Creative Class

Jamie Galbraith says planning is the cure for America’s problems (via Planetizen).

“Planning” has been a dirty word in American politics for decades. For the hard-line right, planning destroyed freedom: it was the “road to serfdom.” Anti-planners also thought it a failure; for them the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was due to “central planning.” But without public planning, who is in charge? Lobbyists who represent the private planning of the great corporations. The public interest ceases to exist, and the public sector becomes nothing more than a trough at which private interests come to feed.

What the government needs most today is to regain an independent capacity to think. The government needs a way to imagine the future that is not dominated by lobbies or even by Congress so long as Congress is dominated by lobbies. Planning is a process: thinking, coordination, action. What is the long-term national interest? What specific targets must be met? What is the best way to do it, and who plays what role? …

Markets do not design new systems—new patterns of transport and housing, new technologies for electric power, for vehicles, for heating and cooling. To design a system, to put the pieces together, to identify the most promising lines of attack and take steps to achieve them: that is the planner’s role.

My PhD is in urban planning, so many might think I’m a proponent. But I’m more than just a little bit worried about planned solutions. Much of the time I find myself argeeing with Jane Jacob’s views on the subject – planning is a poor second to complex, self-organizing processes. And our economy, society, politics, and geography are surely a lot more complicated and complex than in her time. I’d like to believe that government can become independent of lobbyists and regain its independent capacity to think, but the realist in me asks: Is that really possible under our current system?

“[Y]es, we need to fight poverty. Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution… Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”

Said to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June, but I had not seen it before (more here via Planetizen). A quick look at the polls show a double digit Obama lead and significant margins in the electoral college, so this is encouraging news for all those concerned for cities and urbanism in America.

I’m a huge fan of Planetizen and of Bill Bishop, author of the fabulous new book, The Big Sort. Click here for a Planetizen podcast of me and Bill with Nate Berg.

Writing in the NYTimes Magazine, Bill Galston and Pietro Nivola reflect on the sort:

You are less likely to live near someone whose politics differ from
your own. It’s well known that fewer states are competitive in presidential
races than in decades past. We find similar results at the county level. In
1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate
prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such
counties.

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop,
a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue,
stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during
the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many
blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older
manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher
densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such
communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in
turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities
dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast,
tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening
difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and
Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become
supermajorities.  … Polarization feeds on itself.