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Journal of Planning Education and Research, Volume 19, Number 1, Fall 1999Contents:Report from the Editors "Forgetting to Plan" Howell S. Baum Abstract Conventionally, planning for the future depends on collecting information and analyzing it rationally in order to control contingency. In reality, contingency persists, and communities react in ways that defeat planning. Seeing problems and uncertainty, communities often retreat to a past they remember in idealized ways to find gratification they do not expect from the future. They choose nostalgia or fantasy rather than looking realistically at current conditions. Thus communities resist planning not out of ignorance, but out of knowledge. They know the past, its satisfactions, and its centrality to their identity, and they want to maintain it against change. Hence planning depends on forgetting: forgetting a static image of the past in order to remember the past as a time of contingency and to see the past linked in time to the present and the future. "Heavy Industry, People, and Planners: New Insights on an Old Issue" Raymond J. Burby Abstract Protecting people from harm caused by nearby heavy industry is an old, and almost forgotten, goal of city planning. In this case study of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I show that industrial pollution is a serious source of concern for nearby residents, who are disproportionately black. Analysis of factors associated with concern about neighborhood safety indicates there is much that local planners can do, in cooperation with industry and state and federal regulators, to lessen fears about industrial land uses. These findings provide the foundation for a discussion of policy options that planners can apply in dealing with heavy industry, once they realize that industrial uses are still a serious source of distress, particularly for poor and minority communities. "Planning in the Wake of Florida Land Scams" Hubert B. Stroud and William M. Spikowski Abstract A huge surplus of poorly planned vacant lots presents a vexing land-use problem throughout much of the U.S. The most significant problems occur within large pre-platted sub-divisions where, decades ago, distant buyers purchased potential homesites in ill-conceived land developments. The magnitude of the problems and the potential for rapid population growth combine to make platted lands the sleeping giant of growth management problems in Florida, Texas, and parts of the Southwest. The options explored in this research may alleviate some of the problems that large preplatted subdivisions have created. "An Intertemporal Efficiency Test of a Greenbelt: Assessing the Economic Impactws of Seoul’s Greenbelt" Chang-Moo Lee Abstract Greenbelts have been a widely used planning tool for preserving open space and containing the physical expansion of built-up areas. Although both the economic costs and the benefits of greenbelts have been studied, there have been no attempts to integrate the two. In this paper, I attempt to illuminate the argument by measuring the aggregate net metropolitan economic gain or loss (in both household utility and land value) of a marginal release of greenbelt land for development in Seoul, a city that has strong open-space protections and severe urbanization pressures. I present the calculation for four points in time to discover how the net benefit changes over the long run. The trend shows that Seoul’s greenbelt achieved economic efficiency as the city grew, but lost economic efficiency once the congestion effect kicked in. I conclude that a fixed boundary for a greenbelt cannot be a net benefit forever, and thus the original greenbelt designation should be reexamined periodically. "Stated Preference for Pedestrian Proximity: An Assessment of New Urbanist Sense of Community" Ivonne Audirac Abstract New urbanist sociospatial reforms, like previous urban planning and design syntheses such as the superblock, rely on the assumption that the physical design of communities results in social sense of community. New urbanism’s sense of community relies on developing pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and assumes that suburbanites are so deprived of physical sense of community that they would gladly trade-off the lot size found in ordinary suburbia for pedestrian proximity to shared neighborhood amenities. Using a consumer-attitude survey of Floridians, this work investigates the likelihood that individuals would exchange a large yard for pedestrian proximity to five community amenities. The analysis finds contradicting evidence for new urbanist assumptions about suburban preferences, but also finds some groups favorably responding to the trade-offs. The paper ends with a discussion of implications of findings and needs for future research.
"Political Ecology and Planning Theory" Rich Harrill Abstract Political ecology is the inquiry into the political causes and consequences of environmental change, with the goal of facilitating sustainable development through the reconstruction of social and political systems. In this introductory paper, I consider how political ecology might become a productive area of inquiry for planning theorists. After surveying political ecology’s topical and intellectual terrain, I link the field to theory through the consideration of several planning models and roles. I argue that Deweyan pragmatism, by method of social inquiry and communitarian politics, provides an appropriate philosophical basis for integrating political ecology into planning theory. "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Capability Generation: Toward a Normative Basis for Planning in Developing Nations" Sanjoy Chakravorty Abstract Planning in developing nations is increasingly guided by the new market orthodoxy of efficiency. Here, an alternative guiding ethical system is sought within liberal theory, specifically by using Sen’s "capability" approach, and by rejecting libertarianism, utilitarianism, and outcome egalitarianism. The capability-generation approach is shown to be both equitable and efficient. The spatial implications of capability-generation are developed, and the argument made that the delivery of equal access to capability-generating resources should be the primary goal of planning in developing nations. Finally, the implications of this normative approach for the practice of development planning are discussed.
Instruction "Planning the Global Countryside: Comparing Approaches to Teaching Rural Planning" Michael Hibbard and Claudia Römer Abstract Planning is largely an urban field. While the issues facing megacities around the world have received a great deal of attention from planners, the converse of global urbanization–global rural decline–has occurred. The latter is also becoming the focus of significant scholarship. To explore the impacts of globalization on rural areas, we made a comparative assessment of how rural planning is conceptualized and taught in the three nations with the largest economies: Germany, Japan, and the U.S. We begin with a discussion of the meaning of rurality and a summary of the issues facing rural Germany, Japan, and the U.S. We then report on education for rural planning in the three countries. We conclude with a brief discussion of the challenges that globalization presents to rural planners. Comment: Comment: |
