PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Looking at History to Understand Today

Public Engagement Today
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In9oSjjltOs
EARLY YEARS
Setting Down Our Roots
Competing solutions
to the problem of congestion

• City Beautiful: Aesthetics

• professionals and industrialists

• City Practical: Administration

• professionals

• City Social: Physical and Social

• settlement workers
The City Beautiful:
Daniel Burnham
City Practical:
Frederick Law
Olmsted Jr.
City Social:
Mary Kingsbury
Simkhovitch
City Social movement:

Greenwich House Mary Simkhovitch

 Austin in the
1800s
NOT pressured by growth
Edwin Waller, 1853 Plan of Austin
Austin 1890 - 1895
Congress Avenue 1875
 Tensions of the Day:
What is the best route to effective reform?

Is it more important to build a beautiful city or a functional city?

Do we frame the solution as one that is physical or procedural?

Is it more effective to support reform through zoning and code

changes, or to reform through large scale planning?
Planner as social scientist
Surveys and Exhibits:
• Committee on Congestion of Population (1907)

• “Exhibit on the Congestion of Population” at the Museum of

Natural History in March(1908)
UTOPIAN VISIONS
Planner as visionary
Hausmann’s Paris 1850-1870
• In the wake of the French Revolution
• Efforts to remake the city to prevent mobs
• Attempts to isolate particular neighborhoods
• Comprehensive city planning for solving the problems of
• Water, sewage, trains, carriages, and pedestrians.
• Mass society had come into being
• Governments held responsibility for public sanitation,
transportation routes, the physical conditions of cities.
Haussmann’s
Plan for Paris
View of typical narrow streets barricaded
by insurgents in the Revolution of 1848
Haussmann’s
Plan for Paris
- 1853

Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Plan of Paris, 1853

Avenue Richard Lenoir, typical of the boulevards cut by Haussmann through Paris
Haussmann’s
Plans for
Paris

Demolition of Street in Paris

Haussmann’s
Plans for Paris
Cross-section view of the Pre-Haussman
water and sewer system
Tourist boat on the new Parisian sewers after 1852
Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand: Les Promenades de Paris Vol 1 and 2 1867-1873
Olmsted &Vaux Greensward Plan, 1858
The City Beautiful
What is the ideal city for the twentieth century – the city that
can best expresses the power and beauty of modern
technology and the most enlightened ideas of social justice.
--Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias
Inheriting Haussmann’s Paris
• Modernism's imperative to enable vehicular movement and
to assist the forces of capitalist industry and commerce

• Ironic tension between America’s desire for civic

monumentality and the authoritarianism need for that style
of city planning.

• American millionaires looked to Europe for its aristocratic

mores of civic building programs.
The City
Beautiful: Daniel
Burnham (1846-1912)
The City
Beautiful

World’s Columbian Exposition: 1893

Fairs and Expositions
• Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876
• International Cotton Exposition, Atlanta, 1881
• World's Industrial and Cotton Exposition, New Orleans, 1885
• Exposition Universelle Internationale, Paris, 1889, 1900
• World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893
• Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895
• Trans-Mississippi Exposition, Omaha, 1898
• Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo 1901
• South Carolina and Interstate and West Indian Exposition, Charleston, 1901-1902
• Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904
• Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, Portland, Oregon, 1905
• Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle, 1909
• Negro Historical and Industrial Exposition, Richmond, Virginia, 1915
• Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915
• Panama California Exposition, San Diego, 1915-1916

From: http://www.boondocksnet.com/expos/
The Court of Honor
Looking east over the Midway Plaisance
The Electricity Building
Interior of the electricity building
“Dream no small dreams.”
Daniel Burnham
 Daniel
Burnham -
The Chicago
Plan (1909)

Note: 1909 also the year of the First National Conference on City Planning
Inspiring Civic Unity and Adoration
“The central administration building…. Surmounted by a
dome of impressive height, to be seen and felt by the people,
to whom it should stand as the symbol of civic order and
unity. Rising from the plain upon which Chicago rests, its
effect may be compared to that of the dome of St. Peter’s at
Rome.”
- Charles Burnham, Plan of Chicago
Chicago Plan
• Comprehensive plan but with no legal force
• Wanted uniform order in order to save the city, “from chaos incident to
rapid growth, and especially to the influx of people of many nationalities
without common tradition or habits of life.”
• Addressed aesthetic concerns that were not looked at in the housing
surveys, or land use controls of the day.
• Not adequate housing details – but instead ‘spatial opportunity” for all
good housing and all income levels
Critiques of the City Beautiful
1. Impossibility of completing City Beautiful plans
2. Plans failed to acknowledge the centrality of politics
3. Critics asserted a functionalist or “American” Aesthetic
against the neoclassicism of typical designs.
Legacy of the City Beautiful
• It took the city for what it was and refashioned it into
something better” – something the Garden City movement
failed to do.
• It established comprehensive planning
• It gives us the vocabulary for civic architecture and urban
beautification that we inherit today.
• It created a urban political reform movement and a created
a legacy of civic activism.
UTOPIAN IDEALS
19th Century Urban Growth
• London – 900,000 to 4.5 million
• Paris – 500,000 to 2.5 million
• Berlin 190,000 to 2 million
• New York – 60,000 to 3.4 million
• Chicago – a village in 1840 was 1.7 million by the turn of the
century.

All taking place in a time of laissez-fiare economics and

feverish speculation.
Utopian Planners

Ebenezer Howard: Garden City (1898)

Le Corbusier: Plan Voisin (1925)

Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City (1935)

3 Plans with Shared Values
1. The pervasive fear of a revolution from the 19th century
metropolis
2. The sense that modern technology had made possible
exciting new urban forms
3. The great expectation that a revolutionary age of
brotherhood and freedom was at hand.
3 Plans based on technology of the
day
1. Howard: express train
2. Wright: automobile, telephone, and radio
3. Le Corbusier: skyscraper

• But their beliefs were more than a belief in the power of technology – it was a belief
that technology could be used to help manifest the inherent structure of an
industrial society so that an ideal form could help bring about order, freedom,
prosperity, and beauty.
• They moved beyond earlier expressions of social ideals and rendered them in
physical form.
• {Note: Burnham paid little attention to the automobile and was criticized for it.)
Ebenezer Howard &
the Garden City
Ebenezer Howard:
1850-1928
Issues of
the Day

Ebenezer Howard: To-morrow, a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), which he

republished 4 years later as Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902)
The Garden City
The Garden City
• Central park with a
ring of a “crystal
palace”
• 1000 acres total
surrounded by 5000
acres
• Connected by rail lines
• Financed through
philanthropic land
speculation
Sears and Roebuck Catalogue: 1908
The Transect
Le Corbusier
Frank Lloyd Wright
Le Corbusier

http://www.neuchateltourisme.ch/pictures/content/neuc
hatel/Le_Corbusier.jpg
Radiant City
(1922)

A city of organization and freedom

1. We must de-
congest the
centres of our
cities
2. We must augment
their density
3. We must increase
the means for
getting about
4. We must increase
parks and open
space.

Central Station
 Frank Lloyd Wright

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright
Frank Lloyd
Wright –
Broadacre
City (1935)
Austin in the day
Civic Pride
Infrastructure
In 1905 Austin had few sanitary sewers virtually no public parks or
playgrounds, and only one paved street.
Historian David C. Humphrey
Littlefield Building 1910
The Great Granite Dam (Before flood - showing power house and paddle boat)
REFLECTION
CITY SOCIAL CITY BEAUTIFUL CITY PRACTICAL
Elites, reformers, Architects, visionaries, Sanitation engineers, city
Who is the Planner? intellectuals, social engineers administrators,
scientists bureaucrats
Where do they get their Social class, self (claims Sponsors, financial class, Law, elected officials, “the
authority? moral authority) professionalization institution”

Who do they say they're People, tenement Overall Greater Good, Citizens, residents
serving? residents Society at Large

Surveys, social science, Precedent, ideas/ideals Administrative data, fiscal,

What is data / information
photo journalism, monitoring
for them?
narrative
Research displays (at Plans, visual renderings Administrative reports
How does communication
large), one-on-one (day-
happen?
to-day)
SUBURBANIZATION
Creating the World We Live In
“Our property seems to me the most
beautiful in the world. It is so close
to Babylon that we enjoy all the
advantages of the city, and yet
when we come home we stay away
from all the noise and dust.”
-A letter from an early suburbanite to the king of
Persia 539 BCE, written in cuneiform on a clay
tablet
The Set-up
• Innovations in technology
• Model T Ford
• Assembly line and mass
production
• Cheaper cars and higher wages

• Infrastructure
• Road building
• Extension of utilities

• Changing social realities

Ford’s Highland Park plant
• Great Depression
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/ford.htm
• WWII
• Housing starts plummet
• Birth rates fall
“…the revolution Ford had wrought…”
• 1927: 1 car for every 5

http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1908/model.t.html
Americans

• Allowed workers to live

farther from work

• In some cities, suburbs grew

faster than central cities

• Frank Lloyd Wright and

LeCorbusier viewed the
automobile as a
“revolutionary liberating
force” (Jackson 1985: 175)
The Perfect Storm
• New roads for the
automobile age

• Zoning of land uses

• Government-
guaranteed
mortgage lending

• The Baby Boom

Road building
• Robert Moses

• Decentralization – the
horizontal city

• “from anywhere to
anywhere”

• Federal Highway Acts

(1944 and 1956)

http://www.texasfreeway.com/Austin/historic/photos/austin_histo
ric_photos.shtml
Zoning
• Village of Euclid vs. Ambler
Realty (1926)

• Segregation of uses ‘public

welfare’
• health, safety, morals and
convenience

• Established zoning as:

• valid form of nuisance control
• reasonable exercise of police
power

“A nuisance may be merely the right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor
instead of the barnyard” – Justice George Sutherland
Government
Backed Mortgage
Lending
• Federal Housing Authority (FHA)
• Est. in National Housing Act of
1934
• Private mortgages federally
insured
• Longer-term mortgages
• Lower down payments

• Redlining

• Dramatic increase in housing starts

• Population loss in major cities

HOLC's 1936 ‘security map’ of Philadelphia
http://cml.upenn.edu/redlining/images/HOLC_1936-800.jpg
Baby Boom
• Returning Gis

• Birth rates DOUBLE between

1940 and 1957

• Largest generation in
American history

• By 1964: 1/3 of the

population under the age of
19
http://www.biologydaily.com/biology/Post-WW2_baby_boom
O Suburban Pioneers!
"Any fool can build homes—
what counts is how many
you can sell for how little."
William J. Levitt

"Everybody lives on the same side of the

tracks. They have no slums to fret about,
no families of conspicuous wealth to
envy, no traditional upper crust to whet
and thwart their social aspirations."
Saturday Evening Post, 1954.

http://www.fandm.edu/levittown/default.html
URBAN RENEWAL
The Trauma
Ebenezer Howard
- The Garden City
(1898)
 Daniel
Burnham - The
Chicago Plan
(1909)
Le Corbusier
Plan Voisin
(1925)
The Perfect Storm
• New roads for the
automobile age

• Zoning of land uses

• Government-
guaranteed
mortgage lending

• The Baby Boom

What did this all lead to?
How “The Problem” Was Understood

• Suburbanization
• Urban Blight
• An Inefficient City
 “Democracy had not
solved the problem of
building large-scale public
works, so Moses solved it
by ignoring democracy”

Big Bob the Builder

Moses’ Record
• Iconic Public Amenities
• Jones Beach
• Riverside Park
• Randall’s Island

• Bridges and Thruways

• Cross Bronx Expressway
• Henry Hudson Parkway

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Robert_Moses_projects
Moses’ Record
• In Stuyvesant Town Moses cleared 11,000 working class
tenants to move in 8,756 middle class families.

• Working to revitalize Manhattan displaced 100,000 low-

income people 40% Black and Hispanic

• Displaced over 5000 mom-and-pop businesses

Moses on rehabilitation: “They think we should…. fix up with

rubber bands, scotch tape and violins.”
Pruitt Igoe (1960s) Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier (1925)
Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis (1972)
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
• http://vimeo.com/18356414
THE REACTION IN
PLANNING
The Context
…….. the Earth
 Rachel Carson

Rachael Carson
…….. and its People
Postmodernism
How the Planning & Design
Profession Responds
 The Collapse of
Grand Narratives

Mies van der Rohe’s -

“Less is more.”

Venturi – “Less is a bore.”

Learning from Las Vegas - 1972

 A proposal for
constructive dis-illusion, it
is simultaneously an
appeal for order and
disorder, for the simple
and the complex, for the
joint existence of
permanent reference
and random happening,
of the private and the
public, of innovation
and tradition, of both the
retrospective and the
prophetic gesture.

1984
Two Responses to Nature
The pragmatic
The social
Ian McHarg
“Our eyes do not divide us from the
world, but unite us with it…Let us then
abandon the simplicity of separation
and give unity its due. Let us abandon
the self mutilation which has been our
way and give expression to the potential
harmony of man-nature…Man is that
uniquely conscious creature who can
perceive and express. He must become
the steward of the biosphere. To do this
he must design with nature.”
Design with Nature
• Ecological planning—systematic
way of analyzing and designing
around natural systems
• Creates overlays of features in order to eliminate areas of
high ecological value from development
• Highly rational process: ecological data inventory,
interpretation, assessment, design synthesis, guidelines,
plan
 The Layer Cake
understanding a place requires understanding its ecological history in both
time and space

Land use
Wildlife
Vegetation
Soils
Surface hydrology / drainage
Climate
Geology – surface (Pleistocene)

Geology - bedrock
Lawrence Halprin

http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2009/10/landscape_legend_lawrence_halp.html
Ira Keller Fountain (Ira's Fountain),
with Lovejoy Fountain Park
Portland, OR 1971
SEA RANCH,
Sonoma County, CA
1964
FRAMING THEORY
In the Wake of Urban Renewal
• .On a day-to-day basis, planners found themselves on
both sides of the divide; they were part of the larger
government structures that perpetuated existing market
forces, even as they simultaneously made efforts to curb
the effects of the market.
• Through the ideas of critical theory, planners sought to
become aware of how mechanisms such as information
control, network formation, and a basic “framing” of
issues could serve to either blindly perpetuate or critically
negotiate existing power dynamics
Planning – Advocacy Planning

• “…somebody else defined my community in a

way that allowed them to justify the
destruction of it.” Mel King
Paul Davidoff
“Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” Journal of the American Institute of Planners in 1965

• The planner isn’t solely a value-neutral technician; instead, values are part of every planning
process.
• City planners shouldn’t attempt to frame a single plan that represents the “ public interest ”
but rather “represent and plead the plans of many interest groups.”
• So-called “citizen participation” programs usually react to official plans and programs instead
of encouraging people to propose their own goals, policies and future actions.
Neighborhood groups and ad hoc associations brought together to protest public actions
should rightly do their own plans.
• Davidoff said that professionals should be concerned with physical, economic and social
planning
Our Theoretic Heritage: Critical Theory
• Critical theory is an attempt to illustrate how the structures
of capitalism in mass market societies hide the dynamics of
power which the market system unwittingly keeps in place.
• Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and later Habermas

• Habermas: Communicative Action Theory

• Emphatically upheld the norms of democracy in the face of the
historical and social forces that threaten it.
• Lifeworld and the System
• Necessity of an “Ideal Discourse”
Transforming Instrumental Action to
Communicative Action
John Forester’s Communicative Action
1. comprehensible (in other words, not laden with professional
jargon);
2. sincere, so as to establish trust;
3. legitimate (contextually appropriate and justifiable); and
4. true, as far as can be known.

This understanding would reframe the action of the planning

profession as attention-shaping (communicative action) rather
than more narrowly as a means to some end (instrumental
action).
Post-modern Variations
Judith Innes, Patsy Healy, and Laurie Sandercock

• Communicative rationality can no longer lay claim to any universal

rationality or normativity.
• Given the fact of multiple publics, planning practice had to find answers
within larger discursive processes.
• Planners thus become facilitators of a nuanced inclusiveness and worked
to establish some type of consensus around shifting normative claims.
• This perspective is as much about the emerging and evolving communities
of discourse as it is about the actual collective decisions being made.
Our Inherited Contemporary Traditions
• Planner’s Role:
• acts from within the system of government, and as a mediator, interpreter, evaluator
(Forester, 1999) [not experts]
• identifies and incorporate key stakeholders (J. E. Innes, 1995)
• Practices: aims for consensus during decision-making processes (Forester, 1999)
• Values: gives equal voice to all participants (Sandercock, 1998)
• Knowledge:
• works from an understanding of communicative rationality (Healey, 1993)
• allows experts to bridge knowledge gaps between participants (J. E. Innes, 1995)
• Trust:
• seeks broad and inclusive participation based on trust (Sandercock, 1998)
• ensures that groups understand how participation matters (J. E. Innes, 1995)
POWER
 THE ISSUE OF PERFORMATIVE POWER:
MUNICIPAL PLACEMAKING

ZERO-SUM: Arnstein’s Ladder Agonistic

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the Hillier, J. (2002). Shadows of Power: An allegory of prudence
American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. in land-use planning. Routledge.
Civic Life in the Cyber Age

Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms “Understanding ‘New Power’”

Harvard Business Review, Dec 2014

https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding-new-power