There is no Smart Planning without Picking Priorities
Third of 7 reflections on how to smarten the planning of cities
What is the urban plan for? Does it really need to be this long? And cover in minute details all aspect of development?
In the Introduction to this series of reflections, I suggested that cities (the most powerful economic enterprises of the contemporary world) should be managed with the efficiency of a dynamic company. If the urban plan is to be more like a company’s business strategy, it must have the most important strategic priorities well defined and planned – leaving smaller decisions (however important – like what kind of coffee staff prefers) to a different level.
Perhaps planning really does need lots of policies and regulations. But, whether it does or not, it should pick a small number of key priorities for short term proactive action.
This will make planning action oriented – speeding up the allocation of budgets and making planners and politicians accountable for delivery.
London, with a directly elected Mayor and a political manifesto that includes promises relevant to planning, is the closest city in the UK to an action orientated planning model. And the London Plan is a strategic plan, which is accompanied by 33 other Local Plans for the different Boroughs. But even then, the plan itself fails to pick priorities and set out an action plan. It also fails to go back to the public with the details and the choices.
In London, the possible priorities could be:
- Lots more housing, and a dramatic increase in the availability of affordable housing for young professionals as well as key workers and lower income groups.
- Tackling the increasingly dangerous levels of air pollution
- Reaching finally a decision for addressing lack of airport capacity
- Sustaining start-up businesses in an expensive post Brexit city with potentially fewer opportunities than before
- Public transport overcrowding
- Lack of school places in certain areas
What to do first? What should take priority over the rest? Just putting equal policies in an urban plan is unlikely to proactively resolve any of the issues – it is probably going to result in restrictions: fines for polluting activities and vehicles, imposition of quotas of affordability, peak hour fares to discourage travel by public transport and so on.
Proactive planning means focusing on a strategy for implementation, instead . Not just ‘more housing’, but something like:
“X000 homes per year, of which realistically xx% will be built by developers, xx% by social developers, xx% by other means, in these likely locations, where development will be facilitated and speeded up through the following actions: … Permits will need to be in place by the year xx and these are the resources and skills needed, and where to find them. Public budget allocations of xxx will be made. Etc.”
This is clearly very different to simply setting plan targets and expecting that they are achieved by the market. No company business strategy would simply have a sales target, and expect that it would be achieved without further action. Even less it would have hundreds of unqualified targets without allocating any responsibility for implementation.
No company business strategy would simply have a sales target, and expect that it would be achieved without planning out further action
Local plans should identify priorities, elaborate action strategies and go back to the public where trade offs are required or choice needs to be democratically made.
Priorities can be influenced by citizens, for example through an online ‘auction’: is it more important now to have more houses or schools? Save the green spaces or improve public transport? Citizens should not need to be bored with all the details of planning and actions – by they could be invited to influence the choice of investment and then have the chance of monitoring progress.
The 20 second video illustrates an imaginary dashboard I would like to see in my city: giving me options to express my opinion on what it is most important, and the opportunity to monitor what it is actually been done about it. I want to be like a company shareholder: understand and agree to an executive business plan for my city, and be able to monitor progress. Celebrating success, but also able to see if the strategy is not working, well before it is too late.
Facilitator, Capacity Building, Community work, Conflict transformation, Natural resources governance, Project management. Will consider short term missions.
8 年Brilliant! thanks. V.
Architect and planner
8 年Dear Mrs. Juvara, My name is Raquel Sánchez. I am follower of your articles. I am an architect from Costa Rica. At this moment I am running a communication portal for the Urban Planning and Landscape Commission of the College of Architects of Costa Rica, (known by its Spanish acronym CACR). The aim of the commission is to issue non-binding but important criterion in national urban events. The portal is new. The articles are available in this link: https://www.cacrarquitectos.com/A/cacr/comisones/245 The reason of my letter is to ask for your permission to copy the article: “There is no Smart Planning without Picking Priorities” in that website. Thank you in advance for your attention. Regards, Raquel Sanchez
Formatrice pour adultes et ingénieure pédagogique
8 年Hello ! First of all I'm really sorry for my poor English especially the writing. For me (I'm French), this kind of reflection is really relevant because I do long term planning (we actually have a tool in France to do that with local politicians). It's my job to reflect for the next 20 to 25 years. But more important than the plan I'm making in my institution, is the goal of this plan. Locals (politicians but also association or citizens, even if it's really complicated to make them come) are planning something for the next decades and after cities (I work on 87 cities) or small group of them make a shorter plan (most of the time 10 years or less) to realise that. At this point it's a real thing (like one or two projects) you'll discuss so it's easy to make the citizens come and built something with them if you want. Even if I'm young I can tell you there is a lot of problems doing the things that way, but also many good points. First working with citizens on planing (long term one) means working on ideas and most of the time it's kind of impossible because they don't understand the purpose or the goal because we never translate these idea. Why ? Simply because we don't know if this will be really needed there and if the city will want to do it when the time come, maybe the project will be made in another neighbourhood. Working with politics means working for there electoral time so most of the time they don't really play the game fare because of that (making this kind of plan take around 6 years so an entire mandate) but some play the game knowing that they work not for them but for the next mayors and they propose things they don't have done for themself. So it's good and bad at the same time. I can continue like that but that's not the point, I want to have a reflection about your proposition. I think your idea is really good but you'll probably need a more complicated tool for short and long term planning : - have goals for the next 5/10 years (1 or 2 projects in the fields you can touch) - have goals for 20 or more years to let the people know : Yes we can do that now but next time this thing will be more important then another one! Basically give them hope to have what they want. At last I'll just say don't neglect the power of our institutions, if we want to do something we'll need the mayors or other politicians to confer credits to our ideas! Good luck with your proposition, really interested about what you can have once you made that in the real world. Have a nice day.