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Harvard Kennedy School - SUP 601 & Graduate School of Design - 5201

URBAN POLITICS, PLANNING, AND DEVELOPMENT FALL 2012

CLASS MEETINGS: T,Th 8:40-10:00am, Littauer 280. Also, three optional review sessions (see below).

INSTRUCTOR Alan Altshuler Email: [email protected] Office Hours: Thursday 1:30-3:30 (Taubman 352) Phone: (617) 495-0709 Faculty assistant: Heather-Marie Vitale Email: [email protected] Office: Taubman 321 Phone: (617) 495-5140 Course Assistant: Fabiana Meacham Email: [email protected] Office Hours: By appointment. COURSE CONTENT: The foci of this course are the roles of public governance and planning in shaping cities and urban regions, particularly in the United States but with international comparisons as well. Key topics include U.S. urban politics viewed in the large, and more specifically the politics of land use planning and zoning, urban (particularly downtown) revitalization; highway, mass transit, and other large-scale categories of urban public investment; air quality regulation; and contemporary efforts to achieve “smart” growth at large scale. Cross-cutting themes include the special role of business in local governance; citizen participation; equity issues in urban place-making, the costs and benefits of local government fragmentation; and contending theories about the balance of forces in U.S. urban politics.

While the issues and group conflicts on which we shall focus are urban, the governments involved are often national and/or state (provincial in some other countries) as well as local. The course purposes are at once to enhance your sophistication in thinking about the ways in which public decisions that shape urban places are arrived at, and your skill in thinking strategically about how to exercise influence in such decision processes.

The course focuses roughly 75% on the U.S. system, 25% on international comparisons. Students who wish to explore such comparisons more deeply are encouraged to do so in their course writing.

REQUIREMENTS AND FORMAT: This is a discussion course. It follows that the value of our meetings will hinge very largely on your advance preparation and your willingness to engage the issues actively in class. The readings are a mix of case studies and analytic materials, but you are encouraged as well to draw on your direct knowledge of politics and planning in locales where you have lived or worked.

My expectation is that, in preparation for each class session, you will think hard about the required readings (the recommended items are truly optional) so that you are prepared to engage in an interesting discussion of the issues they raise. To assist you, the syllabus includes brief remarks and/or questions to introduce each assignment. I encourage you not only to read these carefully, but to generate additional questions of your own.

There will be three sets of writing assignments, as follows: 1. In preparation for each of eight sessions, you should submit one, or at most two, questions that

you would like to pursue further in class. Each question should be no more than 25 words in length and should end in a question mark. After stating your question, you may elaborate in a separate brief paragraph (no more than 100 words), but this is not required. What is required, though, is your presence in any class for which have submitted a question, so that I can call on you to state and briefly discuss it. I will usually not have time to call on everyone who has submitted for a given session, but I will keep track and try to make sure that no one is left out over the course of the semester. Submission deadline: 4pm the day before the class for which it is intended. Submission format: regular email (not an attachment). Evaluation: I will not formally grade these submissions or your oral contributions to our class discussions, but in

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HUT 201/GSD 5201: Urban Politics and Land Use Policy

combination these will provide the basis for my appraisal of your class participation.

2. For three of the sessions for which you are submitting questions, submit a separate essay, 500-750 words in length, reflecting on some aspect of the assignment in your own voice, with an emphasis on its political aspects. By political aspects, I have in mind the wellsprings of political choices described in the readings and/or strategic considerations that would-be change agents would do well to bear in mind. You should feel free in these essays—though not required--to make cross-session comparisons, to critique specific readings, to utilize formats such as writing a confidential memo to a senior official, and/or to draw on pertinent evidence beyond the readings with which you happen to be familiar (so long as you also demonstrate serious attention to the assigned readings themselves. Submission format: hard copy, double-spaced, 12 point font, one-inch margins all around. Submission deadline: Start of the class for which it is intended. Evaluation: These will be formally graded. I will fairly promptly return them with comments. And they will in combination account for 50% of your grade. Spacing Over the Semester

: You should submit your first essay no later than Session 9 (October 2); your second, no later than Session 18 (November 1); and your third, no later than our final session (December 4). To avoid excessive bunching, there will be a cap (roughly 20% of the class size) on the number of students authorized to write for any of the final four sessions before each of the three deadlines. It will be necessary to sign up for these sessions, though not for any others.

3. There will be a final, four or five hour, take-home examination on Friday, December 14 or Monday, December 17. The precise time will be set in consultation with the class. The format will be essay questions only, with some choice of which to answer.

As an alternative to the exam, there will be a final paper option, by petition, for students who demonstrate a good mastery of course material through the first two-thirds of the term and who have a topic, drawing broadly upon course material but also going beyond it, they are eager to explore. Anyone interested should speak with me no later than Friday, November 9. Based on prior experience, I expect fewer than 10% of students to avail themselves of this option.

REVIEW SESSIONS: Three are scheduled. These will occur on Fridays – September 28, October 26, and November 30 -- in the regular class time slot (8:40-10:00am), in Taubman 301. The format will be informal discussion of questions and/or provocative comments that you yourselves bring in.

GRADING: Final grades will be based 50% on your short essays, 30% on the final exam or paper, and 20% on participation.

READINGS: My expectation, as noted above, is that you will read and think about the required readings for each session in advance of class. The recommended readings, by contrast, are purely optional, for the benefit of students who may have a special interest in the session topic. Many of the readings, both required and recommended, are accessible electronically via the course intranet sites at HKS and GSD or, where indicated, directly from the internet. These are marked below with a double asterisk (**).

All other required readings are available in xeroxed packets or the books listed below. The packets are available for purchase in the Kennedy School Course Materials Office, located in the Kennedy School’s Belfer Building, Room G-7. (The entrance to the Belfer Building is at the corner of Eliot and JFK streets. Room G-7 is one flight down.) A copy of each packet will also be on reserve at both HKS and GSD. So will most other material not in the packets or available electronically.

The books you may wish to purchase, though these will also be on reserve, are as follows: Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public

Investment (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) Bernard Frieden & Lynne Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc. (MIT Press, 1989)

The easiest way to obtain these is from an on-line bookseller such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.


There is no rush. The first assignments in these books are in sessions 14 and 15.

Course Schedule and Assignments

Session 1. September 4, 2012. The Big Questions.

INTRODUCTION

This session will seek to clarify the course purposes and commence discussion of several big questions around which it is organized. In particular: What accounts for the headlong, global pace of migration from rural to urban places in our time, even as urban areas themselves sprawl over greater and greater distances? What is most distinctive about American patterns of urban settlement, and how did they get that way? What strategies do individuals, households, and economic interest groups have available to influence, and to optimize their experiences of, the US urban system? Insofar as some key features of U.S. urbanism are today viewed by many people as serious problems, why are both the problem definitions and proposed remedies so controversial? How well are U.S. urban governance and planning geared to resolve such controversies and, where appropriate, implement effective remedies? How do some other national systems compare in these respects, and why? What can we learn from the study of past change initiatives?

No assigned reading. The following, however, are recommended.

Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (Penguin, 2011), pp. 1-15. **Nicholas Lemann, “Get Out of Town: Has the Celebration of Cities Gone Too Far?” The New Yorker.

June 27, 2011, pp. 76-80.

PART I: URBAN POLITICS

Session 2. September 6, 2012. The Arlington Red Line Case. We commence, in this session and the next, with two case studies – to provide some sense of the flavor of U.S. urban politics, particularly as it involves the shaping of spatial relationships and economic development – and introduce some core themes to which we shall frequently return during the course. These themes include the ways in which development and anti-development forces at times collide; the embeddedness of local governance within state, national, and even global systems; citizen participation, opinion polling, and issue referendums as supplements to electoral democracy; city-suburban differences; and differences between large public and private development projects. The assigned cases date to the mid-1970s and 1980s respectively, and are in some minor respects dated. The patterns of local governance and politics that they illustrate are enduring, however, and despite years of search I have been unable to find newer cases that introduce so many course themes so colorfully, so concisely, or so well.

Turning more specifically to Session 2, several questions to bear in mind as you read the assignment and prepare for class are as follows. What was the planning background of the Red Line Extension proposal through Arlington? How much and how well had it involved citizen participation? Who were the significant stakeholders with respect to this proposal? As this was to be part of a regional transit system, why did local views loom so large? Why was it so difficult to discern local opinion, or for MBTA officials to cut a firm deal with the elected leadership of Arlington? Do you have a clear idea, having read the case, of what the main preference was of Arlington voters in the end? Did they get it? To what extent do you think the citizen controversy in this case might have been overcome with more effective methods of citizen


engagement? Turning to the Rosenthal article: why are certain types of urban infrastructure development more feasible in Europe than the U.S.?

Arnold Howitt, “Extending the Red Line to Arlington (A),” (Kennedy School Case No. C16-87-777.0), entire.

Required:

** Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Europe Finds Clean Fuel in Trash: US Sits Back,” NYT, April 13, 2010, p. 1.

Recommended

**Clarissa Schively, “Understanding the NIMBY and LULU Phenomena…,” Journal of Planning Literature, February 2007, pp. 255-66.

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Session 3. September 11, 2012. An Auto Assembly Plant for Detroit. 1979 and 1980 were years of steep market downturn for the U.S. auto industry, of surging Japanese imports, and of an abrupt shift in consumer preferences toward small cars, a market segment that until recently the U.S. industry had disdained – because it was the one in which foreign manufacturers were most competitive and profit margins per vehicle were lowest. In hard times companies tend to close their least productive plants. It was in this context that in January 1980 Chrysler shuttered its assembly plant in Hamtramck, Michigan.

Formerly known as Dodge Main, this plant dated to 1914 and had for many years been a fully integrated production complex, in which component parts were built as well as assembled. It spread over 120 acres and included five million square feet of floor space, in places eight stories tall. By comparison, virtually all modern assembly plants are single-story. Nonetheless, as late as 1978 its hourly workforce had numbered 5,200.

The city of Hamtramck is just two square miles in area and is almost entirely surrounded by Detroit. Its 1980 population of 21,300, mainly of Polish extraction, was little more than one-third its 1930 peak. To the north of the shuttered plant lay a Polish ethnic neighborhood in Hamtramck. To the south, east, and west lay multi-ethnic and multi-racial working class neighborhoods in Detroit.

By mid-1980 one-third of all hourly workers in the U.S. auto industry, including those employed by suppliers, were on indefinitely layoff, and the industry was on course to lose $4 billion for the year (equivalent to about $11 billion today). All the U.S. companies were severely affected, but General Motors least of all. It was the market leader, still accounting for 46% of U.S. auto sales in 1980, and it had in spring 1979 introduced a popular series of compact and sub-compact cars, known as the X bodies. As a result, its losses were far less than those of its competitors, and lasted only one year during the recession-stagnation years of 1979-1982. In this context General Motors reacted with a massive five-year capital program, to include the construction of multiple new assembly plants. The reading for today focuses on the placement of one of these plants on the old Dodge Main site (but also requiring a quadrupling of its land area).

Questions: Why did it prove more feasible to site the GM plant than the Arlington Red Line Extension? Who were the main stakeholders in this case? How come they expressed themselves so differently from those in the Arlington case? How did GM’s planning differ from that of the public entities in this case, and those we discussed in the Arlington case as well? Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit was a left-liberal, African-American, former labor activist, while the governor of Michigan and (at the culmination of this case) the President of the United States were Republican? How much did these differences matter? What were the effects of federal and state aid programs – and also rules bearing on the exercise of eminent domain by local public bodies and inter-jurisdictional competition for investment? Who were the principal beneficiaries of the public expenditures in this case? At whose expense?


Bryan D. Jones and Lynn W. Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand, 2nd ed.(U. Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 67-108.

Required:

Recommended

**Lynn W. Bachelor, “Regime Maintenance, Solution Sets, and Urban Economic Development,” Urban Affairs Review, June 1994, pp. 596-616.

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Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (Penguin Press, 2011), ch. 2 (pp. 41-67). **William A Fischel, “The Political Economy of Public Use in Poletown: How Federal Grants

Encourage Excessive Use of Eminent Domain,” Michigan State Law Review, 2004, excerpt

, pp. 950-55.

Session 4. September 13, 2012. What Do Local Governments Do Best? And Worst?

This is the first of three sessions on theories of American urban politics – that is, broad-gauge analyses seeking to expose the most significant ideas and forces: (a) that have shaped the structure of american local governance; (b) that drive agenda-setting and collective choices within it; and (c) that, arguably “mobilize bias” in favor of some categories of stakeholders vs. others.

The three theories of urban politics on which we shall focus have been the

most influential in political science and political sociology during the past three decades, though it should also be borne in mind that they are in a line of theories dating back much earlier, and are often seeking to refine or rebut these earlier theories. Be alert to the fact that these theories differ in key respects, at some points head-on, at others in what they highlight [reflecting disagreements about which aspects of urban politics are most fundamental]. You are encouraged first to understand each of the assigned works on its own terms; next to think hard about their points of overlap and difference; and then over the rest of the term to make use of them as aids to your own analyses – a portfolio of concepts and hypotheses from which to draw as you develop your own interpretations of the diverse cases on which we shall focus. Some of you, I realize, eager to get down to brass tacks, will fear that this is too much theory, too soon. My advice is to realize that these theories are by no means presented as gospel. View them rather as tool boxes. Drawing on their rich array of arguments (from your standpoint, hypotheses), concepts, and examples, you will find yourselves far better able to frame analyses of your own, bearing on the detailed histories and case studies encountered through the rest of the term, than would otherwise be feasible in such a brief time span.

The following questions may be helpful in approaching today’s assignment. Do you agree with Peterson that localities, as distinct from individual citizens and organized groups, have clear interests? If so, how similar are these interests from one locality to another? How well are they reflected in local politics and media coverage? Insofar as localities differ in their interests, according to Peterson, what are the most common sources of difference? Are local officials able and disposed, in your view, to pursue the long-term “general” interests of their jurisdictions most of the time, as opposed to catering to special interests? Peterson advances his theory, of course, as an analysis of how local governance in fact works. Some have charged, though, that it has an ideological dimension, favoring some groups as opposed to others. Others claim that key features of Peterson’s theory – particularly his focus on interjurisdictional competition and the obstacles to redistribution, which he viewed as distinctively local – now characterize national politics as well. What are your reactions? How well, in your view, does Viteritti’s recent article mesh with Peterson’s theory?)

Paul Peterson, City Limits (U. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 22-32, 131-43, 150-83.

Required:


**Joseph Viteritti, “Is New York Forsaking the Poor, Urban Affairs Review, May 2010, pp. 693-704. Recommended

**Greg Mankiw, “Competition is Healthy for Governments, Too,” New York Times, April 15, 2012, Business Section, p. 5.

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Marisol Garcia and Dennis R. Judd, “Competitive Cities,” in Karen Mossberger, et al, The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics (Oxford U. Press, 2012), pp. 486-500.

**Eric Lawrence, et al, “Crafting Public Policy: The Conditions of Public Support for Urban Policy Initiatives,” Urban Affairs Review, January 2010, excerpt: pp. 412-18, 426-28.

Session 5. September 18, 2012. Exchange v. Use Values: The Contours of Conflict How, most notably, do Logan and Molotch differ in their view of local politics from Peterson? Do you also detect important similarities? What is the significance of L. and M.’s distinction between “use” and “exchange” values? How persuasively, in your view, do they make their sociological case for the importance of place, and therefore of local politics? What is the significance in their work of the concept “authentic sociology,” and how valuable do you find it? What are “growth machines,” and why do Logan and Molotch consider them so important? As with City Limits, some critics view Urban Fortunes as a work of ideology more than social science [though these may not be mutually exclusive categories]. What do you think? And how persuasive, overall, do you find their analysis vis-à-vis Peterson’s?

John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes (University of California Press, 1987 or 2007; the two editions are identical except for a new preface to the 2007 edition, a portion of which is recommended below but not required), pp. 1-4, 17-23, 29-43, 62-73, 75-79, 88-91, 134-37 (thru para. 2).

Required:

Recommended

Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (U. of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 13-22, 238-43, 248-51, 326-28, 363-65, 374-75.

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**Ezra Klein, “Our Corrupt Politics: It’s Not All Money,” New York Review of Books, March 21, 2012, pp. 42-44.

**Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes,” New York Times, April 29, 2012, p. 1.

**Harvey Molotch, et al, “History Repeats Itself, but How? City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place,” American Sociological Review, December 2000: excerpt: pp. 795-816.

Session 6. September 20, 2012. Local Governance by Public-Private

Regimes: Atlanta as a Case in Point. What does Clarence Stone add to the theories of urban politics discussed in the prior two sessions? Does his alternative “take” on urban politics significantly alter your emerging view of what factors best account for urban policy choices? What, specifically, is a “regime?” Does every locality have one? In what ways does it matter? Are multiple types of regimes viable in the context of dominant American interest group patterns and ideologies? Having read Stone, were you at all surprised by Bayor’s history of racial politics in Atlanta? Can you mesh these two accounts, from rather different perspectives, of Atlanta politics?

Required:


Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (University Press of Kansas, 1989), pp.3-6, 160-74, 186-96 (bottom)

Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta (U. of North Carolina Press, 1996), ch. 3, excerpt: pp. 53-69, 81-92.

Recommended

**Clarence Stone, “The Atlanta Experience Re-examined: The Link Between Agenda and Regime Change,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, March 2001, pp. 20-34.

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**Richard M. Flanagan, “Opportunities and Constraints on Mayoral Behavior…,” Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2004): excerpt, pp. 52-55 (on Andrew Young as mayor of Atlanta).

** Bill Scher, “How Liberals Win,” New York Times, July 1, 2012, Sunday Review Section, p. 8. **Royce Hanson, et al, “Corporate Citizenship and Urban Problem Solving: The Changing Civic Role

of Business Leaders in American Cities,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 2010, pp. 1-23. Session 7. September 25, 2012. Metropolitan Governance: Why so Elusive? Should

We Care? For most purposes other than governance, urban places are today perceived mainly as regions. The U.S. is unique, however, in its combination of extreme urban sprawl over the past century, which has not

The pattern, in short, is of extreme local government fragmentation in the typical region. During the first two decades following World War II – with prosperity, rapid motorization, and very high levels of single-family home construction – the pace of sprawl dramatically accelerated. From the early 1950’s through the mid-1960s the single most salient aim of “good government” urban reformers was to create metropolitan-scale governments, either by consolidating existing localities or adding a new layer of government above them to deal with regional issues. Almost always, their proposals required voter approval in referendums. The best book ever written about several of these efforts was Scott Greer’s Metropolitics, from which selections are assigned below. Though dated in some obvious respects, it remains highly pertinent – in part because current strategies are substantially shaped by historic memories, and in part because Metropolitics is still a uniquely valuable source on some general characteristics of referendum politics and on a different type of business-government relations than we have discussed previously.

for the most part been matched by local government boundary adjustments. There are wide variations, to be sure. The boundaries of older cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, have tended to be fixed, while some newer cities, particularly in the Sun Belt, have been enabled by their state governments to annex surrounding open countryside as they have grown and sprawled. In addition to general purpose governments, moreover, virtually all regions have numerous “special districts” responsible for specific government functions such as education, mass transit, airports, water supply, and waste disposal. Some of the special districts, moreover, have their own elected boards; others are legally state agencies (with boards typically appointed by the governor); while still others have boards appointed by their constituent localities.

Most of the metro reform campaigns of the fifties and sixties failed, and efforts to create general purpose metropolitan governments have since languished. Efforts to enhance governance capacity at urban regional scale have continued, however, whether by creating special purpose authorities, advisory planning agencies, more informal consultative bodies, or in some cases by merging cities and (their generally much larger) counties. The assigned article by Savitch and Vogel describes the most prominent recent success of a city-county consolidation campaign – in Louisville, Kentucky – while Imbroscio’s review is of a recent book examining regional equity campaigns. Study Questions: Do you agree with Greer that political campaigns, and particularly referendum campaigns, tend to be driven by morality plays? What is distinctive about them as organizing themes for political deliberation, and particularly the three he discusses? Can you think of others that are in common use today? Why did business support count for so little in these campaigns, and what implications do you


draw from this? How valid and important, in your view, is the actual case for metropolitan government? What benefits and costs appear likely, in particular, for Louisville? How are these benefits and costs likely to be distributed among income and racial groups? Finally, do you see much prospect for regional reform in at least some US urban areas driven by aspirations for greater equity ?

Scott Greer, Metropolitics (John Wiley & Sons, 1963), pp. 1-18, 60-80, 195 (line 3)-199.

Required:

** H.V. Savitch and Ronald K. Vogel, “Suburbs Without a City: Power and City-County Consolidation,” Urban Affairs Review, July 2004, excerpt: pp. 763-81.

**David Imbroscio, Review of Manuel Pastor, Jr., et al., This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Cornell U. Press, 2009), Urban Affairs Review, 2010, pp. 140-149. If you are interested in this book itself (on reserve), which represents a low-income community mobilization approach to regionalism, I suggest you focus on pp. 1-17, 109-39.

Recommended

Christian LeFevre and Margaret Weir, “Building Metropolitan Institutions,” in Karen Mossberger, et al, The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics (Oxford U. Press, 2012), pp. 624-41 [a comparative overview].

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**Bonnie Lindstrom, “The Metropolitan Mayors Caucus: Institution Building in a Politically Fragmented Metropolitan Region [Chicago],” Urban Affairs Review, 2010 (vol. 46, no. 1), pp. 37-67.

Tony Travers, The Politics of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), ch. 7 [on western European arrangements].

Session 8. September 27, 2012. COUNTERPOINT: EUROPEAN URBAN GOVERNANCE. Guest: Quinton Mayne, Assistant Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.

The readings for this week’s session provide a brief overview of some key themes related to urban governance in Europe. The following are some study questions worth considering: Is it possible to speak of a “(West) European” model of urban governance? What characteristics do countries in Western Europe share in how their cities are governed? How does urban governance vary across Europe? In what ways are cities in Europe governed differently from those in the United States? What might explain these differences? Has there been a convergence over time in how European and American cities are governed? What local, national, and supranational factors are driving or impeding such a convergence?

Required

**Alan Harding, “Urban Regimes in a Europe of the Cities,” European Urban and Regional Studies, 1997, 4:4, pp. 296-307 (‘A tale of five cities’).

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**Patrick Le Galès and Alan Harding, “Cities and States in Europe,” West European Politics, 1998, 21:3, pp. 137-142 (‘Cities with the State’).

Margit Mayer, “Social movements in European cities: transitions from the 1970s to the 1990s,” in Arnaldo Bagnasco and Patrick Le Galès, eds., Cities in Contemporary Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 132-138, 146-151.

REVIEW SESSION (Optional). FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28.


(The format for this and subsequent review sessions is free-flow discussion. I will count on you to arrive with pertinent questions and/or provocative observations that you would like to discuss.)

Session 9. October 2, 2012. The Birth and Evolution of American City Planning

PART II. LAND USE PLANNING AND ZONING

In this session we commence our study of urban planning. Overall, our concern in this course is with the ways in which planning is unavoidably embedded in politics, and with the strategies that planners have evolved in recognition of this fact. In this session we focus on origins, mainly around the turn of the 20th century, and then on a case study of citywide land use planning in the late 1950s.

Origins matter, a great deal. Institutions and professions take forms and make choices in their early years that reflect perceived opportunities and strategic possibilities -- and which tend to persist for generations as norms, skills, and vested interests gather around them. Think about the U.S. Senate, or the great religious traditions. These also change, of course, but it is impossible to achieve a deep grasp of their present realities without some understanding of their history as well.

Urban planning experienced great changes in the 1960s and beyond, to which we shall turn in subsequent sessions. Many of the forces to which planning adapted in its early years remain deeply embedded in its culture and practice, however, so we will need to think hard in these later sessions about just how much has changed, why, and with what consequences for the well-being of urban residents.

A few questions as you ponder the readings for this session: As the United States industrialized and urbanized in the late 19th and first years of the 20th century, what were the most important factors that gave rise to city planning – both as a profession and a widely accepted governmental function? What were the most significant constraints that planners faced as they sought to establish their niche within the overall ecology of local government and private land use activities? How consciously were these choices made, and by whom? In the St. Paul case, we observe a typical – but apparently above average – example of comprehensive land use plan preparation, roughly a half-century into the modern era “of organized city planning in the United States” [to quote Jon Peterson, below]. Why do you think the planners in that case – both Carl Dale and his superiors – made the key choices that they did, with respect both to methods and value choices? And, realizing that you may change your minds as the term progresses, what would you expect to be different if they – or you -- were undertaking a similar task today?

Donald Krueckeberg, ed., Introduction to Planning History in the United States (Rutgers U. Press, 1983), pp. 3-6.

Required:

M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (MIT Press, 1983), pp. 63-66 (end of first paragraph).

**Jon A Peterson, “The Birth of Organized City Planning in the United States, 1909-1910,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2009, pp. 123-33.

Alan Altshuler, The City Planning Process: a Political Analysis (Cornell U. Press, 1965), excerpt: pp. 84-101 (end of para. 1), 114-17, 129-35.

Recommended

**New York Times, March 21, 2011: Sam Roberts, “200th Birthday For the Map That Made New York,” p. A18.

:

Kristina Ford, The Trouble with City Planning (Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 45 (para. 2)-62, 113-19.


Session 10: October 4, 2012. Two Cleveland Cases The city of Cleveland, an industrial powerhouse during the first half of the 20th century, has had very serious problems since World War II. It was among the most widely cited exemplars of new planning approaches during the 1970s and 1980s, however: equity planning in the 1970s, consensus planning in the 1980s [and beyond]. The former, it bears note, has also been labeled at various times and places advocacy, progressive, or “just city” planning.

Questions: What enabled Cleveland’s equity planners to thrive through three very different mayoralties, ranging from very liberal Democratic to moderate Republican? How effective were they – in serving the interests of the city as a whole, of the mayors under whom they worked, of the low-income residents whom they defined as their most important constituency? What did you think about their approach to citizen participation? Would you expect such planning to become more common over time? Turning to the second case: Who were the main constituencies for the Civic Vision approach to planning? Did it provide a much larger role for participation by private institutions and ordinary citizens? Did it advantage similar or quite different stakeholders, by and large? Do you think it represented a good model for contemporary city planning? More specifically, what do you view as its most important pros and cons? Finally, what do you conclude was the civic vision?

Should you find time for the first two recommended readings: How persuasive do you find Judith Innes’ theory of consensus planning? How closely did the Civic Vision process approximate it? What problems did it encounter in San Francisco regional planning process described by Innes and Gruber?

**Norman Krumholz, “A Retrospective View of Equity Planning: Cleveland 1969-1979,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 1982, pp. 163-74.

Required:

Robert B. Jaquay, Civic Vision: Participatory City Planning in Cleveland in the 1980s (Kennedy School Case C16-91-1060.0), pp. 1-18.

**Judith E. Innes, “Planning Through Consensus Building: A New View of the Comprehensive Planning Ideal,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Autumn 1996, pp. 460-72.

Recommended:

**Judith Innes and Judith Gruber, “Planning Styles in Conflict,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2005, pp. 177-88.

**Richard M. Flanagan, “Opportunities and Constraints on Mayoral Behavior…,” Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2004), pp. 43-65: excerpt, pp. 58-61 (on Dennis Kucinich as mayor of Cleveland).

**Ruth Eckdish Knack, “Cleveland: The Morning After,” Planning, January 1999, pp. 12-15. Session 11. October 9, 2012. Zoning: Servant or Master of Planning? An

Instrument for Constraining--or Strengthening--Property Rights? Zoning has long been viewed as the main regulatory instrument for plan implementation. Its linkage to general planning has often been weak, however. And it has long been subject to criticism from both left and right – on the one hand, as a force for segregation, inequality, and urban design banality; on the other as inimical to the effective operation of market forces and invasive of property rights. Yet zoning is also, beyond doubt, the most popular idea associated with planning ever to emerge in the U.S. A few questions: What are the most significant effects of zoning, recognizing of course that these are not everywhere identical? How come it enjoys such broad support? What is the significance of “fiscal” zoning, the most significant technical advance in zoning of recent decades? Insofar as the critics’ varied


arguments have some merit, are there potential reforms that might significantly improve your evaluation of zoning? Which if any of these reforms are likely to be widely feasible, do you think, in the near future? This discussion of potential zoning reform will continue, I should note, in our next session.

Robert H. Nelson, Zoning and Property Rights (MIT Press, 1977), pp. 7-11, 16 (para. 3)-21, 47-50, 84-87.

Required:

Michael Danielson and Jameson Doig, New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development (U. of California Press, 1982), pp. 75-98, and 106-108 (section break).

**Matthew A. Light, “Note: Different Ideas of the City: Origins of the Metropolitan Land Use Regimes in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland,” 24 Yale Journal of International Law (1999), excerpts: pp. 577-78, 585 (start of new section)-591 (thru paragraph 5).

Recommended

**NY Times, October 21, 2007: Peter Applebome, “A Court Decision Elbows a Village In Favor of Religious Rights.”

:

**Harvey M. Jacobs and Kurt Paulsen, “Property Rights: The Neglected Theme of 20th Century Urban Planning, Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2009, excerpt: pp. 134-37 (opening two sections).

**Paul McMorrow, “Playing the Development Bargaining Game,” Boston Globe, April 15, 2011, p. A19.

Session 12. October 11, 2012. Can Land Use Regulation Become Inclusionary? States set the rules for local zoning, and can require or simply enable localities to zone for affordable housing. The states that have been most active in this regard are New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California. Our main reading today is about the New Jersey case, though we shall also devote a bit of time to the Massachusetts law, known as Chapter 40B, which survived a repeal referendum in 2010.

Bear in mind that inclusionary zoning is distinct from government-financed public housing, which dates in the U.S. to the 1930s (though little has been built, and much retired, since the mid-1970s), and from other means of government subsidization for the housing of low-income families such as federal housing vouchers and low-income tax credits (for investors in such housing), which date from the 1970s and 1980s. Inclusionary zoning may be viewed as a functional alternative to direct public subsidization of housing for low and moderate income households.

Calavita and Mallach (p. 2) observe: “Inclusionary housing [i.e., zoning] originated in the United States during the early 1970s, and gradually spread to Canada, western Europe, and more recently to other countries including Australia, India, and South Africa.” The U.S. is by no means the global leader in this domain presently, for reasons to be discussed, but it did pioneer at the outset.

A few questions: How come the states, in general, have been so reticent in this domain, even as they have become increasingly major players in such traditionally local policy arenas as education? What was the rationale for the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mt. Laurel decisions, and how did they evolve from Mt. Laurel I to Mt. Laurel III? How come enforcement proved so difficult, and what does this say about the power of the judiciary? To what forces were legislators and governments responding primarily as they sought to craft legislation responsive to the Mt. Laurel decisions? What was your reaction to the eventual authorization for New Jersey suburbs to “buy out” some of their affordable housing obligations via grants to localities (mainly inner cities) eager to receive them?

Turning to Massachusetts: How does its approach differ from New Jersey’s? How come Chapter 40B, enacted in 1969, has generated sufficient support over the decades to prevail in a statewide


referendum in 2010. (Had it not, the law would have been repealed.) How come as well, though, Massachusetts – which has the strongest law in the nation facilitating affordable housing production – is also among the states with the very highest housing costs?

A similar local case, incidentally, though I have not assigned any readings about it, is New York City. The city government there has been remarkably aggressive in subsidizing the development of affordable housing units since the mid-1980s, and it is the only large American city that still regulates the rents allowable for large numbers of apartments (1.3 million, more than 60 percent of all rental units in the city). Yet its market-rate housing prices and rents are the nation’s highest, and have been among the fastest rising during this same period.

**David Luberoff, “Background Memorandum on the Mt. Laurel Cases,” typescript.

Required:

David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (Rutgers U. Press, 1995):

• pp. 112-35 (end of para. 2, last word: “Republicans”), • pp. 159 (para. 3, first word: “There”) to 162 (end of section), • pp. 173 (paras. 3-4; first word of para. 3: “As”).

**Lynn Fisher, “Reviewing Chapter 40B,” Policy Brief, Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston (Harvard Kennedy School), November 2008. (A good, very brief, background piece.)

Recommended

Calavita and Mallach (NEED FULL CITE), pp. 15-27 (on US experience in international context), 41-56 (on inclusionary zoning in California), 59-74 (a New Jersey update, excessively detailed for our purposes but a useful scan for the general patterns it portrays). For those with comparative interests, note that chs. 3-8 are case studies of inclusionary housing policy in Canada, England, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy respectively.

:

**Mosi Secret, “Clock Ticks for a Key Homeless Program,” New York Times, June 1, 2011, p. A20. **Edward G. Goetz, “Where Have All the Towers Gone: The Dismantling of Public Housing in U.S.

Cities,” Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2011), pp. 267-87.

PART III. PURSUING STRONG VISIONS

Session 13. October 16, 2012. Urban Renewal Thus far we have focused on planning by regulation. Only a very limited subset of planning objectives can be achieved by regulation alone, but through the first half of the 20th century there was little disposition on the part of American governments to expend funds for the purpose of plan implementation. This changed rapidly in the years following World War II, however, when the federal government became a source of large grants-in-aid for certain types of public investment that could (a) help enable localities to achieve widely desired planning objectives and (b) encourage them to plan far more ambitiously than ever before.

Of the new federal programs, the first enacted and one of the two most important for cities was Urban Renewal. (The other, to which we turn in Session 15, was the Interstate Highway Program.) Urban Renewal was enormously popular at the outset, in the early and mid-1950s, but became increasingly controversial in the 1960s and essentially ended in the 1970s. We shall seek to consider why (the popularity, the controversies, the resolutions), as well as the strategies employed by key actors. In subsequent sessions will examine follow-on strategies of central city revitalization.


Questions: How did the Urban Renewal idea happen to arise when it did? Who were its main supporters? Was it fundamentally a good idea? What did planners think? Did they play key roles: as sources of support, of ideas, and/or of technical capacity for program implementation? How come a program so popular in its early years so quickly – that is, within a decade – came under fierce intellectual fire from both left and right, and political fire from the grass roots? How come Danzig in Newark and Moses in New York City were such successful Renewal officials? And what interrupted their strings of success in the end? How did the strategies of lower class program opponents, as in Newark, differ from those of more upscale opponents, as in Greenwich Village? Was the program susceptible of adaptation to overcome, or at least calm, the concerns of its critics? What strategies were employed to save it, and how well did they work?)

Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn, Downtown Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (MIT Press, 1990), pp. 15-19, 22-27, 39-44, 49-56.

Required:

Michael Danielson and Jameson Doig, New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development (U. of California Press, 1982), ch. 9 (pp. 291-309).

Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder… (Random House, 2009), pp. 99-121 (excerpt from case study: “Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village.”).

Recommended

**Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate, 2000, pp. 299-326.

:

**Edward G. Goetz, New Deal Ruins: The Demolition of Public Housing in the United States (book manuscript, 2011), ch. 4 (case studies of HOPE VI in Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans).

Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Cornell U. Press, 2010), ch. 3. Session 14. October 18, 2012. Interstate Freeway Politics and Planning: The

Early Years. The Interstate Highway Program (IHP), enacted in 1956, was the largest public works program in

American history, extending over more than four decades; and its legacy continues to preoccupy those involved in highway policy making – who are charged with operating, maintaining, periodically reconstructing, at times expanding, and financing these main arteries of the nation’s road system. During its early years, on which we focus today, the IHP was almost entirely noncontroversial. The principal officials in charge of its implementation, moreover, state and federal highway engineers, enjoyed enormous esteem. They were more or less universally admired for their technical proficiency in the furtherance of a vital national purpose. Their work was almost invariably portrayed as technocratic rather than political. When political analysts did cast an eye on them, however, they were generally deemed to be among the most powerful civil servants in the American system. Much was to change in subsequent decades, and we will in subsequent sessions carry the story up to date. As noted previously, though, it is impossible to think in a sophisticated way about later adaptations without first examining such programs at their point of origin and in their heyday – as we do today in the case of the Interstate program.

Questions: How come the Interstate program was enacted when it was, and with its predominant reliance on fuel tax financing? Why was its constituency support so overwhelming? Given the breadth and intensity of this support, how come the highway program was viewed so generally as technocratic rather than than political? Viewed from local scale, how did the program look to St. Paul officials? What were the options available to St. Paul urban planners? To citizens whose homes and neighborhoods were threatened with adverse impacts? How adroitly and usefully do you think the St. Paul planners (including one who was retired and participated from the sidelines) brought their own


skills to bear in this case? How about leaders of the neighborhoods threatened with adverse impacts, especially St. Paul’s African-American community? What were the most notable similarities and differences between the St. Paul and Miami cases? And, for those of you who find time to read the selection from Anthony Flint’s book (as I hope many of you will), how do you account for the greater success of the protesters led by Jane Jacobs in New York City’s Greenwich Village by comparison with their counterparts in St. Paul and Miami?

Altshuler and Luberoff, Mega-Projects, pp. 77-84 (thru line 6).

Required:

Altshuler, The City Planning Process: a Political Analysis (op. cit.), pp. 23 (line 5)-28, 40-70 (section break).

Raymond Mohl, “Race and Space in the Modern City: Interstate-95 and the Black Community in Miami,” in A. Hirsch and R. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in 20th Century America (Rutgers U. Press, 1993), pp. 102-104, 109-115, 134-135 (thru para. 3, ending “…by freeways”).

Highly Recommended

Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder… (Random House, 2009), ch. 5 (pp. 137-78: case study, “The Lower Manhattan Expressway.”)

:

Recommended

:

**Jeffrey R. Brown, et al, “Planning for Cars in Cities,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2009, pp. 161-177.

Session 15. October 23, 2012. The 1970s and 1980s (1): Mobility and Clean Air

During the late 1960s and early 1970s a major shift occurred in national priorities, from a single-minded focus on development in the realms of urban land use and transportation policies toward carving out a large policy space for environmental protection as well. The environmental movement had many specific objectives. We focus here on just one, reducing air pollution. It was, though, among the most salient, and it involved the urban land use/transportation system more than any other. The preferred strategy in this case was regulation rather than (as in the urban renewal and highway cases) public investment. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 (plus follow-on amendments in later years), on which we focus in this session, were in combination perhaps the most ambitious regulatory program ever undertaken in U.S. history.

A few questions: How do you account for the extraordinarily rapid shift in public sentiment that laid the basis for the Clean Air Act Amendments? This legislation embodies a then-new theory of how to avoid “capture” of a regulatory program by the regulated interests; how might you characterize this theory? What expanded role did it involve for the judicial branch of government? Did it, in your view, prove [partially or almost entirely] valid? How come the business interests threatened with sharply increased regulation were unable to block or even weaken this legislation? How come President Nixon, generally recalled as a conservative, signed it and appointed administrators determined to implement it vigorously?

What proved to be the most significant problems in carrying it out? Should, or could, the EPA have relaxed the pace a bit as the obstacles to achieving statutory targets by the statutory deadlines became apparent? How come it allowed various regional administrators to have different policies in this regard? Why was Massachusetts a particularly interesting


test case? Should the governor and secretary of transportation in Massachusetts have been more cooperative? How much difference would it have made if they had been? As this case comes to a close, what would you anticipate as the long-range effects of this legislation, looking ahead 20, 30, or more years?

Arnold M. Howitt, “The Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Controls.” in Howitt, Managing Federalism, Studies in Intergovernmental Relations (CQ Press, 1984), pp. 114-22, 139-56, 161-79.

Required:

Recommended

Daniel A. Mazmanian, “Los Angeles’ Transition from Command-and-Control to Market-Based Clean Air Strategies and Implementation,” in Mazmanian and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Toward Sustainable Communities (MIT Press, 1999), pp. 77-112.

:

**Coryden Ireland, “Rising Seas, Imperiled Cities,” Environment@Harvard (newsletter of the Harvard University Center for the Environment), Volume 2, Issue 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 1-9. (This is on the contemporary and future threat of global warming to many cities, with a particular focus on Boston.)

REVIEW SESSION (Optional), FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012.

Session 16. October 25, 2012. Public-Private Partnerships for Downtown Revitalization.

Urban Renewal as a distinct federal program ceased to exist in January 1975, when it and several other programs were consolidated into the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program, which is still ongoing. The CDBG program does not specifically target downtowns, but central city efforts to revitalize their downtowns have never much abated. During the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sharply reduced aid to cities, the latter were increasingly taken with public-private partnerships (PPP’s) as a way to realize their downtown renewal aspirations.

Around this time as well, actually beginning in the 1970s, there was a rediscovery of the importance of retail consumption in the mix of any truly vibrant downtown. These ideas remain very current today, but they were particularly new and fashionable in the eighties, inspiring what I consider the best book ever written on downtown revitalization in the post-Urban Renewal era, on the potential value of PPP’s [together with some risks] for urban redevelopment, and on the importance of collaboration across many fields – from political leadership and real estate entrepreneurship to architecture, public management, and urban planning – in the realization of great projects.

A few questions: Who were the most critical actors in sparking the first “downtown mall” projects in the 1970s? And did the pattern of intiation change in later years? How about the extent of reliance on federal aid? Did the cities really need private partners to carry out these projects? What in the way of ideas and strategies did the localities obtain from their private “partners” that they could not have obtained from their own officials or hired consultants? What, more generally, was the difference between the public-private “partnerships” about which Frieden and Sagalyn write, and the public-private mix in Urban Renewal during the fifties and sixties? What was the significance of tax-increment financing, and could many of these projects have gone forward without it? Finally, did Frieden and Sagalyn, as some critics have charged, view the PPP phenomenon through rose-colored glasses? (The items on the recommended list, some of which reach well beyond downtown revitalization, are more critical. And note that California Governor Jerry Brown is trying this year to eliminate both tax-increment financing and the local community redevelopment agencies [CRA’s] that rely on it.


Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc. (MIT Press, 1990), pp. 107-162, 191-97, 215-27.

Required:

Recommended: pp. 87-107.

**Stephen P. Erie, et al, “Redevelopment, San Diego Style: The Limits of Public-Private Partnerships,” Urban Affairs Review, May 2010, pp. 644-78: excerpt, pp. 653-72.

Recommended:

**Lynne Sagalyn, “Public/Private Development: Lessons from History, Research, and Practice,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Winter 2007, pp. 7-23.

** David Sawicki, “The Festival Marketplace as Public Policy,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Summer 1989, pp. 347-61. This article, on Underground Atlanta, was written prior to its opening. The story is continued in Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion (Temple University Press, 2001), pp. 110-112 (on reserve).

Session 17. October 30, 2012. The New Politics of Highways In the face of rising citizen protest and environmental constraints, the great burst of urban expressway construction ended in the early 1970s. Highway spending continued to rise in the ensuing decades, however, a trend that seems likely to be interrupted only as part of the general budget-cutting movement that has recently ascendant in 2011. Our central concern today will be the strategies that highway advocates have employed since the 1970s to win approval for major highway projects – quite different from those that sufficed during the 1950s and 1960s. By way of illustration we shall principally on the case of Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project, though with brief attention to several others as well. Insofar as time permits, we will consider finally the extent to which the strategies that worked in some cases during the final decades of the 20th century require modification today.

A few questions: How come the great coalition that brought about the Interstate Highway Program in the 1950s proved so vulnerable to urban anti-highway protests during the late 1960s and early 1970s? What strategies enabled some projects to continue moving forward or – as in the case of the Central Artry/Tunnel project – even gather momentum in subsequent years? Why did these strategies prove so time-consuming and expensive? How come the Westway Project in New York City failed to reach fruition, despite the extraordinary breadth of its political support? What was different about the Artery/Tunnel in Boston and the Century Freeway in Los Angeles, which did get built? Were these, in the end, cost-effective public investments? Do you think we will their like again? Should we wish to? Finally, what if any broad strategies are available to address “needs” for future reconstruction and expansion of the U.S. highway system in the face of the anti-tax fervor now dominant, which has even engulfed the highway program and which seems likely to reign for quite awhile to come?

Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects (Brookings, 2003), pp. 84 (line 7)-121 (to second line from bottom, at fn. 77).

Required:

**Alan Altshuler, “Equity, Pricing, and Surface Transportation Politics,” Urban Affairs Review, November 2010, excerpt, pp. 155-65, 169-74.

Recommended:

** Peter Park, “Planning for the Post-Freeway American City,” lecture at the Lincoln Institute for Land


Policy, March 20, 2012, video available on-line at https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/video/af354e1d1f36477eb3d17756440621dd/Planning-for-the-Post-Freeway-American-City

**Paul Sorenson, “Moving Los Angeles,” Access, Fall 2009, pp. 16-24. Session 18. November 1, 2012. The Political Revival of Mass Transit.

Mass transit is at once a competitor of the private motor vehicle system, and a complement to it. They are linked, moreover, within the federal Department of Transportation [and similar departments in most states] and, more significantly, the federal legislative process, where both have been funded since the early 1970s as elements of “surface transportation.” While the rise of mass motorization was initially devastating for urban mass transportation, its more recent administrative and fiscal links to the motor vehicle system have been instrumental in its partial revival. We shall focus in this session on the nature of this revival, seeking to distinguish between its political and service components, leaving time as well for some discussion of just what is the actual potential of mass transit in contemporary urban America?

Several questions: How do you account for the political revival of mass transit, which seemed on the brink of death during the 1950s and early 1960s, in the decades that followed? Why did rail rapid transit loom so large in this revival, though buses tend to work better in lower density settings and U.S. urban areas were in the midst of rapid urban sprawl? Why has it been so difficult to link transit with land use planning? How significant is this disjunction in the U.S. systems of urban planning and land development? How serious for mass transit is the impossibility of user-tax financing? Given this political handicap, how has it managed to achieve such robust funding over the past four decades? What has (and has not) been achieved thus far in terms of service to the public and land use planning? What may transit advocates realistically hope to achieve in the coming decades re: sustainability, social justice (defined in terms of service to those most in need), congestion relief, and the accommodation of diverse life style options?

Required: Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Megaprojects (Brookings, 2003), ch. 6. (pp. 176-218).

Highly Recommended: Robert Cervero, The Transit Metropolis (Island Press, 1998), pp. 83-99.

Recommended

**Peter J. Haas and Katherine Estrada, “Revisiting Factors Associated with the Success of Ballot Initiatives With a Substantial Rail Transit Component,” Mineta Transportation Institute (of San Jose State University), June 2011, Section III (Findings and Conclusions).

:

http://www.transweb.sjsu.edu/PDFs/research/2911-Ballot-Initiatives-Rail-Transit.pdf **Gabrielle Gurley, “Delays in Service: The South Coast Desperately Wants a Rail Link to Boston and Politicians

are Eager to Provide It, But Can The State Afford It? Commonwealth, Summer 2011, pp. 42-50. **Erick Guerra & Robert Cervero (2011): “Cost of a Ride,” Journal of the American Planning

Association (Summer 2011), excerpt: pp. 282 (section head: “Toward a Normative Transit-Oriented Development Density”) to p. 288 (end of article).

Session 19. November 3, 2012. Entertainment and Tourism as Core Development Strategies. The vogue of downtown mall development, on which we focused in session __, was just the beginning of a much broader, ongoing phenomenon, involving local public investment to serve mainly people who neither live nor work in the city. Scholars refer to this as “the tourist city” syndrome, and it is broadly international. We shall wish in this session to explore its main

https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/video/af354e1d1f36477eb3d17756440621dd/Planning-for-the-Post-Freeway-American-City�

https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/video/af354e1d1f36477eb3d17756440621dd/Planning-for-the-Post-Freeway-American-City�

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components, its sources of political support, and its consequences for the locals. Questions: What motivates local officials to devote substantial portions of their public investment resources to serving non-residents? Who are the main supporters of tourist-oriented development? What are the most significant obstacles they face in seeking to achieve their objectives? What does Judd mean in speaking of the “tourist bubble” and is this a helpful formulation? What is the theory of how tourist-oriented developments contribute to overall urban (and particularly downtown) revitalization, and how persuasive do you find it? What is the specific rationale, within the framework of this strategy, for subsidizing convention centers, which are mainly venues for business meetings? How about venues for professional sports teams, owned by super-rich people and paying some of the highest salaries in the land? How do you react to the discussion by Agostini, et al, of the merits of referendum decision-making for investments like the new stadium for the San Francisco Giants?

Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” in Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, The Tourist City (Yale U. Press, 1999), excerpt: pp. 35-44, 51-53.

Required:

Altshuler and Luberoff, Mega-Projects (op. cit), pp. 18 (para. 3)-21, 32 (all but first four lines of text)-42. Stephen J. Agostini, John M. Quigley, and Eugene Smolensky, “Stickball in San Francisco,” in Roger Noll

and Andrew Zimbalist eds., Sports, Jobs, and Taxes (Brookings: 1997), excerpt: pp. 385-398. **Michael Kimmelman, “A Ballpark That May Be Louder Than the Fans,” New York Times, April 29,

2012, p. 1. Recommended

**Joshua Sapotichne and James M. Smith, “Venue Shopping and the Politics of Urban Development:

:

Lessons from Chicago and Seattle,” Urban Affairs Review, January 2012, excerpt: pp. 93-99. **Ryan Holeywell, “Game Over: When a Team Leaves Its Stadium, What Do You Do With The

Building?” Governing, December 2011, pp. 42-47. Steven P. Erie, et. al., Paradise Plundered (Stanford U. Press, 2011), pp. 161-69 (case study: San Diego

convention center). **Newspaper As Business Pulpit,” New York Times, June 11, 2012, p. B1. John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, eds., Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s

Games, 1896 to 2012 (Routledge, 2007), pp. 1-7 (end of page), 289-97 (on 2008 Beijing Olympics), 298-320 (on the 2012 London Olympics)

Session 20. November 8, 2011. Singapore: The World’s Most Comprehensively Planned Metropolis?

Part IV: International Comparisons

Singapore is the world’s sole fully sovereign city-state and among its greatest modernization success stories of the past half-century. Though ideologically capitalist and a favorite of multinational corporate investors, it is also conspicuous for the strength and autonomy of its public sector. And it is, as near as I can judge, the world’s most comprehensively planned metropolis. I have spent seven months in Singapore over the past four years, striving to understand its governance, its planning, and at least the general secrets of its success. So I will take the lead in this session while calling on visitors in subsequent sessions to help us think about the interplay of politics and planning in some other world cities.

A few questions to bear in mind as you prepare for this session: How do you account for the extraordinary commitment of Singapore to comprehensive land use planning? Why has it been


able to engage in such planning, and to carry out the plans, so much more successfully than any of the jurisdictions we have discussed previously? How do its leaders apparently think about the relationship between capitalism and strong government? Economic growth and environmental protection? Land use, economic development, transportation, and other infrastructure planning? How do you account for the fact that Singapore has led the world in adopting such western ideas as congestion pricing and waste recycling? How has Singapore achieved such remarkable continuity in its planning visions and policies? To what extent is business a significant force in its decision making? How about ordinary citizens, in their roles as voters and/or participants in specific policy deliberations?

Robert Cervero, The Transit Metropolis (Island Press, 1998), ch 6, excerpt: pp. 155-71 (end of section). The numbers in this piece are outdated; from the mid-1990s. The history is excellent, though, and the patterns he describes are still valid.

Required:

**Cheong Koon Hean, “Achieving Sustainable Urban Development [in Singapore],” Ethos, June 2008, pp. 18-31. (Mrs. Cheong was, at the time she wrote CEO of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, which is responsible for comprehensive land use and development planning, 2004-2010, and is now CEO of its Housing Development Board.

**Lee Yuen Hee, “Waste Management and Economic Growth,” Ethos, June 2008, pp. 51-61. (Mr. Lee is CEO of Singapore’s National Environment Agency.)

**Alan Altshuler, “Congestion Pricing in Singapore,” excerpt from article, “Equity, Pricing, and Surface Transportation Politics,” Urban Affairs Review, November 2010, pp. 165-66 (through para. 3)

Recommended

** Kenneth Paul Tan, “The People’s Action Party and Political Liberalization in Singapore,” ms., 2011.

:

**Seth Mydans, interview with Lee Kuan Yew (founding father of modern Singapore, prime minister 1959-1990, and a dominant figure till 2011), New York Times, September 11, 2010, p. A5.

**Andrew Jacobs, “As Singapore Loosens Its Grip, Residents Lose Fear to Challenge Authority,” New York Times, June 17, 2012, p. 9.

Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit, The Spirit of Cities (Princeton U. Press, 2011), pp. 78-110. Session 21. November 13, 2012. The Revival of Planning in Greater London. Guest: Isabel Dedring, Deputy Mayor of London for Transport. Greater London, with a large measure of national government oversight, pioneered in regional planning from the 1930s through the 1950s. During the 1980s, however, both regional government and regional planning all but disappeared, as the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) and with it all local government at regional scale in the London area. On the other hand, some major planning initiatives such as the Docklands development were undertaken in this period at the initiative of the national government. In 1999, the pendulum swung again.. A new Labor Government, led by Tony Blair, created the Greater London Authority (GLA), with a mandate for regional leadership in spatial planning, land use regulation, and transportation. The GLA, also known as the City of London, is headed by an elected mayor, whose most important functions are the oversight of regional transportation, urban planning and development, and policing. The transportation agency for Greater London, known as Transport for London (TfL), came into being in its current form at the same time as the GLA and has jurisdiction over both highway and mass transportation. We are fortunate to have as our guest today London’s Deputy Mayor for Transport, Isabel Dedring.

The first GLA mayoral election occurred in 2000, and the years since have witnessed an extraordinary revival of planning, public investment (particularly in mass transit, above all in the projected $16 billion


Crossrail project), innovation (particularly congestion pricing and climate change regulation), and public space development (above all, around the 2012 summer Olympic site). Though the GLA was led for its first eight years by a Labor mayor and more recently by a Tory, its basic planning strategies and momentum have thus far remained essentially consistent. This momentum is today threatened, some believe, by the severe fiscal retrenchment at the national level and pressures for devolution of planning authority to sub-regional bodies, but it will be interesting to hear our visitor’s take on this view.

Several questions: What is unusual about the London plan, by comparison with what you might expect to see in a U.S. urban plan? Any thoughts on how to account for the differences? How come London was able to adopt congestion pricing, when it has been so difficult elsewhere – even in the United Kingdom? How much difference does it seem to have made when the leadership of Greater London passed from Labour to Conservative hands?

Peter Newman and Andy Thornley, Planning World Cities: Globalization and Urban Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, Revised Edition 2011), ch. 10 (pp. 144-65, on London).

Required:

**Mayor of London, The London Plan: Spatial Development Strategy for Greater London: Consolidated with Alterations Since 2004 (Greater London Authority, March 2010). Read at least the following: “The Mayor’s Vision,” and chapters 1,5,6,8. Note that this is Mayor Boris Johnson’s revision of the London plan originally promulgated in 2004 by Mayor Ken Livingston (which is still on-line). The Johnson version, on which you should focus, is available at: http://www.london.gov.uk/shaping-london/london-plan/strategy

**Alan Altshuler, “Congestion Pricing in London and New York City,” “Equity, Pricing, and Surface Transportation Politics,” Urban Affairs Review, November 2010, excerpt: pp. 166, paragraph 4 (beginning “The London…”) thru p. 169 (end of section). (Also, if you have not read it earlier, pp. 169-70 on New York City for purposes of comparison.)

Recommended

Tony Travers, The Politics of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 182-205. See also ch. 5.

:

Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Cornell U. Press, 2010), ch. 4 (on London). **Susan Fainstein, Crossrail (B): The Politics of Approval (Kennedy School Case 1899.0, 2008).

Sessions 22, 23: November 15, 20. Urban Policy and Planning in China. Guest: Meg Elizabeth Rithmire, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School.

Note: Thanksgiving, November 22, 2012. No class

China is not just the world’s most populous nation and second largest economy – more than twice the size of #3, Japan. It has also over the past three decades been among the most rapidly urbanizing. During this period hundreds of millions of people have moved from the countryside to China’s cities, its old cities have been transformed while hundreds of new ones have come into being, and these developments have occurred within a framework of one-party centralized control, including government ownership of all land – though also increasing opportunities for private land leases and for private ownership of other assets. Urban planning is prominent in China; indeed, virtually every major city has a conspicuous museum celebrating its planning. Major questions remain, though, about the roles that planners actually play in Chinese urban policy making, in relation to senior party officials at both national and local levels, and in relation to corporate enterprises, both state-owned and private? Meg Rithmire has spent the past several years examining these questions, mainly in three Chinese urban areas, while researching her Ph.D. dissertation in government at Harvard. Fortunately, having completed her degree in 2011, she has remained in Cambridge and has agreed to share some of her findings and insights with us. Some questions to ponder in preparation for these sessions. You will not possibly be able to

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construct even preliminary answers to them all on the basis of the readings alone. I encourage you to bear them in mind, however, as you read, listen to Professor Rithmire, and question her in class. (You can write subsequent to these sessions. A due date for post-class memo submissions will be provided in class.) How has China’s state socialist legacy affected its urbanization and planning? What are the principal incentives and purposes that appear to drive senior officials in Chinese cities, and how do they balance objectives in tension? Are their courses of action heavily driven by professional planning? How come planning looms so large symbolically in Chinese cities, though the actual influence of planning thought in shaping Chinese urbanism is a subject of considerable debate? And does the symbolism at least convey a very important aspect of current reality? To what extent has Chinese urbanization become market-driven over the past three decades, as opposed to state-directed? How are property rights defined and allocated within the Chinese system. How serious a problem does it seem to be that such rights are less well-defined and legally protected in China than the west, and particularly the U.S.? Where do ordinary residents fit within the framework of Chinese urban governance and planning? Are there ways in this system for citizens to express their views and have them seriously considered? This topic extends over two sessions, and you can spread out your reading accordingly. Professor Rithmire will provide a general overview of Chinese urban politics and planning in the first session. The second, in full discussion mode, will focus mainly on the Beijing case study.

Tony Saich, “The Changing Role of Urban Government,” in Shahid Yusuf and Tony Saich, eds., China Urbanizes (World Bank, 2008), excerpt: pp. 181-88 (to line 3).

Required:

**Meg Elizabeth Rithmire, “The Political Logic of Spatial Change in Urban China,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Government, Harvard University, 2011: • Ch. 1 (“Property Rights and Territorial Politics in Urban China”), pp. 7 (line 5)-27 (through

para. 2, ending “below”); 31-35 (through para. 2, ending “motion”); and 41 (para. 2 only). • Ch. 7 (Conclusion), entire: pp. 307-24.

**Shenjing He, “State-sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition: The Case of Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review, 2007, excerpt: pp. 174-82.

**Chelsea Lei, “Beijing’s Dilemma: Reconciling the Objectives of ‘Automobility,’ Clean Air, and Congestion Relief,” Case study, Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School, 2011.)

News clips: ** New York Times, July 4, 2012: Keith Bradsher, “Bolder Protests Against Pollution Win

Project’s Defeat in China.” ** New York Times, July 7, 2011, p. 1: David Barboza, “China’s Cities Piling Up Debt to Fuel Boom.” **New York Times: May 27, 2010, p. 1. Michael Wines and Jonathan Ansfield, “Trampled in a Land

Rush, Chinese push back.”

Recommended

Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard U. Press, 2011), pp. 698-706.

:

Peter Newman and Andy Thornley, Planning World Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, Revised Edition, 2011), pp. 251-68 (on Shanghai and Beijing).

Richard McGregor, The Party (Harper Collins, 2010), ch. 5 (pp. 135-69). You-Tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford U. Press,

2010), pp. 124-132, 188-97.


Session 24. Copenhagen: Planning for Livability. Guest: Quinton Mayne, Assistant Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.

Fifty years ago this very month Copenhagen’s municipal council took what was then the controversial step of closing part of the city center to vehicular traffic. This decision to pedestrianize is now seen by many as marking a turning point in government efforts to use planning as a tool for enhancing Copenhageners’ quality of life. This week’s readings deal with a range of planning initiatives affecting Copenhagen, all of which in one way or another share the ostensible goal of improving urban livability. Here are a few questions to reflect upon for this session: How has the notion of livability morphed over time from the point of view of urban planning in Copenhagen? How and why has the constellation of actors involved in planning in Copenhagen changed in the past half century? What role have party politics, economic growth, social justice, and climate change played in shaping the processes and outcomes of urban planning? In what ways have the form and tools of planning aimed at enhancing livability (e.g., in terms of scale or location) changed over time in Copenhagen? To what extent has mass mobilization and citizen engagement affected planning decisions in Copenhagen? How important has Denmark’s cradle-to-grave welfare state been in helping planners improve livability in Copenhagen?

Required

Michaela Brüel, “Copenhagen, Denmark: Green City amid the Finger Metropolis,” in Tim Beatley, ed., Green Cities of Europe: Global Lessons on Green Urbanism (Island Press, 2012), pp. 83-108.

:

**Henrik Gutzon Larson and Anders Lund Hansen, “Gentrification—Gentle or Traumatic? Urban Renewal Policies and Socioeconomic Transformations in Copenhagen,” Urban Studies, 2008, 45: 12, sections 3 and 4 (pp. 2432-2444).

**Gene Desfor and John Jørgensen, “Flexible Urban Governance. The Case of Copenhagen’s Recent Waterfront Development,” European Planning Studies, 2004, 12:4, sections 3 and 4 (pp. 482-492).

Jan Gehl, Lars Gemzøe, Sia Kirkhæs, and Britt Sternhagen Søndergaard, New City Life (Danish Architectural Press, 2006), pp. 20-33, 134-135, 138, 156, 158.

Recommended

**International Herald Tribune, March 6, 2012: Nick Foster, “A dream grows in Copenhagen: Hard times or not, 2 projects – from 2 centuries – plow ahead,” Finance Section, p. 9.

**Financial Times, December 12, 2009: Oliver Lowenstein, “A green reckoning: Copenhagen’s eco-blueprint divides opinion – even among its residents,” Weekend Supplement (House and Home), p. 2.

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Session 25. November 29. The Los Angeles METRO Transportation Plan. Guest: Jody Feerst Litvak, Community Relations Manager for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (METRO).

PART V: CURRENT U.S. EXEMPLARS

Los Angeles is at once the nation’s densest urban area at regional scale, one of three regions with the worst traffic congestion, and now the region with both the strongest local commitment to financing new transportation infrastructure and arguably the best regional transportation plan. The voters of Los Angeles County have on three recent occasions (1980, 1990, 2008) voted half-cent sales tax increases to finance surface transportation improvements. These have been

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cumulative, moreover, adding up now to 1.5% of most retail sales. The most recent vote was particularly remarkable in that it occurred right in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, and required a two-thirds majority to pass. (It was approved by 68% of those voting. The earlier measures, which for complicated legal reasons had not required two-thirds, were approved respectively by 54% and 50.4% of those voting.)1

During the 1980s and 1990s there were extraordinary conflicts in LA around surface transportation issues, but these have now largely been resolved, and when the voters went to the polls in 2008 they had before them a combined highway-transit plan for the coming decades that enjoyed near-consensual approval. Our concern in this session will be to acquire some understanding of how this plan came into being and attracted such broad support, and of its strategies for integrating highway, transit, air quality, congestion relief, and equity concerns. How, in particular, can one explain its strong policy tilt toward public transportation and carpooling, given the current pattern of extreme auto-dominance in the region. Are its proposed investments well-calibrated, do you think, to further its announced objectives? Is the pressure for geographic distribution of benefits too great in this sort of process, or simply to be expected in regional decision process striving for broad consensus?

**Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (METRO), Long-Range Transportation Plan (2009). Available at www.metro.net/projects/reports.

Required:

**National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Report NCHRP 20-24(62)A, Making the Case for Transportation Investment and Revenue: Supplement A-Strategies and Messages,” ch. 2, “Los Angeles County Measure R (2008) Case Study.” Recommended: ch. 1, “Overview.”

**New York Times, Sunday Review, July 24, 2011, p. 10. Timothy Egan, “What Can We Learn from Carmageddon?”

Recommended:

**Joe Grengs, “Community-Based Planning as a Source of Political Change: The Transit Equity Movement of the Los Angeles’ Bus Riders’ Union,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2002, pp. 165-78. (This piece recounts a major dispute in LA during the 1990s about equity as a value in mass transit decision-making.)

1 California’s Proposition 13 of 1978 requires two-thirds voter approval for all tax increases by cities, counties, and special districts. (This was a scarcely noticed provision at the time. The campaigns for and against Prop. 13 focused almost exclusively on its provisions limiting property taxes to one percent of market value, and permitting reassessment of market value only when properties were sold.) The agency sponsor of the sales tax ballot propositions of 1980 and 1990 was the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC) – which maintained that it was not a special district, let alone a city or county, and thus not subject to the provisions of Prop. 13. It prevailed in this view, moreover, before the California Supreme Court. But LACTC was merged in 1993 with the Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD), clearly a special district, to create the current Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (METRO). A provision of METRO’s enabling legislation, carried over from SCRTD’s, seems to place it squarely in the special district category. Whether this was explicit legislative intent, or an inadvertent consequence of the wholesale importation of old legislative language into the new act, no one at METRO seems to know.


Session 26. December 4, 2012. Portland, Oregon Comprehensive regional land use planning, with the force of law, is extremely rare in the United States, particularly in large, multi-county regions -- though of course various state and federal programs with high planning relevance [involving, for example, infrastructure, environmental protection, K-12 education, and property rights] are significant shapers of land use in virtually all urban regions. What is distinctive about the Portland case is that the plans are, at least in land use terms, comprehensive; that they are developed and adopted by a regional government [with input, to be sure, from smaller local governments in the region, and with broad state oversight]; and that the leaders of this regional government are directly elected.

Questions: What is special about Portland – bearing in mind, perhaps, its political history and culture, its economic base, its demography, its location -- that enabled it to forge out so far ahead of other U.S. metropolitan areas in the domain of regional land use planning? How significant a role has been played by the state of Oregon? What have been the principal sources of political support for Portland area planning, and also of opposition? Does it appear that some groups may have shifted position over the life of this program, now approaching 40 years, and if so why? How come there have been so many referendums contesting core features of the Portland planning system? Do you think that, on balance, they have undermined or strengthened it? Why has the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) been such a flashpoint for mobilization both pro and con around the planning system? Do you think that its effects have, on balance, been beneficial or harmful? What has been the significance of the “escape route” from Portland planning to suburbs in the state of Washington? Can you imagine circumstances in which Portland’s innovative approach to regional land use planning might be emulated in a number of other U.S. metropolitan areas?2

**Christopher Leo, “Regional Growth Management Regime: The Case of Portland,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 1998, excerpt, pp. 366-85. .

Required:

Anthony Flint, This Land (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2006), pp. 172-85 (bottom). **John Provo, “Risk Averse Regionalism: The Cautionary Tale of Portland, Oregon, and Affordable Housing,”

Journal of Planning Education and Research, March 2009, excerpts: pp. 374 (start of Case Study)-377 (end of para. 2), and 379 (conclusion).

**Sam Lowry, "Oregon Clips measure 37's Wings," Planning and Environmental Law, (January 2008), pp. 9-10.

**Ellen M. Bassett, “Framing the Oregon Land Use Debate… 1970-2007,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, August 2009, pp. 157-82.

Recommended:

**Anthony Downs, “Smart Growth: Why We Discuss It More Than We Do It,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Autumn 2005, pp. 367-78.

Sy Adler and Jennifer Dill, “The Evolution of Transportation Planning in the Portland Metropolitan Area,” in Connie P. Ozawa, ed., The Portland Edge… (Island Press, 2004), ch. 11 (pp. 230-56).

** Gregory K. Ingram, et al., Smart Growth Policies… (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2009), Executive Summary (2 pp.), pp. 206 (column 2)-207, and the following tables: 3-10 (p. 39), 3-11 (p. 40), 5-1 (p. 62), and 6-1 (p. 77). http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/smart-growth-policies.aspx

2 Rather similar systems do exist, it bears mention, in Vancouver and some other Canadian urban regions. And within the U.S., Seattle has a weak version of the Portland system. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council exercises significant regional governance powers, but it is a state agency whose members are all appointed by, and serve at the pleasure of, the governor of Minnesota.

http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/smart-growth-policies.aspx�

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