First of a 4-part series

Are you a planner? Then what do you have in common with Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Daniel Burnham, Robert Moses, and Edmund Bacon?

Plenty.

According to Alexander Garvin, author of a new and engaging book titled The Planning Game: Lessons from Great Cities (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013, 223 pages), all planners are involved in “the planning game.”

Mr. Garvin is not being cynical or flippant. What he means is that planning involves players and rules, strategies and insights, winners and losers: “Planning brings together the forces of government, business, finance, politics, and public opinion…in order to produce change….”[1]

The Planning Game focuses on the role of planners in the physical transformation of the public realm, “an approach that emphasizes the importance of public investments in determining the future of what we own and control: our streets, squares, parks, infrastructure, and public buildings…. It is…the framework around which everything else grows.”

The heart of the book is devoted to Paris, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, and the men known for transforming them through public improvements. They are worth studying—or studying again—because the planning game is largely the same for all planners.

Few of us have the backing of an emperor, as Haussmann did, but he, Burnham, Moses, and Bacon also possessed the qualities that all successful planners have, according to Mr. Garvin:

  • An understanding of the physical landscape and its diverse population;
  • The ability to gauge the appropriateness of developments and to fit them into a whole greater than the sum of its parts;
  • A facility for combining and synthesizing different ideas to provide what citizens want;
  • The readiness to adjust and readjust proposals;
  • Perseverance;
  • Skill at marketing and salesmanship; and
  • A gift for letting others adopt visions and bring them to fruition.

Their accomplishments demonstrate Mr. Garvin’s central theme:

The changes that result from planning must meet the demand for greater livability in the present. But if they are to be sustainable, they must accomplish other things as well. They must generate a private-market reaction, provide a framework for continuing changes in the culture, and be adaptable so they can meet unexpected demands in the future.

Parisian Planning

Paris in the mid-19th century was choking on growth. Trains, wagons, a million workers and residents and 37,000 horses clogged the streets. It was difficult for food and raw materials to enter the city, as well as for finished goods to go out. Most water came from fountains and commercial water carriers; few streets had sewers. Unless something was done, other industrial

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, circa 1865

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, circa 1865 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

cities rising in Europe and the United States would eclipse Paris.

“Haussmann possessed a combination of administrative brilliance, the ability to spot talent and an uncanny understanding of what Napoleon III wanted.”  He also understood other players and their interests. Knowing that app

ropriations of public funds couldn’t possibly cover the costs of his projects, he devised innovative (though perhaps ethically dubious) financing: he issued bonds to be serviced by the higher taxes from improved properties, an early version of tax increment financing; he acquired more land than necessary and sold the excess to developers; and he made contractors take out loans to meet their expenses, paying them only when their work was done.

By the end of Haussmann’s tenure—1853-1870— drains underlay every street in Paris and piped water reached almost every building, if not every floor. (The uniform height of the buildings erected in Haussmann’s time is due in large part to the reach of water pressure.)  Thousands of acres of parks were created, ranging from regional parks at the eastern and western edges of Paris down to neighborhood parks. Ninety miles of broad new tree-lined streets, without which Paris would not be Paris, connected all parts of the city and freed up the movement of people and goods. (Among the most fascinating illustrations in the book are maps that overlay the new Paris road system on top of the roads and parcels of the medieval city that was replaced.)

Ultimately, Haussmann’s ego and his high handedness toward politicians did him in. But the Paris he left behind has been beautifully adaptable to almost 150 years of growth and change.

In Part 2, we meet Daniel Burnham

[1]   At least one reader, Carl Schramm writing for Forbes, believes that the book shows planning to be a cynical enterprise:

…[Garvin’s] book is about polities and the importance of “playing” well so that new buildings get built. There is no discussion of the city’s economy. The index entry under “economics” takes the reader in every case to a discussion of the financing of projects. The book rests on the fallacy common to all contemporary urban planning, namely, that the built environment will make the economy happen.

Mr. Shramm may have perused the index to The Planning Game, but it’s not apparent that he read the whole book.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carlschramm/2013/05/14/its-time-for-city-planners-to-adapt-a-new-model/