ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

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ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

• Week Eight
• Golden Era Planning

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Course Mechanics Revised Detailed Course Guide

• Handout near door
• Also posted to wiki ARCH1065 page
• New information
• Includes questions for weeks 10-12 (listed as TBA
  in original Guide)
• Adds more questions and readings for weeks 8-9
• Corrects availability information for some
  readings
• Corrects due dates for weeks 8-11 (original Guide
  incorrectly listed assignments as due one week
  early!)
• Week 12 assignments are due on 2 June, as listed
  in the original Guide this is an earlier date
  than normal, because classes will have ended

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Course Mechanics Missed Classes Tutorial
Sessions

• If you have missed or do miss a class or tutorial
  session
• Lecture notes and some tutorial notes are posted
  to the wiki several days after each class
• You are responsible for reading this material,
  following up with me if needed, and making
  arrangements to hand in any activities you missed
• Handing materials in when you cannot come to
  campus
• Email your work to me by the deadline
• Bring a hard copy in the next time you are on
  campus (I will mark assignments only after I
  receive the hard copy)
• Outside meetings, drafts, etc.
• Meetings time is set aside in most tutorial
  sessions for one-on-one support I will schedule
  outside meetings only if
• you have first tried to resolve issues during the
  tutorials, and need more intensive support, or
• you need to speak about an intrinsically private
  matter
• Drafts
• I will read and comment briefly on draft work
  posted to the wiki for your individual research
  assignment
• I will not read draft theoretical essays,
  although I will allow submissions of additional
  essays, and will count only your highest three
  grades

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Course Mechanics Wiki Individual Assignments
Due Friday!

• Hand in hard copy versions of your individual
  research by close of business on Friday, 28 April
• I will grade only the hard copy versions, as work
  posted to the wiki can be edited by anyone
• Hard copies may be a printout of the work as it
  appears on the wiki, or a printout from a word
  processing document
• Deadlines will be strictly enforced, as other
  students ability to start working on the
  collaborative project depends on timely posting
  of individual research to the wiki
• If you cannot get to campus on Friday, email your
  assignment to me by the deadline, then bring a
  hard copy to class on Monday

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Course Mechanics WikiPosting Your Work

• All assignments must also be posted to the wiki
  I will penalise assignments that are not also
  posted to the wiki
• However if everyone tries to log in and post
  their assignments at the same time on Friday,
  some people will inevitably experience problems
• If you try to post on Friday, and cannot, try
  again at a later time, or over the weekend I
  will count your assignment as on time if you
• (1) hand in your hard copy on time and
• (2) post your content to the wiki before Mondays
  class
• You may need to reformat materials for the wiki
  (links, headings, bold text, footnotes, etc. may
  require special wiki formatting) you may
  continue to correct these sorts of formatting
  issues, or even add new content, after the
  deadline, as long as you have handed in your hard
  copy assignment on time

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Course Mechanics Wiki Individual Research
Assessment Criteria

• From the Course Guide
• Individual research will be assessed according to
  whether it
• Provides a good introduction to the topic,
  including a sense of opposing approaches or
  debates about the topic in the planning
  literature
• Demonstrates the connections between the research
  topic and materials read for the course, as well
  as a wide range of outside materials
• Has a clear, logical structure
• Includes signposts for further research that
  needs to be done
• Takes advantage of the online publication
  environment
• Is well written (spelling, grammar, syntax)
• Is well-written for the web (short paragraphs,
  frequent headings, dot points, lists, etc.)
• Provides citations and references (Harvard
  format) for all materials or concepts borrowed
  from other sources

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Course Mechanics Citation Notes

• Harvard format
• Online materials should be cited in exactly the
  same way as text materials
• author, year and page number or other location
  marker in parentheses in the text
• full citation in bibliography/reference section,
  with author, year, title, publisher, etc. if
  you are unsure how to find these things, consult
  a reference guide, or ask!
• In addition, online materials also need to
  include the URL where the resource may be found,
  and the date when you accessed the resource
• Provide page numbers for all quotations,
  paraphrases and specific facts

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Course Mechanics Useful Wiki Formatting

• Headings
• This Is a Wiki Heading
• This Is a Subheading
• The wiki will automatically generate a table of
  contents for your piece if you use heading tags
• You can also create a headings for topics you
  dont have time address, but that you believe
  should be addressed in a comprehensive article
• Links
• Internal links to another page in the wiki
• If you dont mind using the wiki page name
  appearing in your text, you can just type double
  square brackets around the page name, like this
  Categories
• If you want someone to be able to go to a wiki
  page when they click on a specific word in your
  text, do this Categoriesclick here! the
  text click here! will appear on your page as a
  link when someone clicks it, they will go to the
  Categories page.
• External links to a page outside the wiki
• If you dont mind the URL appearing in your text,
  you can just type the URL directly into the wiki,
  like this http//www.rmit.edu.au
• If you want someone to go to an external page
  when they click on a specific word in your text,
  use single brackets, a space and then the word,
  like this http//www.rmit.edu.au RMIT

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Course MechanicsUseful Wiki Formatting

• New Pages
• Some people have asked how to create a new page
  within the wiki you do this the same way you
  create a link to a page that already exists
• Place the new page name inside square brackets,
  like this New Page Name
• Please follow the convention of capitalising all
  words within a page name
• There is a risk that someone else will already be
  using a page with the name you have used. To
  minimise this risk
• Check to make sure that the new link appears red
  if it doesnt, you have created a link to a
  page someone else is already using. This can be
  okay, if they want to use the page for the same
  purpose you do.
• Make at least a small edit on the page you have
  just created, indicating what content you think
  should go on that page this will signal to
  others, if they try to create a link to the same
  place, that the page already exists, and let them
  decide if they want to create a new page, or
  continue linking to the one you have already
  created.

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Course MechanicsUseful Wiki Formatting

• Bullet points use an at the beginning of the
  line (multiple for subpoints)
• Numbered lists use the at the beginning of
  the line (multiple for subpoints)
• Italic and Bold text use multiple apostrophes
  around text to create bold and italic effects
  two apostrophes for italics, three for bold, five
  for both effects
• If you see an effect you like on someones page,
  use the edit screen tab to see what they types
• The Users Guide provides additional formatting
  tips

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Course MechanicsPreventing Big Problems

• Things can go wrong in an online environment. To
  protect yourself, remember the following
• Typing a long, original passage directly into an
  online editing field is asking for disaster to
  strike. To protect yourself
• Anything more significant than a minor edit
  should be written in a word processing program,
  and then cut and paste into the wiki.
• Save early, often and in a range of different
  media dont slave away for an hour, only to
  lose everything when you trip over a power point
  and accidentally turn off your computer.
• The most important requirements are
• submitting your hard copy version to me on time,
  and
• letting me know if your dedicated attempt to post
  content online fails
• The internet ate my homework will not be
  accepted as an excuse for late work. It is a
  requirement of this assignment that you maintain
  hard copy and electronic backups of all work,
  until your final grade for this course has been
  submitted.

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Course MechanicsThe Collaborative Stage

• Introducing the Collaborative Stage of the
  Project
• Most of you have already been collaborating
  suggesting references, asking questions, and
  commenting on one anothers work
• This collaborative process will become more
  intensive and extensive once the individual
  research assignments have been posted to the wiki
• Editing your and others work
• Once your individual assignment is in, you are no
  longer uniquely and primarily responsible for
  your individual research topic
• You may edit other peoples pages, and they may
  edit yours everyone is responsible for
  improving the quality of the wiki as a whole,
  using the individual research assignments as a
  starting point

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Course MechanicsThe Collaborative Stage

• Editing comes in many forms, from basic
  proofreading all the way to composing additional
  articles
• If you see a neglected topic that no one has
  written on, you can create a new article to
  address that topic.
• If you see a way to improve an existing article,
  go ahead and edit it. You can edit for
• Proofreading grammar, syntax, etc.
• Structure and organisation
• Technical wiki formatting
• Internal connections links to other articles
• Substantive corrections or new information
• If you think something needs to be improved, but
  dont know how to improve it yourself, write a
  comment on the talk page for that article (click
  on the discussion tab, and then the edit
  tab).
• Some collaborative editing tasks will require
  more formal organisation, including
• Integrating articles written on very similar
  topics
• Developing a wish-list of new articles
• Developing an overarching navigation system for
  the project

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Course MechanicsThe Collaborative Stage

• Finding things to do
• Everyone should provide an indication in their
  individual research of topics or issues they
  havent covered if these placeholders are
  difficult to find, consider posting a dot-point
  list on the talk page for the article
• As I mark assignments, I will also post to do
  recommendations on the talk page for articles (I
  will not post information about specific
  students grades)
• Help Wanted Page next week, I will ask all
  students to post requests to the Help Wanted page
  for their individual research
• Tutorial Presentations students should use
  their tutorial presentations to highlight work
  that remains to be done on their original topic
• Categories Page you should explore the pages of
  students working on similar topics or on topics
  where you have some expertise, and see what you
  can contribute
• Random Reading if all else fails!

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Course MechanicsThe Collaborative Stage

• How much collaboration is enough?
• The value of your contribution to the
  collaborative stage cannot easily be defined in
  terms of a word count or other numerical value.
• Through their contributions, I expect all
  students to demonstrate that they
• have undertaken some additional reading and
  research for the collaborative stage
• are reading and thinking seriously about other
  students contributions
• Are contributing regularly and consistently to
  the collaborative editing process
• At minimum, all students should undertake
• at least one major substantive revision (writing
  a new article, substantially revising or adding
  to one or more existing articles, undertaking a
  complex technical task such as taking primary
  responsibility for creating a navigation system,
  or integrating multiple articles into a better
  form), plus
• a series of minor revisions, comments,
  proofreading or technical edits.
• Assessment for this project (outlined in detail
  in the Course Guide), takes into consideration
• The quality of your original individual research
• The quality of the final product (all students
  receive the same mark for this task, as long as
  they contribute to each stage of the project)
• The quality and quantity of your individual
  contributions to the project

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Lecture Overview

• Last week
• Overview of social, cultural, economic and
  political trends in the transition from liberal
  capitalism
• This week
• Discussion of key trends in planning theory from
  the 1920s-1970s
• Next week
• Early critiques of post-war planning
• Recommendation
• Commanding Heights the Battle for the World
  Economy documentary lots of copies available
  from AV section of Swanston library one copy on
  2-hour reserve
• First two programs good overview of debates
  between Hayek and Keynes
• AV 338.9 Y47

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1920s-1950s

• Planning Commissions
• Informal associations of business and community,
  gradually yielding to formal, state-sponsored
  projects
• Development of small-scale area plans,
  gradually yielding to larger-scale, more
  comprehensive, metropolitan plans
• Comprehensive approach to planning survey,
  plan, review derived from Geddes and similar
  figures, although not necessarily preserving
  Geddes commitment to designing for physical and
  historical context
• Planning as design planning as an extension
  of architecture
• Concerned with physical layout, more than social
  or heritage values (although social results were
  often assumed to follow from proper physical
  design)
• Separation of uses residential, commercial,
  retail
• Attempt to contain urban boundaries green
  belts, zoning restrictions and other techniques

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Recap of Week 7 Lecture (more details in last
weeks lecture notes)

• Challenges to liberalism
• Great Depression challenged principles of
  individualism egalitarian values transcendent
• World War II obligation to provide housing,
  employment for returning servicemen
• Keynesianism legitimised interventionist state
  role
• Labour movement living wage, family wage
  movements
• Commitment to full-employment economy
• Taylorism, Fordism new model for industrial
  production
• Faith in state, governing comparatively closed,
  bounded domestic economy
• Keynesianism
• Large-scale urban and national reconstruction
  programs
• Long boom
• Domesticity
• Return of women to the home after wartime
  experiment
• Intensified physical separation of
• Unexpected baby boom
• Consumerism
• Automobiles push-pull effect
• need to create housing leads to more dispersed
  settlements, leads to need for car, leads to
  further dispersed settlements
• Full-employment economy automobile manufacture
  housing/roads construction

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Australian Settlement

• Paul Kelly
• (1992) The End of Certainty the Story of the
  1980s, St Leonards, NSW Allen Unwin.
• Federation 1960s
• Elements (according to Kelly)
• White Australia
• Industry Protection
• Wage Arbitration
• State Paternalism
• Imperial Benevolence (reliance on US/UK)
• Kelly Australia was founded on faith in
  government authority belief in egalitarianism a
  method of judicial determination in centralised
  wage fixation protection of its industry and its
  jobs dependence upon a great power, (first
  Britain, then America), for its security and its
  finance and, above all, hostility to its
  geographical location, exhibited in fear of
  external domination and internal contamination
  from the peoples of the Asia/Pacific. Its
  bedrock ideology was protection its solution, a
  Fortress Australia, guaranteed as part of an
  impregnable Empire spanning the globe. This
  framework introspective, defensive, dependent
  is undergoing an irresistible demolition. (1992,
  p. 2)

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1960s Systems and Rational Models for Planning

• Often conflated, and do share some overlapping
  assumptions and concerns
• Movement away from design orientation of earlier
  plans, in which planning represented a type of
  large-scale application of architectural
  principles
• Reflected a shift in planning personnel, as
  persons educated in policy sciences, rather than
  architecture or engineering, came to the fore
• Expressed the perception that planning was a
  generic technique for good administration, rather
  than a field dedicated to spatial or land use
  issues
• Both reflected a centralised, expert-driven
  concept of planning in tension with principles of
  democratic control
• Both often described as positivist approaches
  to planning posit the potential for planners to
  be value-neutral, focussed on means rather than
  ends (instrumental rationality vs. substantive
  rationality)
• Both yielded techniques that have persisted, even
  if the theoretical underpinnings are not
  currently popular

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Systems Theory

• Associated with Brian McLoughlin, George Chadwick
• Inspired by prospect of rising computing power
  suggested the potential to model more complex
  processes than had previously been possible
• Emerged in tandem with holistic conceptions of
  ecological systems components of urban
  environment (housing, employment, transport,
  etc.) are all related to and affect one another
  through complex feedback loops
• Posited that healthy urban systems would increase
  in diversity over time
• Competition between individuals would ensure
  dynamic change
• Adaptation of and to urban spaces would gradually
  generate new habitats
• Rich communication infrastructure facilitates
  feedback loops
• Urban environment is not a closed system (in
  which all variables can be predetermined and
  controlled) but, instead, is a complex, dynamic
  environment assumption shared with liberal
  tradition as developed by Hayek
• Hayek concluded that this kind of environment was
  unpredictable and therefore rendered planning
  impossible
• Systems theory argued that computers enable
  modelling of dynamic complexity, because
• Individual decisions are never completely free
  context always constrains
• Individuals and collectives operate according to
  principles of rational utility acting as
  rational maximisers who (in aggregate) aim to
  maximise personal utility

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Systems Theory

• Views planner as helmsman steering society
  through centralised control mechanisms
• Aims to replace intuitive, hunch-driven
  interventions and toward a conscious
  understanding of the causal relationships and
  feedback loops between different components of
  the urban environment
• cybernetic focussing on mathematical models
  and rising computer power for predicting effects
  of interventions
• Foresaw new division of labour that would bring
  together interdisciplinary teams who would feed
  information about disparate processes into
  overarching model
• Stipulated a model process
• Observe and collect factual information
• Form a hypothesis based on causal sequence of
  events
• Create a model
• Choose among simulated future states based on
  optimum future conditions
• Choose a plan based on the results of this
  simulation

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Rational Process Planning

• Derives from older theoretical tradition
• Weber/Mannheim
• Distinction between types of rationality
• instrumental rationality, formal rationality
  dedicated to determining logical means to get
  to a desired goal (regardless of what the goal
  might be)
• substantive rationality dedicated to
  determining the proper end (generally understood
  to be a political or aesthetic choice Weber did
  not believe ends could be rationally chosen)
• Modernity was understood to generate a trend
  toward professionalisation and bureaucratisation
  to create a class of specialised experts in
  implementation, who perfect and utilise
  instrumental reason
• Chicago School
• Note There are actually several Chicago
  Schools in different disciplines, some with
  opposing theoretical and political aims
• The Chicago School that leads into Rational
  Process Planning related to a course offered in
  the 1940s and 1950s, associated with Rexford
  Tugwell
• Extrapolated from Great Depression, WWII
  experience to conclude that a Fourth Branch of
  government was required to ensure that land use
  and economic planning could be conducted free of
  political interference
• Planners must proceed rationally, with a clear
  process consider alternatives, identify and
  evaluate consequences, select alternative that
  produces best outcome

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Rational Process Planning

• Andreas Faludi develops from these theoretical
  foundations
• Argued that planning
• Was a general technique of rational public
  administration (not specific to urban issues),
• Was value-neutral (the substantive end of the
  planning process was determined externally to
  planning itself, through a political process that
  then provided goals for the planning process)
• Absorbed inputs from other fields (including
  the input of the moral or ethical endpoint of
  the plan) into its own process
• Should focus on the rationality of its formal
  process or procedure
• Broke the planning process down into steps
  identify problem, choose appropriate response
  (e.g., via cost-benefit analysis), implement

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Rational Process Planning

• Faludi recognised that the rational process he
  described simplified the complexities of the
  actual planning process
• He recommended
• Development of routines and rule-based
  decision-making to speed up the planning process
  and ensure greater consistency in decision-making
• Using tools like matrix-based scoring mechanisms
  to break decisions down into simpler portions and
  evaluate consistently
• Imposing patterns on disordered information (cf.
  Webers ideal types)
• Sometimes implied that the actual planning
  process could remain less systematic, as long as,
  after the fact, the results of the process could
  be defended in terms of rational process concepts

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Common Criticisms of Positivist Planning

• Division between planning theory and planning
  practice models of value-neutrality or
  systematic processes do not correspond to the
  often intuitive art of planning practice
• Planning deals with wicked problems
  intrinsically complex, self-reflexive systems
  that are changed by the very act of planning,
  consensus on either ends or means is rare,
  planners must make decisions on a short timeframe
  without complete knowledge, etc.
• Value neutrality is both impossible and
  undesirable
• Top-driven approaches exclude community and,
  under the guise of value neutrality, tend to
  support established interests

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Next Week Preview

• Emerging critiques of postwar planning
• The resurgence of civil society