Back in September I paired questions with this semester's courses. Now that I'm within a multiple-choice exam of being DONE with the semester, I figured I owed you some answers.
Urban Planning (UP) 540, Planning Theory. "Why do we plan? How do we think it should work? Has it ever worked?"
"Why do we plan?" Depends how and when you look at it. Planning heads off nuisance claims (see: Legal) and externalities (see: Econ); it's a structure for rational technocracy to rise above messy democracy or a form of collective action to express public desires (see: comprehensive planning and its discontents); or it dulls the excesses of capitalism just enough to ensure it will survive (see: Foglesong, with a bit of Marx). I see planning as a way to build support for forward-looking governmental action. It's an imperfect tool but one of the more powerful ones available on the local level.
"Has it ever worked?" Both 19th-century pollution, disease, and overcrowding and mid-20th-century abandonment and violence were huge problems for cities without a clear solution. Along with broader societal and technological forces, planning helped mitigate these problems and more. At the same time, every major planning intervention has brought a wave of criticism in reaction. I prefer to think of reactions to early public housing, transportation projects, and suburbanization in general as refinements, solving major problems first and at least most of the time doing more good than harm. That is, planning _has_ worked, but in doing so it's never failed to give itself large opportunities for refinement.
"How do we think it should work?" Well, how much of current U.S. politics and legal structures can we change in our hypothetical? In any case, there are many conflicting theories of how to improve public involvement and the scope of planning efforts. I may not have a good answer to this question for a few more semesters.
UP 513, Legal Aspects of the Planning Process. "What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy? What are the levers we can push?"
"What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy?" It's true that there are varying philosophies of land ownership, the relationship between nature and human activity, and between the individual and the state. For example, "it's my land -- you can't tell me what to do with it!" doesn't really stand up to the theory of government that prevents your neighbor from building an incinerator. Prof. Norton spiced the lectures with a few good recommendations on how to calmly hear and clearly counter such challenges to planning. Moral and legal philosophy aren't what decide the important court cases, however.
"What are the levers we can push?" Levers? Zoning is more of a dysfunctional Rube Goldberg contraption. Because of an overdeveloped Anglo-Saxon sense of land ownership, our litigious society, and fear of experimenting with any regulatory scheme beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed constitutional use of the police power rather than a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, states and cities have made only small variations since the Village of Euclid, Ohio's zoning scheme was originally upheld in 1926. This means municipalities must divide their area into districts that are each treated uniformly, and must create plans, often after the fact, to justify why they make sense. There's a huge amount of duplication and contradiction in most zoning codes, not to mention how quickly they can become out of date. The court officially frowns on "individualized assessment" that might determine whether a particular new development was beneficial overall, while special permits, "voluntary" developer donations, and variances granted by the Zoning Board of Appeals in practice bend the law all the time.
Most states have only enabled local governments to zone, meaning there are potentially over 36,000 governmental units that each are trying to advance their own interests. I live in Washtenaw County, Michigan, which is composed of 20 townships, 5 cities, and 3 villages, which have boundaries that interlace in interesting ways. Each of these municipalities has the power to create its own planning board and effectively zone out certain kinds of activities beyond its borders. But they can't effectively work together to manage growth that happens across boundaries, and even so each place has a strong incentive to look out for its own interests.
So zoning is awkward, self-contradictory, difficult to maintain, and hyperlocal. It's also exclusionary by design, and has discriminatory effects that the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't struck down except in the most egregious cases. However, it's what we've got in this country. Some areas, like Ann Arbor, appear to have the resources to translate forward-thinking goals into master plans and zoning codes, and to adapt public involvement requirements into moderately productive interactions. I'd love to see the state enabling laws change at least to have more of a regional focus, but for the meantime I'll need to just keep all these limitations in mind when working with local planning and land use.
UP 510, Public Economics for Urban Planning. "When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk? And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?"
"When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk?" Sadly, the course quickly veered into teaching the the IS/LM model and enough microeconomics to understand taxation and intergovernmental grants, and dropped the critical perspective present at the beginning of the course. Occasional winks prevented the theories with the most egregiously regressive implications from being completely unbearable.
"And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?" I still don't know, but here are some notable quotables:
- "Milwaukee surprised me: It's a city!"
- "It's complex...but it isn't actually all that complicated."
- "It's a good thing you're learning Stata because I won't be using it."
- "It's a sort of w w w dot thing."
- "We shall develop a conversationality about this..."
- "...to determine what type of pain infliction machine we want."
- "If you're ever going to get a tattoo, you should get:
β̂ = (X'X)-1X'Y"
Believe me, they were all very funny at the time.
UP 406, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Maps. Computers. Databases. 'Nuf said.
Okay, so ArcGIS violates like every software design principle ever. I am still quite motivated to check out qGIS/GRASS and other free software alternatives, even if I didn't get a chance to during the semester. That said, I am as confident as one can be in using the basic functions of software that loves to fail silently.
Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) 662, Seminar in Resource Policy and Administration, more specifically Localization: Adaptations for the Coming Downshift. "How will we build reliance and justice in the absence of cheap energy or continued growth?"
This was the first course I was done with. It's been almost two weeks. I loved the thoughts, the people, and the framework, but I never felt like I had enough depth to fully evaluate or trust the arguments that would have made the class really hang together. I've put many of the books that the reader excerpted from, on my reading list. Interestingly, it's the premise of the course that sticks with me the most, even if some conclusions don't.
The premise has three parts. (1) A societal downshift is inevitable, as we pass peak energy and as we make defensive expenditures to prepare for and recover from climate change. (2) Larger-scale governments, such as the U.S. Federal government, will be overwhelmed by the economic and energy shifts, and will have less ability to make policy that shapes local reactions. As a result, local communities are a more realistic point of leverage. (3) We cannot avoid the downshift, but we can prepare for it, and through our ideas and experiments, provide accessible models for communities to take advantage of when the downshift becomes more obvious.
I find points 1 and 3 consistently compelling. I've been going back and forth as to the second point; I expect it has some truth but I think our federal government should still have an active role even if recent trends of intensifying transportation and globalization revert to some degree.
With luck, I'll have another two semesters to chew on this one. On that note, I should go write my application to the School of Natural Resources and the Environment!
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