Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure

This article was downloaded by: [Neuman, Michael] On: 18 June 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 912489536] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK International Planning Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713426761 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure: An American View Michael Neuman a a Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Online Publication Date: 01 May 2009 To cite this Article Neuman, Michael(2009)'Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure: An American View',International Planning Studies,14:2,201 — 217 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13563470903021241 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563470903021241 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. International Planning Studies Vol. 14, No. 2, 201– 217, May 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure: An American View MICHAEL NEUMAN Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843, USA ABSTRACT Savvy planners around the globe have always used infrastructure as a key tool in their box. Today in the USA, the strategic use of infrastructure is being revived, and offers a new opportunity for the planning profession and academy. This essay assesses links between infrastructure and city planning. The aim is to show how infrastructure provision can improve by being in the hands of planners, and how planning can improve by employing infrastructure strategically. It suggests that infrastructure services and the cities and activities that they support benefit greatly if planned, designed, and financed comprehensively, using a life cycle approach, with the form, function, and sustainability of the city in mind. Building on this insight, infrastructure provides a basis for an invigorated planning practice that is strategic and visionary, yet grounded and pragmatic — a combination suited for effective planning leadership. Leaders and Infrastructure The two-term Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin calls herself the ‘sewer mayor’. Since when do American politicians unabashedly align themselves with infrastructure, especially one as unsexy as sewers? Mayor Franklin is not just any mayor. Time listed her as one of the nation’s five best mayors. The US News and World Report cited her among America’s Best Leaders. American City and County awarded her its Municipal Leader of the Year. The JFK Library Foundation honoured her with its Profile in Courage award. Was it her ‘pothole posse’ that did it? Or the ability to bring contentious actors together and fund a $3.8 billion ‘Clean Water Atlanta’ programme to clean up local waterways and sewage systems? Or the $150 million Quality-of-Life bond programme to bolster walking and bicycling? Her administration has linked infrastructure to urban planning in other ways, including the Beltline Project, a 27 mile circular green transit corridor ringing Atlanta that is being developed on abandoned railroad right-of-way. Perhaps her biggest infrastructure achievement was to reinstate public sector leadership and funding for infrastructure. She has got a 50% increase in property taxes and a one percent voter approved Correspondence Address: Michael Neuman, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. Tel.: þ1 979 845 7062; Fax: þ1 979 862 1784; Email: Neuman@tamu.edu ISSN 1356-3475 Print/1469-9265 Online/09/020201– 17 # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13563470903021241 Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 202 M. Neuman sales tax dedicated to infrastructure. This came after recognizing that systemic underinvestment in infrastructure exacts a big toll in the long run. ‘The biggest challenge’, according to Franklin, ‘is to make decisions today that would be beneficial 150 years from now’ (Pomerance, 2007:57). Mayor Franklin’s efforts provide a sharp counterpoint to our time, when market forces increasingly overshadow regulatory mechanisms of city planning in many but certainly not all jurisdictions in the USA, an approach spreading across the globe. She knows that infrastructure investments guide urban growth and revitalization without resorting to regulatory means. In times of globalization and heightened competitiveness in which the best-networked societies prevail, infrastructure does the networking and confers value to places and processes alike. In times when the call of sustainability animates responsible policy and investment decisions across all sectors of society and in all nations, leaders are progressively turning to infrastructure for sustainable solutions. President Barack Obama has made infrastructure a cornerstone of his administration, from senior appointments such as the Nobel Prize winning energy physicist Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy and the annual budget to the $800 billion economic stimulus, which includes $160 billion for transportation, energy, and water infrastructure. His administration is linking energy, climate, economic development, and sustainability together via infrastructure. On the other side of the Atlantic, from the European Union to municipalities and every level in between, infrastructure has long been playing a central role in urban planning and development, and now, sustainability. Two often-cited examples at the sub-municipal level — BedZED in suburban London and SymbioCity in Sweden — are worth summarizing briefly to give a sense of how integrating innovative infrastructures into plans and designs is changing the urban landscape. BedZED, the Beddington Zero (fossil) Energy Development, was designed by Architect William Dunster and opened for occupancy in 2002. It is an environmentally friendly housing and commercial development near Wallington, England, in the London Borough of Sutton. It contains 100 housing units plus community facilities and workspace for 100 more people. Monitoring conducted in 2007 found that BedZED had achieved the following reductions compared to UK or local (Sutton) averages (Hodge & Haltrech, 2007): (1) Space-heating requirements were 81% less than Sutton averages (48.0 kWh/m2/yr). (2) Electric power consumption was 45% less than Sutton averages (3.4 kW h per person per day). (3) Vehicle miles travelled was 64% less than UK averages (3708 km/yr). (4) Total water consumption was 50% less than UK averages and 58% less than Sutton averages (72 l/day). (5) Hot-water consumption was 57% less than UK averages (2003 data). BedZED has won numerous awards, and while imperfect and evolving, is perceived as a model for sustainable urban brownfield development. Its key achievements were to integrate infrastructure systems for synergistic efficiencies, install renewable energy infrastructure (sun and wind), and to close various energy and water loops. The planning and design of these infrastructures considered the life cycles of various systems and processes in their analyzes. For a photograph of BedZED, see Figure 1. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 203 Figure 1. BedZED — Beddington Zero Energy Development, London, England. Image Copyright Bill Dunster. Source: http://www.ecoconstruction.org/images/c_study_bedzed5.jpg In Stockholm’s Hammarby Sjöstad port district, several infrastructure service providers, among them energy, waste, and water management entities, co-ordinated their efforts in converting this waterfront brownfield into a vibrant neighbourhood. Once fully built, Hammarby Sjöstad will have 11,000 residential units for just over 25,000 people, and a total of about 35,000 people will live and work there. Completion is expected by 2015. According to the project sponsors, the goal is ‘that the impact placed on the environment by emissions from Hammarby Sjöstad shall be a massive 50% lower than the corresponding level for newly constructed housing areas dating from the early 1990s in Stockholm’ (City of Stockholm, 2007). Reusing and recycling all flows — water, energy, materials, wastes — by closing and integrating loops is the planning strategy that employs infrastructure to accomplish these tasks. For example, the main source of heating in Hammarby Sjöstad is district heating. In 2002, 34% of this heat came from purified waste water, 47% from combustible household waste and 16% from bio fuel. Except for toxics, all wastes are reused, recycled, or used to produce energy; in that order. Waste cycling is done by automated systems. Treated wastewater effluent is reused in the district heating and cooling system, and its sludge is used to produce biogas and fertilizer (data taken from the web site hammarbysjostad.se). The Hammarby Sjöstad district, also known as SymbioCity (an international trademark), is visited by tens of thousands per year, and has won numerous awards. In the past five years, environmental impacts have been reduced 50%, and 80% of all trips are by foot, bicycle, or public transport. Rethinking infrastructure has been central to its planning and its success. For a photograph of Hammarby Sjöstad, see Figure 2. Planning and Infrastructure These selective sketches highlight the roles that infrastructure plays in new modes of sustainable urban development and redevelopment, and their planning. As infrastructure Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 204 M. Neuman Figure 2. SymbioCity, Stockholm, Sweden. Photo by Victoria Henriksson 2009. Copyright by El Paı́s and # Prisacom S.A. Madrid, Spain. receives more of the spotlight, American planning and engineering institutions and practices are finally re-embracing public works and employing them to their advantage. Savvy planners have always done so, relying on infrastructure as a key tool in their box. One of the founding pillars of the modern city planning profession on both sides of the Atlantic was infrastructure (Burnham & Bennett, 1909; Cerda, 1855, 1867; Saalman, 1971). Planners then as well as today recognized that infrastructure exerts a profound, pervasive, and persistent influence on the shape and growth of cities and has done so throughout history. Is it time to recover a great — and effective — planning tradition? Thinking and acting through infrastructure confers many advantages to the planning of cities. We can start with the affirmation that cities could not exist without infrastructure. Infrastructure provides a competitive advantage for those cities that have high-quality networks and facilities, and high-quality environments made possible by infrastructures both green and grey. Infrastructure systems are always planned, for better or for worse. Who plans infrastructure is a question of vital importance with significant consequences, and determines whether for better or worse, as the case of the $17 billion mistake called the Big Dig in Boston or the tragic devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans illustrate. Notwithstanding, there are number of instances where infrastructure does occupy important roles in city planning. Even Houston, not renowned for its planning, employs a project — infrastructure — neighbourhood triad (discussed below) that has forged a planning process where none existed before. Another way by which infrastructure shapes planning outcomes is by the use of capital improvements programmes that are linked to comprehensive planning. Another relationship links infrastructure planning with its financing, including but not limited to impact fees assessed by localities on new development to help pay for infrastructure. Public – private partnerships and transit Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 205 oriented development are two other approaches that have been gaining momentum that also employ infrastructure in urban development. Yet in other instances, infrastructure is tangential to planning. Infrastructure is sometimes dealt with in a piecemeal — individual systems like water, transportation, parks, and telecommunications; or individual aspects like financing, designing, and assessing — and not a comprehensive and strategic fashion. Public city planning agencies in the USA often leave key infrastructure planning functions to public works agencies, streets or transportation departments, and budget or finance offices. This can especially be true for the physical planning and urban design of infrastructure. Much the same can be said of university programmes and academic conferences, which leave infrastructure, broadly conceived beyond transportation, mostly to engineering and other disciplines. The splintering of infrastructure into specialized disciplines and agencies serves to box it, thus constraining concepts and impoverishing action. This is especially evident when serious efforts for sustainable development take place, in which integrating systems and closing material and energy loops (by which is meant outputs of one process becomes inputs to another, or as William McDonough states, ‘waste equals food’ (McDonough & Braungart, 2002). In an expanded take on infrastructure, planners would draw on their talents to provide a comprehensive vision of place so as to co-ordinate infrastructure specialists. This enriched view dovetails with the resurgent emphasis on the physical form of cities via urban design, new urbanism, form based codes, the compact city, and so on. Urban form is based upon and connected together by infrastructure, and the practitioners of these emerging paradigms are starting to incorporate infrastructure into their techniques. In this essay, I assess the links between infrastructure and city planning in the USA. In part, it suggests that (1) infrastructure provision has suffered by not being more completely in the hands of city planners, (2) city planning has suffered by not having infrastructure as part of its purview, and (3) planning can address today’s most pressing problems more effectively using infrastructure. Moreover, I suggest how planning can be improved by including infrastructure more comprehensively and strategically in its purview, thus enhancing its role as a leadership profession. Here, infrastructure refers to built facilities and networks, which are above or below ground (‘grey’ infrastructure), and non-built, yet planned and managed landscapes that provide human and nature services (‘green’ infrastructure). This broad take includes publicly, privately, and jointly owned and operated systems such as: Utilities — gas and electricity, water supply and sewerage, waste collection and disposal. Public works — roads and bridges, dams and canals, ports and airports, metros and rails. Community facilities —schools, parks, hospitals, libraries, prisons, police, fire, EMS. Telecommunications — telephone, fax, internet, television, radio, print, cable, broadband. Green infrastructures — parks, river and open space corridors, watersheds, wetlands, rivers and lakes, forests, and habitats. Infrastructure can Transform Planning into Leading Planners provide long term and comprehensive visions for the future that are packaged in plans, projects, forecasts, and scenarios (Hopkins & Zapata, 2007). In plan- and projectbased visions, planners hold a strong card that they can lay on the table — infrastructure. Who better than planners to consider the broad and long-term impacts of infrastructure on Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 206 M. Neuman cities, society, and the environment; including sustainability, equity, and aesthetic concerns? This is a broader scope than the typical functionality and efficiency criteria used by our allied professions in the discharge of their infrastructure duties. Infrastructure possesses a number of characteristics that endow it with leadership qualities. First and foremost, without infrastructure, development does not happen. Infrastructure gets built first, shapes growth most, and lasts longest. Infrastructure links, enables, enriches, and provides opportunities and access. Infrastructure can remain in use for centuries and even millennia. Such longevity evokes the power of infrastructure. Infrastructure leads because it is first, it provides the foundation, and has staying power. What better asset to have under your control? What better illustrates the importance of infrastructure than knowing that war planners seek to destroy it first? Why? Without it, the enemy cannot fight or survive. These same attributes make infrastructure the first to get rebuilt after a war or natural disaster. These extreme circumstances highlight how infrastructure responds to the needs, interests, and desires of all the players in urban planning and re/development arenas in affirming ways. Planner and theorist Luigi Mazza illustrated the important distinction between regulatory planning and strategic planning (Mazza, 1987). Regulatory planning seeks to keep things as they are, and includes preserving community character, protecting historic buildings and districts, and minimizing environmental impacts. Regulatory planning manages urban development by regulations, which require and restrict: zoning codes, building codes, environmental regulations, and so on. Strategic planning seeks to change, and includes smart growth, adaptive reuse and redevelopment, new initiatives and visions to keep up with or get ahead of rapid societal changes, etc. Strategic planning manages by tools that activate and attract, stimulate and steer urban development: infrastructure, investments, projects, incentives, and the like. This difference is critical, yet poorly understood. Agencies, developers, and others that plan often use one type of planning approach to accomplish the other type of outcome: regulations to change, strategies to maintain. The results can be disastrous, and take years if not decades to correct. In the USA, one example of this is that in the absence of a comprehensive plan, or an up-to-date one, municipalities often use their zoning or development review ordinances as strategic tools. Strategic and regulatory approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, growth management can be accomplished by blending both judiciously. A savvy planner selects strategic investments in infrastructure and projects to steer growth to one or more areas, and regulations that limit growth in other areas. Military base redevelopment and major waterfront conversions are good examples of strategic planning, and historic districts and classic (pre-World War Two) residential district zoning codes are examples of regulatory planning. While regulatory planning, a legacy of legal influence on the early decades of the profession, may have been suited to the pace, scale, and impacts of urban growth nearly a century ago; we can ask if it is the right model for the rapid and massive urbanization occurring worldwide in the context of globalization, networking, migration, wars, and catastrophic natural events. Other important drivers of global and urban change derive from the incremental and cumulative equity and ecological impacts of a consumer driven society, especially in light of India and China, whose residents for the most part are desirous of western standards of consumption. In the context of all these vast changes, the strategic mode of planning correctly applied, in balance with regulations that are intelligent, effective, equitable, and efficient; can be a more responsive and responsible approach. Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 207 This problematic is further complicated by political leaders who repeal or otherwise turn back or scale down regulatory modes of planning. This is part of a larger worldwide dynamic of deregulation, privatization, and decentralization. A healthy aim of these efforts is to increase democracy, and to increase accountability and responsibility at the most appropriate levels — a principle known as subsidiarity. Yet as the citizenry and media are awakening to the mounting evidence of the waste laid by the increasingly naked market, there is a new demand in some polities for government to reclaim more of its dominion over the multi-valent public good in affirmative and proactive ways. Need it be regulatory, should it be strategic, or are there new syntheses? Regardless of the new formulation, there cannot be planning leadership without infrastructure. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Infrastructure, Cities, and Planning Progressive city planning practices acknowledge and capitalize on the reciprocal relation between cities and infrastructure. This relation is an important element in understanding the twin rise of cities and civilizations. A sketch of this relation helps us understand the roots of contemporary practices. It starts with a fundamental proposition. Great cities are born of and give rise to great infrastructure. Seats of empire, such as Rome, Madrid, and London, owed their central standing to extensive infrastructure. These capitals could not govern the expanse of their dominions without superior transportation and communication systems to extend the reach and lucre of empire and the size of the capital administering it. The Roman Empire, for example, could not have existed in its grandeur without roads emanating to its peripheral outposts and aqueducts supplying Rome with water (Benevolo, 1980 [1975]). The saying ‘all roads lead to Rome’ clearly asserts the centrality of infrastructure for Rome and its empire. Today, global cities owe their positions as command posts in the global economy to telecommunications and transportation networks that concentrate knowledge, capital, and people. Old notions of empire and hierarchy have been pushed aside by a new order that shapes the symbiosis of corporate conglomerates with governments into networks and posits world cities as key nodes. The networking of society and its cities has recast relations among peoples, institutions, and places (Castells, 2001; Sassen, 2001 [1991]; McNeill & McNeill, 2003). The transformation of social space in general and urban space in particular is due to the transformation of infrastructure, and the transformative power of infrastructure. Cities and infrastructure have always been mutually interdependent and co-evolutionary. City planning, being deeply rooted in infrastructure, has played a mediating role between cities and infrastructure. The prominence of this role has varied across time and place. Early city planning was exclusively infrastructure planning: the layout of streets, squares, and open spaces, and the location of civic monuments, temples, and markets. Since the advent of the industrial era in the eighteenth century, historians have chronicled a series of reform movements that laid the groundwork for planning practice, many of which were based on infrastructure (Krueckeberg, 1983; Benevolo, 1967 [1963]; Fishman, 2000; Hall, 2002). The industrial era led to the modern city and the modern planning era, ushered in by Haussmann in Paris and Cerdà in Barcelona in the middle of the nineteenth century. Being civil engineers, it is not surprising that their seminal plans 208 M. Neuman were largely infrastructure plans (Cerdà, 1855; Choay, 1969).1 These and other landmarks, as well as commonplace practices, suggest that changes in cities brought about by new infrastructure technologies were accompanied by transformations in city planning and its role in city development. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Strengthening Planning Via Infrastructure Today, emerging planning practices informed by sustainability, active living, healthy communities, and the various urbanisms employ infrastructure planning as an effective means to manage urban development and redevelopment. Key urban trends, including globalization, the networking of cities and societies, and the emergence of mega-cities and mega-city regions all rely heavily on infrastructures. Our equivalent to the sanitary city is the sustainable city. A key to more sustainable cities is the new types, scales, and integrations of infrastructure networks that employ renewable energy and resources, exploit nature services without detriment to nature, and are local, small scale, and positive impact; thus contributing to communities rather than being a burden like many current large scale infrastructure systems that provoke NIMBY responses. A capital budget tied to a physical plan (comprehensive plan, general plan, master plan, or development plan) is vehicle to manage urban development via infrastructure. The City of Philadelphia has for generations based its capital budget on its city master plan, starting in the era of planning director Ed Bacon and his Center City Philadelphia Plan of 1963. Many municipalities and counties have since followed suit. The New Jersey State Plan is largely a plan to co-ordinate planning among and within levels of government by co-ordinating and prioritizing capital investments. It is revealing that the only mandatory elements in the New Jersey State Planning Act were an Infrastructure Needs Assessment and a capital budget consistent with the plan. The link between infrastructure and planning is one reason why the Office of State Planning was initially housed in the Treasury department, responsible for four inter-related activities that were strategically brought together in the State Plan: infrastructure, financing, budgeting, and state agency management. These two well-known and award winning plans suggest that getting involved in capital plans and budgets gives planners the standing to co-ordinate a jurisdiction’s affairs using the most direct and accepted means available — the budget. A growing number of jurisdictions, both local and state, are employing capital improvement programming, recognizing it as one of the primary infrastructure tools in the planner’s kit. Capital improvements elements are required statewide in several states such as California, Georgia, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington; and are recommended by other state planning enabling acts. Consider a contrasting scenario, the common practice of developers providing infrastructure and facilities as part of their site development plans. In these instances, the developer provides the land for parks, schools, or other facilities; or the facilities themselves. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, their locations may be distant from centres of population, and may not serve long-term community goals. Instead of the school or library, say, being central to neighbourhoods, and thus encourage walking and community, their exurban location induces sprawl and travel. When a developer provides infrastructure and land for it, the municipality may believe it is getting a good deal — ‘free’ infrastructure. When the city surrenders control over infrastructure to the developer, however, what are the long-term costs and impacts? Are the new facilities in their removed locations in accord with its plan, its future goals? Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 209 A jurisdiction with a plan and an impact fee programme has more control over its infrastructure and its future than one that lets the developer build it to satisfy private interests. Cities get more value from their infrastructure when it is co-ordinated with their broader goals via comprehensive planning. Growth management over the decades has tried to marry infrastructure to planning using a range of tools. The first growth management schemes in Ramapo and San Diego exploited the growth-infrastructure connection by introducing a fourth dimension into land use planning — timing and sequencing — by which growth was permitted if it was planned so that sufficient supporting infrastructure was provided in advance, or at least simultaneously. Growth management practices in leading states and metros are nearly all infrastructure based. Florida has its ‘3C’ growth management approach: compactness, concurrency, and consistency. While consistency has been contentious, the first two C’s — both based on infrastructure — have had at least partial success in good growth management (Khan & Chapin, 2006) but also evidence of countervailing effects on densities (Boarnet et al., 2006). Portland Metro, apart from its growth boundary, uses transportation and green infrastructures as cornerstones of its metropolitan design strategy. To the extent that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) manage growth, they do it via infrastructure, primarily transportation. The role of MPOs and Councils of Government in capital improvements planning varies widely around the country. While certain states such as Maryland, California, Florida, and New Jersey, along with numerous metro areas are engaged actively in shaping development patterns through infrastructure planning, there are many others that are less successful in using infrastructure to guide growth. The fields of fiscal impacts analysis and impact fee financing provide proof of the leadership roles that are exercised by planners. Planners have collaborated with financial and accounting experts to develop numerous high-quality software programs that examine the needs for different infrastructure systems and their costs that are occasioned by growth. As good as planners have become in using impact fees to require property developers to finance a portion of the infrastructure occasioned by their developments, they are only a partial fix because they deal with new development only, not existing development, and then only the developer’s ‘fair share’, not the entire cost. What about existing infrastructure? What about financing the public portion? What about the tremendous backlogs that are routinely documented in infrastructure assessments? The life cycle costs for all infrastructure systems? These questions point to just some of the drawbacks to current North American planning approaches to infrastructure that lead to less than desired outcomes. The paradox is that planners have become adept in the local financing of infrastructure supporting new development as an unintended consequence of gradual and steady public sector cutbacks in infrastructure over the past several generations through privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in general revenues (tax cuts and measures like California’s Proposition 13). Recent reports confirm what every planner knows: that massive underinvestment in the USA is resulting in negative safety, competitiveness, growth, and sustainability consequences (Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young, 2007; American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009). At the other end of the spectrum, we can ask how states actively shape metro and local infrastructure planning through mandatory strategic infrastructure plans and budgets. Apart from New Jersey, Maryland, and Florida, now California is once again taking a more active role in co-ordinating investments in infrastructure for strategic goals through Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 210 M. Neuman its comprehensive Strategic Growth Plan of 2006.2 Essentially an infrastructure plan, it addresses critical infrastructure needs over the next 20 years. According to the plan, the state faces over $500 billion in infrastructure needs to meet the demands from population growth over the next two decades. Also in 2006, voters approved the first installment of that 20 year vision to rebuild California by authorizing a series of General Obligation bonds, totalling $42.7 billion (California Department of Finance, 2007). To further help finance projects, the State established the Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank). In 2008, voters approved a $9.9 billion bond measure to construct high speed rail connecting Los Angeles with San Francisco. These acts clearly recognize the leadership that infrastructure plays in strategic growth management. They were instituted after a series of reports pinpointing the need to do so (Neuman & Whittington, 2000). Other states are stepping up to the plate, following the lead of states like California and New Jersey, and the Council of State Governments. National leadership is important as well, and we should strive to link federal and state infrastructure initiatives much more closely. Consistency and predictability in infrastructure and its financing are essential to spurring development, and highly desired by both the private sector and the local public sector. A stronger national role is presenting itself in 2009, and the profession is acting to seize it. The American Planning Association leadership, dovetailing with the advent of the new president’s administration, is actively and swiftly seeking to redress this concern (American Planning Association, 2009; Farmer, 2009). APA President Bruce McKnight is leading the National Infrastructure Investment Task Force, and immediate past President Robert Hunter has been spearheading infrastructure efforts as well. They are working to raise infrastructure to a new, strategic level in the planning profession. Strategic Uses of Infrastructure in Cities Contrasting infrastructure planning in Barcelona and Houston, at opposite ends of the urban planning spectrum, reveals how different styles of planning employ infrastructure strategically for urban development and redevelopment. Their planning styles— Barcelona’s based on public sector direction, Houston’s a bastion of private sector leadership—could not be more different. But their similarities are more telling, and they revolve around the strategic and entrepreneurial use of infrastructure to attain urban change and improvement. Barcelona, a paragon of planning and urban design, has wedded infrastructure to urban design in its planning to transform its declining industrial and historical core into one of the most vibrant, beautiful, livable, and sustainable cities on the planet. Houston has used infrastructure as a key part of its approach to grow the metropolis and to transform the downtown into a regional multipurpose centre instead of merely being a leading office location. A tale of two contrasting cities, each with infrastructure as a protagonist in their stories. Strategic planning in Houston is decidedly non-regulatory. There, planning is accomplished using a project—infrastructure—neighbourhood triad in lieu of a general plan and zoning, which Houston does not have. Regarding the first component of the triad, most new built projects are in the downtown area or in the medical centre complex. Since 2000, there were ten billion dollars of new projects inside the inner loop (Interstate 610) alone. In the year 2000 alone, for example, over $4 billion in construction was Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 211 permitted, half in downtown. Many of these projects are metro-scale capital facilities: cultural, entertainment, and sports venues. For the second component, infrastructure projects underway or recently completed include airport expansions for both the Bush Intercontinental and Hobby International Airports, a major expansion of the Port of Houston, a light rail system, a new outer ring road, and a new Interstate Highway. Each of these projects has a projected cost of over one billion dollars, and will have major long-term impacts on the metro area’s future.3 This is not to say that all the impacts are positive. One outcome of highway-led planning is the near complete dependence on the automobile, suburban sprawl, and its attendant harms. Neighbourhoods have been gathering increasing importance in city planning. To round out the third component of Houston’s planning triad, 88 ‘super neighbourhoods’ have been designated, each encompassing smaller neighbourhoods and block groups. They are intended to make local decisions and participate in citywide arenas through elected governing Councils. In practice, however, super neighbourhood effectiveness has been spotty and at times timid, depending on leadership and other circumstances within each neighbourhood.4 Neighbourhood planning entails deed restriction programmes, land assemblage, urban design projects, and civic improvements. A good percentage of their activities are infrastructure and public space related. Taken together, this triad underscores infrastructure as a connective tissue not only in the built environment, but for planning processes as well. This project — infrastructure — neighbourhood triad has forged a new foundation for city planning in Houston. It has enabled the city and its leaders to gradually accept planning as a valid governmental activity. It has begun to develop a planning culture, and a broader civic culture that is placing planning higher on its agenda (Neuman, 2007). The three, taken together, form a vital part of Houston’s civil society. This is based on a century-long tradition of infrastructure guiding its urban development and its planning (Platt, 1983). Houston’s brand of strategic planning without a plan and without zoning has afforded a degree of flexibility to managing the urban growth process unavailable in cities that are constrained by zoning. Infrastructure has been critical to this overall flexibility, as it has been critical to providing flexibility to project and neighbourhood planning in turn. Imagine city planners promoting economic, social, and environmental gains via infrastructure instead of mediating disputes about their negative impacts. This is exactly what happened in Barcelona this decade, due to a bold vision to redevelop a run-down former industrial district that housed three noxious metropolitan scale facilities: an incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, and a power plant. These facilities were transformed into a convention site to host the Universal Forum of Global Cultures in 2004. The site was the last undeveloped area of the two millennia old city. To make the Forum site buildable, an inclined forty acre platform was constructed on top of the sewage treatment plant. The expo’s buildings and a sculptural pergola supporting the world’s largest solar panel (17,000 square feet generating 1.4 megawatts) were built on top of the platform. In order to house the Forum, and more importantly in order to provide an attractive and healthy setting for future urban growth, the three noxious infrastructures had to be made benign, and 600,000 cubic metres of soil polluted with heavy metals had to be decontaminated. Not only were the three systems modernized, they were converted into models of sustainable infrastructure. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 212 M. Neuman The 300,000 ton per year capacity solid waste incinerator was converted into an electricity co-generating plant, and its effluent gases were cleaned up to such an extent that a new city park was placed at its base. The sewage treatment plant was improved by adding third and fourth (biological) stages of treatment, eliminating sludge discharge into the sea, and employing a sludge drying plant that doubles as a co-generator, producing 25 megawatts of electricity. The pre-existing power plant was converted from diesel generation to cleaner fuel sources. Finally, a combined sewer outfall was divided in order to separate stormwater runoff from sewage, further enhancing water discharge quality. The place where the sewage treatment plant meets the sea is now a recreational marina, an open water marine life exhibit, and a public park with open-sea swimming. These improvements converted hazardous and unsightly infrastructures into safe, sustainable, and attractive public places fit for human habitation and enjoyment, and for urban development. Instead of the usual NIMBY treatment normally accorded to these types of infrastructures, people are now lured to recreate in this former wasteland by exemplars of planning and design that combine beauty with biology in the treatment of everyday sewage and trash, and combine elegance and engineering in the generation of power. Smart planning turned infrastructures from NIMBY to ‘want to be’ there. The impetus to improve this district and its infrastructure facilities came from a savvy planner who happened to be the mayor, the entrepreneurial Pasqual Maragall. He opened up the opportunities for both the public sector and private developers to collaborate to convert public eyesores into urban amenities and reap the benefits (Acebillo, 2004). Despite their dissimilarities, both Barcelona and Houston used infrastructure to tie together individual projects into coherent places. Infrastructure was a major design element to build the last remaining piece of Barcelona, and to link the city with its waterfront (a 1990s project). Infrastructure was also used to weave major venues together in both cities into webs of culture, entertainment, and sports offerings. They show how infrastructure planning has the added political – institutional advantage of being an entrepreneurial, non-regulatory mode of planning. Since the 1920s, American planners have been largely schooled to a regulatory mode of planning: land use and zoning controls, historic preservation, infrastructure impact fees and environmental regulations (Clawson, 1981). This mode had been questioned by a political and institutional milieu that devalues regulation and police power. To an extent, infrastructure allows planners to escape this restrictive mode of practice, enabling them to be more entrepreneurial and proactive. Sustainability and Infrastructure The prospect of cities and life in them is largely conditioned by infrastructure. The way we plan infrastructure will ultimately help determine whether cities and our urban way of life will be sustainable. The role of infrastructures both green and grey in cities and their planning is widely recognized, as evidenced by the United Nations report The State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007 and the Worldwatch Institute report The State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future (United Nations Center for Human Settlements, 2006; Worldwatch Institute, 2007). The United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued four reports in 2007 on Global Climate Change. They underscore in detail the consensus on the need for action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and propose a multi-pronged campaign largely reliant on transportation and power Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 213 infrastructures (IPCC, 2007). They are written using rationales that support good urban planning and can thus be used by planners in their efforts to persuade leaders and populaces. When we examine sustainability from three vantages — ecological, economic, and equitable — we find infrastructure at the core of each. In our physical environment, infrastructure and its use account for significant energy and material consumption, waste production, and impacts. In the USA, most energy is consumed by infrastructure use, or by the infrastructure system itself, according to the Department of Energy. For example, 28% of all energy consumption in the USA is by the transportation sector, in the year 2007. Residential, commercial, and industrial structures account for more than 50% of all energy consumption. Their energy is provided by infrastructure. Planning to retool power infrastructures so that energy sources and distribution systems better support sustainable urban development patterns opens up a major challenge to planners to save energy and slow global warming. In this way, proper planning can more responsibly manage what now accounts for over three quarters of America’s energy. The same is true for water, sewerage, wastes, transportation, and other infrastructures. Water, for example, is a growing concern worldwide as over-withdrawal, contamination, and droughts combine to make scarcity a leading issue. In the USA, how (by wide, open canals traversing hot, arid landscapes) and how far (hundreds of miles) fresh water is transported to be used, in part, to irrigate golf courses and lawns in deserts should be a planning concern. As with energy, more intelligently matching water types and sources with end uses will require the redesign of water infrastructure networks. The ‘Purple Pipe’ of Austin, Texas that conveys grey water from sewage treatment plant effluent for re-use as irrigation water and the Orange County wastewater to drinking water conversion provide viable examples. Inventive planners can devise many others. Infrastructure plays a key role in the economy and society. The vital importance of infrastructure to the economic development and economic role of cities has been repeatedly affirmed in case studies (Cronon, 1991; Lindstrom, 2002) and general treatises and histories (Mumford, 1961; Benevolo, 1980 [1975]; Jacobs, 1984; Perry, 1995). City fortunes can rise and fall in response to infrastructure investments (Platt, 1983; Erie, 2004). Is it surprising that the low point of American urban fortunes, from the 1960s to the 1980s, coincided with a low point in infrastructure, as documented in widely influential critiques of the state of infrastructure (Choate & Walter, 1981; National Council on Public Works Improvements, 1988)? Infrastructure provision affects social equity in several ways. Infrastructure siting decisions have long placed noxious facilities in poor areas, and led to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. Access to parks, schools, libraries, and other community facilities (especially quality facilities) typically favours wealthier communities and residents, further worsening social equity. Social equity is governed partly by differential accessibility to infrastructure and its services, a fact acknowledged by the popular expression ‘the digital divide’. Another expression, ‘the other side of the tracks’, reflects how infrastructure can segregate and splinter urban space, causing further inequities (Graham & Marvin, 2001). The degree of sustainability of infrastructure systems can be incorporated as a key evaluation criterion in assessing the viability of urban growth patterns. Infrastructure can similarly be added to existing assessment protocols such as environmental impact assessments, economic impact assessments, and fiscal impact assessments. The National 214 M. Neuman Institute of Standards and Testing and the International Standards Organization have been painstakingly developing ‘green or environmental accounting’ reporting standards whose principles can be adopted by urban planners. The way an organization counts affects the way it acts, and thus opens up wide avenues for planners to be more influential in practice through infrastructure accounting and assessment. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Planning Leadership by Infrastructure Infrastructure affords the opportunity for planners to turn fragmented forums and arenas, where different disciplines vie for control over infrastructure planning and design, to their advantage by offering integrated, sustainable, and life cycle approaches. Public sector entrepreneurship, a rapidly emerging role for planners, empowers them to bring disciplines together under the umbrella of long term, comprehensive, and co-ordinated action to which they provide strategic vision and leadership. This way planners can effectively guide if not directly manage the large purse strings that come with infrastructure investments — a promising leadership function. When planners do see the city (town, neighbourhood, urban region) through the eyes of infrastructure, then planning cities through planning infrastructure becomes apparent. What does the city through the infrastructure looking glass look like? Take a walk to main street, through the park, along the stream bank, and down the bike path. Then stroll down main street, lined by trees and attractive street furniture. The wires are underground, utility poles absent, solar panels awnings shade the sidewalk, rainwater collectors water the flowers along the storefronts and animate a fountain where kids of all ages splash in the heat of the summer. An electric trolley whose power is generated by wind silently glides by, the conductor waving to bicyclists in the bike lanes. There is no torn up street and noisy jackhammers, nor closed lanes and ugly construction sites in order to get to the pipes and cables underground, because they are housed in orderly infrastructure galleries underground with worker and equipment access at each corner. This allows the street trees to grow tall, as their roots spread wide, undisrupted. Park your plug-in electric hybrid at work, uploading electricity generated by driving to the grid and getting paid for it. Drive it home and park in your garage at night, recharging from clean wind energy. We could continue to embellish a vision nourished by sustainable infrastructure. How does this compare to planning standard ways of seeing and expressing the city to its constituents, such as a land use map and zoning? In public meetings, maps are more often than not sources of controversy, far from the vision and entrepreneurial spirit of infrastructure-based sustainable urban design. The salience of infrastructure is in accord with leadership directions of the profession. In the academy, ACSP identified a core theme of planning as the comprehensive interconnections in cities. Infrastructure is the key physical connective tissue that ties individual parcels into coherent wholes: neighbourhoods, cities, regions. Another ACSP core theme is pathways to the future (Myers, 1997). What more solid foundation on which to build a better future than sustainable infrastructure? The fact that infrastructure is essential for making these connections and assuring a brighter future points directly to infrastructure-based planning leadership. Can planners neglect a topic so centrally anchored in our field? Robert Olshansky referred to ‘Planners as Leaders’ in discussing the possibilities after Hurricane Katrina (Olshansky, 2006:152). This growing view is echoed by Chris Nelson, Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 215 who suggests that ‘planners should question whether land uses need to be separated at all’, and instead focus on urban form and the built environment (Nelson, 2006:402). Of course, infrastructure shapes urban form, and points to a huge prospect. Infrastructure also has the potential to bridge across divides among branches of planning: academic, professional, and citizen (Myers & Banerjee, 2005). In a seeming chorus chanting for change in the way we practice today, Olshansky, Nelson, Myers, Farmer, McKnight, Banerjee and others indicate planning as a leadership profession. Infrastructure provides a solid platform for that leadership. Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Notes 1. The industrial city represented an unprecedented change in the scale and pace of urban growth, which was due to technological advances that were manifest in infrastructure. First steam and hydro, and later electrical energy provided the power to transform crafts and trades into industries, and towns and cities into metropolises. These energy sources plus oil powered new transportation technologies, which were woven together into infrastructure networks. The crowding occasioned by industrial metropolises, and the pollution caused by fossil-fuelled infrastructures, led to the miseries of the industrial urban condition: disease, air and water pollution, concentrated poverty in slums, and so on. The extent to which the industrial city was cleansed was equally due to sanitary infrastructures developed in response to rapid and large scale industrial urban expansion (Benevolo, 1967; Hughes, 1987; Melosi, 2000). 2. In the golden years of the 1960s, Governor Pat Brown led a water-education-highways investment triumvirate that propelled the state for decades. 3. Some of the major projects include the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Main Street Corridor Light Rail, Harris County Administration Campus, Enron Field baseball stadium, Reliant football stadium, a downtown sports arena, Convention Center expansion, plus millions of square feet of new office space, hotels with thousands of new rooms, new parking garages with over 10,000 spaces, 5000 new housing units, and institutional projects such as Jones Plaza and the South Texas College of Law. This data is compiled from a wide variety of sources from the Houston city planning department from 2000 to 2006. 4. Based on author’s interviews in Houston from 2000 to 2006, and personal communication from long time resident and activist who is also a professional planner with an international consulting firm. References Acebillo, J. (2004) Una Nueva Geografia Urbana, Arquitectura Viva, 94(95), pp. 44–53. American Planning Association (2009) APA, National Infrastructure Investment Task Force, Available at www. planning.org/policy/infrastructure (accessed 23 February 2009). American Society of Civil Engineers (2009) America’s Infrastructure 2009 Report Card (Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers). Benevolo, L. (1967 [1963]) The Origins of Modern Town Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Benevolo, L. (1980 [1975]) The History of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Boarnet, M., McLaughlin, R. & Carruthers, J. (2006) Does state growth management change the pattern of urban growth? Evidence from Florida. ACSP Annual Conference, Forth Worth. Burnham, D. & Bennett, E. (1909) Plan of Chicago (Chicago: The Commercial Club). California Department of Finance (2007) California Five Year Infrastructure Plan 2007 (Sacramento: California Department of Finance). Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cerdà, I. (1855) The extension of the city of Barcelona: Descriptive memorandum of the technical work and statistical studies carried out by government order, in Generalitat de Catalunya (1996), Cerdà: Urbs I Territori: Catalog of the Exhibition Mostra Cerdà (Madrid: Electa). Cerdà, I. (1867) Teorı́a General de Urbanización y Aplicación de sus Principios y Doctrinas a la Reforma y Ensanche de Barcelona, 2, General Theory of Urbanization and the Application of its Principles and Doctrines the Reform and Expansion of Barcelona (Madrid: Imprenta Española). Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 216 M. Neuman Choate, P. & Walter, S. (1981) America in Ruins: The Decaying Infrastructure (Washington, DC: Council of State Planning Agencies). Choay, F. (1969 [1965]) The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (New York: George Braziller). City of Stockholm (2007) Hammarby Sjostad — a Unique Environmental Project in Stockholm (Stockholm: City of Stockholm). Clawson, M. (1981) New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Cronon, W. (1991) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton). Erie, S. (2004) Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Farmer, P. (2009) ‘Change’ Planning, January 3–4 (Chicago, IL: American Planning Association). Fishman, R. (Ed.) (2000) The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press). Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge). Hall, P. G. (2002) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (New York: Blackwell). Hodge, J. & Haltrech, J. (2007) BedZED Monitoring Report (London: Bioregional Development Group). Hopkins, L. & Zapata, M. (Eds) (2007) Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute Press). Hughes, T. (1987) The social construction of technological systems, in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes & T. J. Pinch (Eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2007) Fourth assessment report on climate change 2007. Available at www.ippc.ch Jacobs, J. (1984) Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: Random House). Khan, H. & Chapin, T. (2006) Investigating the fiscal response by local governments to Florida’s unfunded growth mandate. ACSP Annual Conference, Fort Worth. Krueckeberg, D. (1983) Introduction to Planning History in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research). Lindstrom, B. (2002) Public works and land use: the importance of infrastructure in Chicago’s metropolitan development, 1830–1970, in W. Weiwel & J. Persky (Eds) Suburban Sprawl: Private Decisions and Public Policy (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe). Mazza, L. (1987) Tipologie di piano regolatore e loro giustificazione, Archivo di Studi Urbani e Regionali, 28, pp. 125–138. McDonough, W. & Braungart, M. (2002) Cradle to Cradle (New York: North Point Press). McNeill, J. R. & McNeill, W. (2003) The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New York: Norton). Melosi, M. (2000) The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Mumford, L. (1961) The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World). Myers, D. (1997) Anchor points for planning’s identification, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 16(3), pp. 224–225. Myers, D. & Banerjee, T. (2005) Towards greater heights for planning: Reconciling the differences between profession, practice, and academic field, Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), pp. 121–129. National Council on Public Works Improvements (1988) Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works (Washington, DC: National Council on Public Works Improvements). Nelson, A. (2006) Leadership in a new era, Journal of the American Planning Association, 724, pp. 393–407. Neuman, M. (2007) How institutions and individuals use plans: Planning cultures and images of futures, in L. Hopkins & M. Zapata (Eds) Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute Press). Neuman, M. & Whittington, J. (2000) Building California’s Future: Current Conditions in Infrastructure Planning, Budgeting, and Financing (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California). Olshansky, R. (2006) Planning after Hurricane Katrina, Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(6), pp. 147–153. Perry, D. (Ed.) (1995) Building the Public City (Beverly Hills: Sage). Spatial Planning Leadership by Infrastructure 217 Downloaded By: [Neuman, Michael] At: 10:53 18 June 2009 Platt, H. (1983) City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Pomerance, R. (2007) A cool hand leads Hotlanta, Pennsylvania Gazette, 105(6), pp. 56–57. Saalman, H. (1971) Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York: George Braziller). Sassen, S. (2001 [1991]) The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press). United Nations Center for Human Settlements (2006) The State of the World’s Cities 2006/2007 (London: Earthscan). Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young (2007) Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute). World Watch Institute (2007) State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future (Washington, DC: World Watch Institute).