by Michael Gallis,  Michael Gallis & Associates

In the summer of 1929, New York published what was to become the most famous and effective regional plan ever developed to guide the future growth of a major metropolitan area. Published on the eve of the Great Depression, it provided a framework and guide for the construction of infrastructure, parks and public building across the metropolitan areas throughout the Depression. By providing employment and business opportunities New York fared much better than most cities during the Depression and by the end of WWII had an over capacity in its infrastructure that laid the foundation for its rise to become a great world city in the post war period. In the preface of the report entitled "From Plan to Reality", published in 1933 at the height of the Depression, it stated that "broad new conceptions which have gripped the imagination of the people may have more influence over the future development of the community than the completion of numerous specific projects."

Lack of Planning
However, since that time large scale planning was rarely undertaken and never again so successfully as in the New York region. Today, the modern metropolitan area is referred to as a "poly-centric urban mass" in urban geography terms. They have become essentially formless blobs with multiple commercial and traditional centers sprawling across the landscape. Unfortunately, the urban geographers who coined the term are correct. Over the past 50 years as the population and economic activity doubled, the metropolitan areas where most Americans live were never designed or even planned at a metropolitan scale; they just got bigger without a plan.

From Cities to Metropolitan Areas
Boston is a typical example of what happened in this period. A city of just over 800,000 people coming out of WWII in 1950, it had declined in population to 589,000, or three quarters of its former size, by year 2000. As city dwellers migrated to the suburbs, over 200 cities within a 40-mile arc around the city center grew together to form the Boston metropolitan area with a combined population of near 4.4 million. Today, the City of Boston represents just over 13% of the Boston metro. Each of the myriad of cities in the metropolitan area have their own planning departments that plan for their respective jurisdictions, but rarely do they ever come together to plan for the entire metropolitan area. Across America, the same thing happened in every large metro area from Los Angeles to Detroit, Chicago to Houston, and Atlanta to Seattle.

The Problem of Fragmentation
As these metropolitan areas emerged, they were a collection of traditional and newly incorporated, independent and separate cities that once were bounded by rural countryside and far away from their neighbors, but after decades of growth and annexations they now all shared common boundaries. Unfortunately, as they grew together these large agglomerations of individual cities, in different counties and often crossing state lines, reacted jealously of each other, not wishing to cooperate or coordinate policy, planning and investment strategies. An illustration of this type of resistance to cooperation was the reluctance of two small cities with populations under 20,000 in the Charlotte Metropolitan area to build a single water tower to serve both communities instead of each building their own. Despite the substantial savings and the resulting advantage to both cities' budgets and to the taxpayers, a long-standing high school football rivalry made it impossible for the cities to work together. In the end, each built their own water towers at an unnecessary added cost and impact on the environment.

Unmanaged Growth
Just like unregulated financial markets, America's metropolitan areas grew without a framework for growth. Thinking that metropolitan areas obeyed the same laws as biology, many came to believe that cities were self-regulating mechanisms that would self correct as problems arose. Little did they understand that lack of cooperation among a myriad of local governments, citizen resistance commonly know as the NIMBY factor*, and land use laws among other factors would prove to be barriers that would not allow cities to self-regulate. Even in cities without zoning such as Houston, neighborhood covenants designed to protect neighborhoods from change can act like zoning. 

Fragmented Institutions
As cities grew, the public bureaucracy was highly fragmented and treated each problem separately instead of as part of a system. Larry Dams, a leading transportation expert describing the condition of the transportation system in the San Francisco Bay Area stated, "There is nothing systematic about the system." Why are commuters stuck in endless traffic jams that waste hours? Because, he went on to say, that we had four levels of government operating in different combinations controlling different parts of the system. We had FHWA and the state DOT planning and building the interstate and federal highways, the state DOT building their own system of state roads and separate local governments building city roads. While they all were involved in building the highway network of the region, their plans and investments were never planned on a systematic basis, and were never intended to achieve system-wide goals or operating performance measures. When you add in the independent bridge and transit authorities, you quickly realize that far from a coordinated metropolitan transportation system, what we have produced in America in a highly fragmented chaotic mess of disconnected parts that we call a system.

Not only is this characteristic of our transportation system, but also our educational, economic, medical, cultural, infrastructure and utility systems are all in the same condition. These highly fragmented and discontinuous systems have no ability to achieve any kind of synergy and therefore are highly wasteful and therefore more expensive and create more significant impacts on the environment.   

Lack of Planning Theory
Compounding the problem of a lack of policies, plans and investments to guide the growth of these large and highly fragmented metropolitan areas has been a lack of planning theory, methodology and practice. One would have thought that the planning profession would have early on recognized the problem and begun to develop the necessary strategies to address the massive growth of metropolitan America. One of the reasons it didn't is a book published in 1961 by Jane Jacobs, in which she decried the destruction of the fabric of cities due to the construction of the interstate highway system and urban renewal. While many of her critiques of the then current planning practices were correct, including her objection to the cross Manhattan freeway which connected Brooklyn and New Jersey but cut the island in two, or the ill fated Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco that cut the city off from the bay, she was wrong in rejecting all large scale planning entirely. Rather than tempering the ill considered practices of the time with sensitivity to the local scale, the book led to a wholesale rejection of large scale planning in favor of only very local neighborhood planning. The latest version of this type of myopic approach to metropolitan planning is the "New Urbanists" who advocate removing freeways and interstates in favor or 4 lane boulevards and city streets. Can you really imagine removing the NJTP and driving from Washington to New York along Route 1? At another scale, the recent "mega region" concept now advocates planning massive areas such as the Upper Midwest or the entire Northeast, with its 52 million person population, as a single region in some kind of over arching "uber' plan.

The Need for New Concepts
What is wrong with the way we design cities? Simply put it is that they are not designed at all. A few regions, such as Orlando where myregion.org - a seven county public, private and institutional member organization - developed a framework that succeed after a seven year effort to put in place a regional growth policy plan, are planning at a regional level. Unfortunately, they are exceptions, not the rule, and our cities and metropolitan areas continue to grow, like our financial system, without regulations to control or guide their futures. While the world's attention is now focused on solving the problems of the financial system, little attention is given to solving the problems of our cities. As they stated in the report of 1933, we need "broad new conceptions" to guide the future of our cities and metropolitan areas. We need to once again design the cities we live in!

// Editor's Note: For more on the NIMBY factor visit www.projectnoproject.com