Planning gets a lot of stick from some because it is said to be akin to social engineering. In particular there’s a strange bunch of people (mainly in the USA but occasionally in NZ) who are particularly concerned with the elements of planning which are roughly encompassed by the phrase ‘Smart Growth‘. Wendell Cox is a particularly vocal opponent of Smart Growth, saying that it effectively amounts to social engineering. Cox’s book outlines his opinion on planning pretty clearly:
People around the world associate the “universal dream of home ownership” with an unprecedented improvement in quality of life. But there is a war on this dream, the result of policies that seek to control urban sprawl or suburbanization. The proponents and governments that implement such anti-suburban policies do so with little debate and virtually without any serious analysis of the consequences.
Anti-suburban policies outlaw development on large swaths of land, creating scarcity and increasing housing prices. This means less home ownership in the future and less wealth creation. Anti-suburban policies hopelessly seek to force people to use mass transit instead of cars, while failing to build roadway capacity to accommodate rising demand. The result is more intense traffic congestion, air pollution, and less productive urban areas.
Author Wendell Cox takes a closer look at this growing problem in War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life. With most of the world still living in relative poverty, it is clear that neither economic growth nor wealth creation can be taken for granted. Anti-suburban policies must be rejected and repealed. Only by such actions will national economies and their urban areas be positioned to ensure that future generations have a better quality of life.
What has often confused me about this whole position is that most planning rules (particularly the ones that make a big difference like minimum parking requirements) seem to be the opposite – limiting urban densities and therefore ‘forcing’ peripheral growth. Similarly, most transport spending in Auckland has historically been on motorway expansions, which encourage low density urban sprawl. Rules limiting development intensity (through density controls, height limits, yard requirements, parking requirements and so forth) are often justified in terms of preserving the ‘amenity’ of the area or ensuring ‘quality development’ outcomes. Particular rules, like requiring minimum apartment sizes, seem to particularly verge on social engineering, but once again from the perspective that it’s important to limit development intensity.
Of course this doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any planning rules at all. Planning, at its simple level, is necessary to overcome the issue of externalities – that something done in one place can have adverse effects on others which just isn’t fair if there isn’t some sort of mechanism to control them. Think someone setting up a polluting factory next to your house. The other necessity of planning is to enable environmental protection and enhancement, to ensure – as per the Resource Management Act in New Zealand’s situation – that we manage natural and physical resources in a sustainable way. But a lot of planning rules arguably don’t really fit into either of these categeories for their justification. Minimum apartment sizes are a classic example of this – unless there’s justifiable proof that small apartments are really bad for people’s health (and I don’t think that’s the case).
My hypothesis is that we can call planners out for attempting social engineering with respect to some of the rules which end up in District Plans. However, in the complete opposite to Wendell Cox’s hypothesis that planners are forcing people out of the sprawl they’d otherwise prefer, I actually think that the social engineering undertaken remains a fear of intensity and density, a fear of urbanism in many respects – harking back to planning’s roots in 19th century England. There’s still an, almost sub-conscious, instinct that the lower density a development is the better, an assumption that people naturally prefer to live in a large house with a large backyard with two cars in the garage.
I think that many of the planning debates we have – over things like minimum apartment sizes, removing minimum parking requirements, whether places ‘should’ have dedicated outdoor open space and so forth – are somewhat strange arguments, because surely if someone doesn’t like a place then they won’t buy or rent it. And if enough people obviously don’t want to buy or rent a particular type of dwelling, then the developers will stop building them. But just because one person thinks that they prefer a large house with a yard and a double-garage increasingly doesn’t mean that everyone else wants the same thing. And it definitely doesn’t mean that other housing types should be banned, just because they’re “not something I’d like to live in”. That’s like banning Toyotas because they’re not as flash as Ferraris, or assuming that everyone likes SUVs because one person does, then banning other types of cars because they’re not SUVs.
I’m sorry Wendell Cox, but I think you’re the biggest social engineer of the lot.