning and as its supposedly Cartesian principles of separation move locally (Rabinow 1989). As planners use other planning tools of more recent vintage—such as their inclusion of civilian actors in participatory planning, where their opinions and advice are to be incorporated into the results of the planning