Jennifer Mack - Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City

Life Among Urban Planners

THE CITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

LIFE AMONG URBAN PLANNERS

Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City

Edited by

Jennifer Mack

and

Michael Herzfeld

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mack, Jennifer, editor. | Herzfeld, Michael, editor.

Title: Life among urban planners : practice, professionalism, and expertise in the making of the city / edited by Jennifer Mack and Michael Herzfeld.

Other titles: City in the twenty-first century book series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: The city in the twenty-first century | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019052081 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5228-6 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning. | City planningSocial aspects. | City planners. | Urban anthropology.

Classification: LCC HT166 .L5266 2020 | DDC 307.1/216dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052081

CONTENTS

Jennifer Mack

Michael Herzfeld

Margaret Crawford

Andrew Newman

Adle Esposito Andujar

Federico Prez

Gabriella Krling

Jennifer Mack

Bruce ONeill and Kevin Lewis ONeill

Trevor Goldsmith

Monika Sznel

Mark Graham and Lissa Nordin

James Holston

INTRODUCTION

Living Life Among Planners

Jennifer Mack

Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Planners choices attempt to direct issues like how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic network, how a squatter community can be transformed into the legitimized residents of an area, or how a current demand for thousands of new dwelling units will be met as quickly as possible without engendering negative consequences.

While it may appear that the work that planners do is dictated purely by abstract logic, in this volume we argue that they operate largely out of personal, internal, and cultural logics and the everyday demands of particular social and cultural contexts. Todays planners are frequently tasked with both policy and design assignments, an expansion of their historical role that focused mostly on city form. This has happened even as urban designersoften working in architectural offices rather than for municipalitieshave increasingly been given the most high-profile design assignments. In the wake of these concomitant professional expansions and losses for planners, they have nonetheless continued to rely on visual models to explain their work because of their demonstrable power in achieving (often uncritical) political support. Sometimes, the forgotten logics of the modernist pastwith its emphasis on the universalare reassessed as comforting, guiding forces for planners who feel lost in the confusion of more specific demands arising as the local has achieved greater prominence in their work.

In professional settings from municipal or national governments to private design firms to NGOs, a degree in urban, community, regional, or town planning produces specialists who shape the city in a variety of ways. They may restrain patterns of growth and operate with rhythms, time scales, and schedules that extend well into futures both imagined and, at least in some cases, repeated. Defined as experts on urban welfare and development, urban planners work from the birds-eye view down to the specification of materials to be allowed in new structures to the footprints of the buildings that will occupy new development sites.

With the power of planning also come, clearly, opportunities for less heroic activities, such as the displacement of informal settlements or the stigmatization of certain neighborhoods as they are defined to require renovation. Planners often participate in the making of urban tragedies, intentionally or not.

With these loaded power structures and practices in mind, we collectively approach the production of space (Lefebvre 1974) and spatiality by treating planning as a set of critical cultural acts that are both controversial and, in many cases, contested. Planningand, as this volume places in focus, plannerscan then be considered in relation to the social dynamics of the contexts in which they operate: in the planning office, on construction sites, in sometimes violent confrontations with those at whom they are directed. What roles do planners have in shaping the social dimensions and daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and reshape the expertise assigned to them for that purpose? The essays here critically examine what planners persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and represent and preserve the past. We are particularly concerned with the social contexts in which planners produce their work, including their cultural values, personal assumptions, social pressures, and beyond.

As planners ignore, acknowledge, and describe the transformations of their own professional practice, they adapt it from its initial legitimization as a profession through the development of university curricula and licensing. The planning process is unlike that of many other professions in which practitioners are required to achieve similar forms of official definition. For many of the worlds planners, in fact, the process of professionalization began just a century ago.

As planners have contended with the temporal, political, and economic limits of their abilities to act on the city, perceptions of failures have sometimes come from the very communities they have reshaped. The profession has had particular difficulty in contending with the legacy of the many grand plans or master plans enacted in the name of urban renewal and modernism in the mid-twentieth century. These plans have left their imprint, not only on the cities in question, but also on planning itself. Unlike power broker Robert Moses in New Yorks 1960s (Caro 1974), the planners of the 1970s and 1980s found themselves in a depleted professional position with a loss of public trust and support, a stance that continues, in part, into the present.

Shaping the city, urban planning professionals use urban analyses, historical trends, and statistical data to draw sometimes-unwarranted conclusions about the demographic and economic directions that will arrive at the places in which they operate. Approaching planners with ethnographic eyes opens up a new perspective on how todays planners contend with this conundrum.