Nature and Functions of Urban Planning

SONGSU CHOI As we start this distance-learning program in urban planning, it will be useful for us to consider what are the most essential things that urban planners should do or, in other words, what are the most essential things that other people should expect urban planners to do. Urban planning involves a lot of different things and involves a lot of people, and, therefore, people emphasize a number of different things. And in many cases, people say that urban planning deals with a comprehensive range of things, and the most important thing is to cover all of those. But, of course, comprehensiveness is not the professional activity, and, for example, journalism is comprehensive, and the economic planning is comprehensive. But as a professional, the urban planners probably should provide something unique contribution in the management of the urban development. To think what are the most important and essential things for urban planning, I would like to review first the types and functions of planning in general, and then will consider what are the current and changing contexts for planning in China that have bearing in how we should conduct planning and then focus on urban planning itself and make my argument about the most important focus of planning. In one traditional sense, planning is like a blueprint. It's like an architectural plan or machine drawings or even the plan for some investment projects. Under the command planning economy, the government and urban planners as the planner for the government had full control of a number of things. Therefore, it has been a useful thing to do, and in the case of infrastructure and civic government structures, it still is the case. And this requires a very clear definition of growth (goals?) and control of its inputs and the planning, programming of those inputs. However, in many cases, these conditions are hard to find. At least the control of the external variables are very difficult to find in this time. So the classic case is the military actions. You can control your own troops, but, of course, you have no control over what the other side will do. So the planning in this case involves to define what you're going to do when certain things happen and what you're going to do when things happen differently. So these are the classic definitions of military strategies and, of course, there are a number of studies and body of knowledge about corporate development strategies, corporate action strategies. And in the case of China, we have started city development strategy exercise which Mr. Anderson will be talking about in a later session. The important thing is that you have--you can control your own strengths and weaknesses, and in order to best take advantage of opportunities and best handle the threats. When you have--when you are not a direct participant of actions, then it is--the one way to influence the outcome would be set the rules and standards for action. Thus, what was normally called regulations or rules and standards, and in the case of urban planning, of course, the important ones are the zoning plans and land use plans. So the--what is the important factors that--outside factors that all planners should consider? Since all planning involves looking ahead, the current rapid changes in economy and

society poses probably the most difficult challenge. And it is most difficult in the case of urban planners in China, first because the changes that are happening in China are probably one of the most rapid and unprecedented in any time or anywhere in the world history. On top of that, the urban planners have to deal with these changes for--and look ahead for a very, very long time. Urban planning usually spends much longer period of time than other planning. Therefore, it is doubly difficult for urban planners to handle. We, of course, do not need to go into all the details, but I would just like to stress that the emergence of the market and the increase of the number of entities that participate in the decisionmaking that affects the course of urban development, and the--which, of course, means relative decline of the government authority. And also the spillover, as the economies are run more by the market, and the markets normally do not respect the administrative boundaries, economies and environment--environmental effects spill across local administrative boundaries or even international boundaries. So, therefore, we probably have to think that the blueprints are going to be much less effective in this--under these circumstances, and it will be--the more effective means of planning would be strategies and regulations. In fact, many people have been advocating that the blueprints should be almost discarded as the core function of urban planning. And I believe that that emphasis away from blueprints and maps have gone a little too far. Like the economic planners, the main function of the economic planning is to project what would be available economically and financially and to allocate them to different activities. And I believe the core function of the urban planning is to allocate the land and space, which is limited, to different activities that want the same thing, the most conveniently located land within a reasonable distance from each other. As we all know, the essence of the city is that many activities are clustered together in very close proximity. And this generates a lot of externalities, a lot of effects that are not intended by the individual participants, individual residents and businesses in a city. We all know, for example, the agglomeration economies that make businesses more efficient by locating close to each other, and we also know that the roads--road investments pay off very well when there are enough activities and enough people that will use the road. So these are so-called positive externalities. The economies call these effects externalities because there is either a complete lack of pricing or even if there is--there may be a price, it is not very effective in guiding people's actions. For example, if you put the roads in, then the price of the land will go up, but it is not good in making the roads--making road investment happen. It happens only afterwards. So these are good externalities, but there are also negative externa lities. Take the example of roads again. Of course, the congestion, nobody believes that they are causing the congestion, but it is by the collective effect of the individual actions on congestion that affects everybody negatively. Also the same is true with noise and pollution. That is more of a problem in densely populated urban areas because the negative effects are very, very high.

Therefore, these things need to be allocated. Everybody wants a very convenient location, but everybody wants enough space that they can--within which they can do things without much intrusion. And, of course, it's not possible because, again, the cities--our cities, because people are--people and businesses are close together. So in many cases, the market mechanism itself will take care of itself. It's the land market and the real estate market would force businesses who do not need the most convenient location to a more distant location, for example, and, therefore, in many cases in China a lot of problems, I believe, are the result of not having a good functioning real estate market. And I believe that one of the main tests for urban planning in China would be to do its own job so that the land and real estate markets would function well. And what would be the job that urban planners have to do to make the market mechanism to work well? I believe that is to take care of the externalities. First, you take care of the positive externalities well. In other words, put the-do an optimal layout of roads and other infrastructure and civic structures like parks and schools. Then the market will take care of the rest. And you should also take care of the negative externalities, and those again, congestion, pollution, and things like that. And these can be--can be achieved by two things. Of course, the traffic congestion, in order to manage traffic congestion, you have to have good traffic regulation, but you have to also have a good land use planning, good regulation of the density of development. So these things should go hand in hand together. So we, the urban planners, by sticking to this very traditional core activities of urban planning, which is land use planning and infrastructure layouts and zoning, I believe that the markets, the land markets and other things can take care of itself on a number of other things that need to be taken care of. Now, there are a number of different things that people will emphasize regarding urban planning. One of the things that are quite unique for urban planning is very long-term nature of urban planning. But this is quite natural because of the core activities of urban planning. If you focus on infrastructure and land which lasts almost forever and costs a lot to change, you have to have a very longer-term planning horizon. And then another important nature of urban planning is that it is very comprehensive and multisectoral, but it is like economic planning. It is the-again, since all activities or almost all activities that happen in the cities require land and structure, by focusing on land and structure, you, the urban planners, are forced to deal with a number of different sectors and different considerations. However, I do not believe that it will be--it will be the duty of the urban planners to go into any depth in those sectoral planning activities. Again, as I just discussed, the urban planning should work together with sectoral planning to achieve the same objectives. The zoning and land use planning should be combined with traffic management and traffic regulations to achieve the--to minimize the negative externalities of transportation. And the urban planners should work with the parks authorities or schools authorities to increase the--to maximize the positive externalities of land use and the business activities. So all in all, I believe that the--I have focused on essentially one thing, that I believe that I have made some arguments that why we should stick to the old traditional core activities of

urban planning, of land use planning and zoning. Now I would like to briefly introduce the next presenters in this module, and they will be actually talking about much broader things, and they-and they probably are more qualified and more passionate about urban planning in general because they are real planners. Mr. Jeff So (ph) is an executive in the American Planning Association, and he will be talking about the--talking about the planning practice and context in the USA and would be--and would try to draw some lessons from U.S. experience for China. Mr. Lambert Tol (ph) is a well-known urban planner who worked in the World Bank and now just retired, and he will be reviewing some concrete examples of failures and success of planning around the world and will focus on the interaction between planning and the market. Mr. Mats Anderson is a financial planner for the World Bank, and he has been managing the city development strategic work in China and would be--would give you a brief outline of what is being done under this city development strategic exercise. Mr. Zao (ph) of the Ministry of Construction will be talking about alternatives to urban planning, and I am extremely interested in his topic, but unfortunately I have not been able to understand it. He will be--as he has given it--will be giving--has prepared his session purely in Chinese. Thank you, and I hope you have fun.