Planning Innovation

People imbue places with life and should be planning’s central concern. If they did not exist, there would be no need for buildings or parks or roads. Planning’s abiding obsession with form is driven by long cherished fallacies, like permanence is fundamentally important and that the built environment determines behavior. Even if immutability was essential when edifices were built for enduring institutions, continuing to assume specialized buildings are the solution to every problem in today’s rapidly evolving world is shortsighted.

Conditions change more unpredictably than ever before. Conjectures about work and housing made five years ago were wrong only in part due to the pandemic. While conditions today may seem like an acceleration of previously known trends like flexible and remote work, no one accurately predicted the full extent and speed with which living and working has changed since 2020. If it wasn’t possible to anticipate today five years ago, why believe forecasts for a decade hence, let alone over the lifespan of cities.

Cities are complex aggregations of people, places, infrastructure, and services. Projects intended to produce certain outcomes inevitably create unforeseen consequences. That is life. Doctrines and codes fail because they are not adaptive to changes in circumstance, technology, or demographics. By shifting planning’s focus from regulating use and form to visualizing patterns of habitation, policy can be far more effective at serving needs and responding to an unpredictable, evolving world.

In order to transform, planning must leverage methods developed by ethnography as well as data and decision science to track and respond to changes as they happen. The capabilities that people need in their day-to-day lives, as well as during emergencies, need to be understood. Baseline information must be collected and modeled to understand how people really work, commute and generally live their lives, so that leaders can understand and respond. Models need to incorporate technological solutions that are able to provide many of the things people need faster and with greater adaptability while using fewer, limited resources.

Perhaps we are past the point where a building is, or should be, the solution to every need.

The 20th century is riddled with anecdotes about designers who neither understood nor respected the inhabitants of their creations, while demanding control over many aspects of occupants lives. From Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier, theoreticians assumed they knew better rather than being interested in how things really were. These visionaries used selective precedent and ignored inconvenient facts in order to impose their beliefs. That is no way to build an inclusive and resilient world.

Urban planning may be broken, but I believe we can, using observation, data, feedback, and visualization, enable better places, and lives, for all of us.