When Will Urban Planners & City Councilors Learn From Their Mistakes?
The new Planners Pledge (preamble and link below) is a serious document developed by thoughtful urban planners. It includes a formal apology for the role planners played in creating the most inhospitable elements of our cites, including car dependent sprawl and its host of toxic environmental, racial and health maladies.
Sadly, the planning profession’s now-discredited mantra of suburban mobility planning – with its externalized costs of cheap land, cars and gas – has been replaced with a new, post-suburban mantra of density everywhere, claiming the same progressive promises as before: *A Better Life For Everyone!*.
But now, instead of praising low-density suburbia, our local governments are being guided by corporate real estate financialization into a high-density alternative of luxury tower upzonings with their own set of externalized costs: deep shadows cast over our neighborhoods, blank walls and loading docks devaluing and endangering our public streets (see photo above of North Hills tower on Six Forks Road), and rampant land speculation driving up the costs of land and living beyond the reach of most Raleigh residents.
Let’s hope this opposite extreme is not The New Planners Pledge. Lets hope today’s planners and elected leaders will turn away from these inhuman urban design errors the same way they turned away from the ills of car dependent suburbia.
Read about an alternative to real estate financialization that is driving bad density in Raleigh and beyond: Policy Debt: The Missing Massive by Charles Marohn of Strong Towns. Here is an excerpt:
Incremental growth and [immediate jumps to large-scale developments] aren’t competing visions for how a city should grow. One is what a healthy ecosystem does: it keeps adapting, keeps maturing, is never finished, and just becomes an older and more complex version of itself with each passing year. The other is the radical distortion that happens when a place is supercharged for change, yet keeps suppressing it.
Preamble to The Planners Pledge
As practitioners of a discipline that has advocated for what it believed to be best practices while inevitably advancing the dominant ideology of its society, we professional planners wish to formally apologize for the significant role that our profession has played in creating the unsustainable suburban sprawl development pattern that now constitutes most of the American built environment, reinforcing race and class segregation while burdening the vast majority of citizens with the mandate of car ownership.
To put it bluntly, planners have contributed to the creation of a landscape that separates us ruthlessly both from different activities and from different people, such that we are inordinately dependent on our automobiles and less connected to one another. …
The outcomes of this pattern of growth could not be more profound. We have worsened public health, lost economic resiliency, exacerbated inequity, and undermined the social fabric of our communities as our daily driving cooks the planet.
If there are professional planners in your life, please encourage them to have a look at the Planner’s Pledge, and to sign it if it works for them.
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