Utopian thinking is concerned with ideal end states or proposals leading to ideal states, and places them in critical contrast to existing realities.43 It addresses issues of power only by implication; by pressing proposals that amount to a complete overhaul, and indeed rejection, of existing arrangements, it by implication rejects the systems of power on which such
arrangements rest, although how explicitly it raises the issue of power varies. But there are variations within utopian thinking that have to do with the extent of the focus on the built
environment, the forms and shapes of utopias, and the aspects as to which they stand in critical contrast.
There are three main variations of utopian thinking. The first, design utopias, address directly ideals of a perfect society but are little concerned with its physical form. The second, symbolic utopias, use the forms of the built environment simply to illustrate broad social concepts of such a society. The third, physical utopias, see defining forms of the built environment as in fact decisively incorporating the desired ideal. While abstract utopias have a long history, as concrete planning proposals aimed at the improvement of the built environment they are of relatively recent vintage.
Design utopias are oldest, going back millennia. They focus at the societal scale, are sharply critical of existing forms, and share with other utopias a lack of concern with implementation, developing instead ideal models, not so much concerned with physical arrangements, urban or rural, as with the social, with relationships of government, or among individuals, or between individuals and society. Plato might be an early contributor, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun, St. Augustine’s City of God, are among others.
Symbolic utopias, deceptively related to the structuring of the built environment, used physically shaped proposals to illustrate graphically, or symbolize, desired social
arrangements. Butler’s Erewhon, H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward, Jack London’s Iron Heel, and George Orwell’s 1984, are examples. Both of these types are what David Harvey would call utopias of process.44 The third type of utopian planning is what Harvey would call utopias of product: planning whose primary focus is affecting spatial and physical relationships.
Applied utopias are those often seen as being in a direct line from the early utopias, although their social justice edge is often implicit rather than explicit – the proposals for the design of city forms and social relationships, such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities proposals. They are physical utopias and share the heart of utopianism, the grounding in ideals involving
fundamentally different new social, economic, or institutional arrangements, derived from a critical view of the existing society. But they make serious physical proposals as the way to those changes, rather than seeing physical changes as the result or simply accompaniment of broader social changes. It may well be that such proposals entered the imagination only at the point when physical changes in the organization of urban life began to appear as something subject to public control.
Garden Cities ideas have had wide popularity, and have been implemented to varying degrees.
The ideas of the Regional Planning Association of America in the United States, the new towns developments in the United Kingdom and in the Scandinavian countries, the housing
developments of the between-wars periods in Germany, all owe much to analogous thinking.
None has produced developments operating at the scale of the large city or the megalopolis, although they were centrally concerned with issues of regionalism, and all have been severely limited by the dependence on national political and economic structures that have curtailed the resources available to their full development. The abortive New Towns initiative in the United States in the 1970s is a classic example of the limitations within a broader national context little focused on social justice ideals.
What is important about all of these evolutions that social justice planning took from its roots in the early utopian schemes is their central concern with the social and their critical view of the existing conditions, both aspects of which vary from one to the other in their scale, their depth, and their concern with implementation, but not in their willingness to challenge the conventional and the established in their efforts.
Conclusion
So there have been three different approaches in the history of planning, each with multiple differing aspects. They range from the technicist to the social, running sometimes parallel, almost always mixing to some degree, often in tension with each other. Their separate natures can be formulated in many different ways. Their difference is analogous to that between substantive rationality and instrumental rationality in Habermasian terms, between
conventional planning and justice planning in the current discussions about the Just City.45 Israel Stollman, the well-respected long-time leader of both the American Planning
Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners, phrased it as the tension between planners following the precepts of their clients and planners asserting their own values.46
Thus this essay should not be taken as suggesting a moral judgment on the actions of individual planners, but rather as an attempt to highlight the divergent roles that planning has been asked to play historically in the shaping of cities. The interplay between what is wanted, and by whom, and what is possible, between what is just and what is realistic, creates a constant tension in city development. Clarity on the causes of that tension and attention to the
alternatives for its resolution ought to be an on-going mandate for those concerned about the future of cities.
Notes
Original publication details: Marcuse, Peter. 2011. “The Three Historic Currents of City Planning”. In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 643–55. Reproduced with permission from John Wiley & Sons.
1. The difference between the two definitions roughly corresponds to the uses of the word
“social” in schools of social work and in departments of sociology. As planners use the term, it often corresponds to the “soft” concerns of planning, as opposed to the “hard” of physical concerns.
2. Leonardo Benevolo (1967) The Origins of Modern Town Planning. Trans. Judith Landry.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3. Peter Hall (2001) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. 3rd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
4. Mel Scott (1969) American City Planning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
5. Israel Stollman (1979) The values of the city planner. In The Practice of Local Government Planning, eds Frank So and Israel Stollman, American Planning Association, et al.
Washington, DC: International City Management Association in cooperation with the American Planning Association (hereafter “The Green Book”), 7. Subsequently, Stollman talks explicitly about the values of “the planner,” but of the planner as an individual, not of planning as a profession.
6. Both Coke in the first ICMA Green Book (James G. Coke (1968) Antecedents of local
planning. In Principles and Practice of Urban Planning, eds William I. Goodman and Eric C. Freund. Washington, DC: International City Managers’ Association, 5–28) and David Harvey (1978) On planning the ideology of planning. In Planning for the ’80s: Challenge and Response, ed. J. Burchall. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, separate out that component of planning that is technical.
7. See for instance David Harvey (1976) Labor, capital, and class struggle around the built environment in advanced capitalist societies. Politics and Society 6: 265–95; Edmond Preteceille (1976) Urban planning: the contradictions of capitalist urbanization. Antipode
March: 69–76; Richard E. Foglesong (1986) Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Christine Boyer (1983) Dreaming the Rational City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. T. J. Schlereth (1981) Burnham’s Plan and Moody’s Manual: city planning as progressive reform. Journal of the American Planning Association 47 (1981): 70–82.
9. Scott, American City Planning, 123.
10. Proceedings of the Engineers’ Club of Philadephia July 1912: 198–215 at p. 201.
11. In 1910 before the Second National Conference on City Planning and Congestion of Population, reprinted as F. L. Olmsted (1910) The basic principles of city planning.
American City 3: 6772.
12. M. Castells and J. Borja, in collaboration with Belil Mireira and Benner Chris (1997) Local and Global. The Management of Cities in the Information Age. United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat). London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
13. Peter Marcuse (2002) Depoliticizing globalization: from neo-Marxism to the network society of Manuel Castells. In Understanding the City, eds John Eade and Christopher Mele. Oxford: Blackwell, 131–58.
14. Castells and Borja, Local and Global.
15. Nicolai Ouroussoff (2006) Injecting a bold shot of the new on the Upper East Side. New York Times October 10. Available online at
www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/arts/design/10fost.html?
scp=1&sq=ouroussoff%20Upper%20East%20Side%20October%2010%202006&st=cse (accessed October 21, 2010).
16. See, for instance, the columns of Nicolai Ouroussoff, architect critic of the New York Times. On Gehry in particular, see (with a symptomatic headline “What will be left of Gehry’s vision for Brooklyn?”) New York Times March 21, 2008: E25.
17. The most recent examples run from downtown Los Angeles to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New York.
18. For a more detailed discussion of the multiple roles of planners in practice, see Peter Marcuse (1976) Professional ethics and beyond: values in planning. Journal of the
American Institute of Planners 42 (3): 254–74. Reprinted in Public Planning and Control of Urban and Land Development: Cases and Materials, ed. Donald Hagman. 2nd edn.
Minneapolis, MN: West Publishing Co. (1980), 393–400.
19. See, for instance, the accounts collected in Bruce W. McClendon and Anthony James Catanese (1996) Planners on Planning: Leading Planners Offer Real-Life Lessons on What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why. Jossey-Bass Public Administration Series. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
20. Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
21. See Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig (1992) The People and the Park: A History of Central Park. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
22. Peter Marcuse (1998) Sustainability is not enough. Environment and Urbanization 10 (2):
103–12. Also in The Future of Sustainability, ed. Marco Keiner. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag (2006), 55–68.
23. See Peter Marcuse (1980) Housing in early city planning. Journal of Urban History 6 (2):
153–76, reprinted in slightly different form as Peter Marcuse (1980) Housing policy and city planning: the puzzling split in the United States, 1893–1931. In Shaping an Urban World, ed. Gordon E. Cherry. London: Mansell.
24. S. Arnstein (1969) The ladder of citizen participation. Journal of American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–24.
25. Peter Marcuse (1970) Tenant Participation – for What? Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, Working Paper No. 112–20, July 30.
26. As adopted by the American Institute of Certified Planners, March 19, 2005. The full text, and its history, is available at www.planning.org/ethics/ethicscode.htm (accessed October 21, 2010).
27. Norman Krumholz and John Forester (1990) Making Equity Planning Work. Leadership in the Public Sector, foreword by Alan A. Altshuler. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press; Norman Krumholz and Pierre Clavel (1994) Reinventing Cities: Equity Planners Tell Their Stories. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
28. Leonie Sandercock (ed.) (1998) Making the Invisible Visible. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Thomas Angotti (2008) New York for Sale: Community Planning
Confronts Global Real Estate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1977) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Pantheon Books.
30. In Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s sense of the term: Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (1993) The Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
31. This characteristic needs to be spelled out in more detail. It is intuitively likely that working-class groups, immigrants, minority group members, women, non-conformists in lifestyle or ideology, are to be found active within or supportive of critical social justice planning, but the detailed evidence remains to be marshaled. It is one of the lacunae in existing research that this has not yet been done systematically.
32. John Friedmann (1987 [1973]) Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday; John Friedmann (1987) The social mobilization tradition of planning. In Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 225–310.
33. Susan Fainstein (2009) Planning and the just city. In Searching for the Just City, eds Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, and Justin Steil. New York and London: Routledge, 19–39.
34. John Forester (1989) Planning in the Face of Power. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
35. Michael Burayidi (ed.) (2000) Urban Planning in a Multicultural Society. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 225–34.
36. Clare G. Hurley (1999) Planning theory … approaching the millennium … Study Manual for the Comprehensive AICP Exam of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
Chapter President’s Council, the American Planning Association.
37. Angotti, New York for Sale, and James DeFilippis (2004) Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital. New York: Routledge.
38. Paul Davidoff (1965) Advocacy and pluralism in planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 31: 331–8; Linda Davidoff and Nel Gold (1974) Suburban action:
advocacy planning for an open society. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 40:
12–21.
39. June Thomas (1998) Racial inequality and empowerment: necessary theoretical constructs for understanding US planning history. In Making the Invisible Visible, ed. L. Sandercock, 198–208.
40. Sandercock, Making the Invisible Visible.
41. Peter Marcuse (2007) Social justice in New Orleans: planning after Katrina. Progressive Planning summer: 8–12.
42. The argument is developed in P. Marcuse (2005) Katrina disasters and social justice.
Progressive Planning, the Magazine of Planners Network 165 (fall): 1, 30–5.
43. For background, I have found Malcolm Miles (2007) Urban Utopias: The Built and Social Architectures of Alternative Settlements. London: Routledge, exceptionally useful.
There is a Society for Utopian Studies, whose website has links to a substantial bibliography.
44. David Harvey (2000) Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
45. See Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, and Justin Stein (eds) (2009) Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice.
Oxford: Routledge.
46. Stollman, The values of the city planner, 8.