Susan S. Fainstein

NEW DIRECTIONS IN PLANNING THEORY

The author examines three approaches to planning theory: the communicative model, the new urbanism, and the just city. The first type emphasizes the planner’s role in mediating among “stakeholders,” the second paints a physical picture of a desirable planned city, and the third presents a model of spatial relations based on equity. Differences among the types reflect an enduring tension between a focus on the planning process and an emphasis on desirable outcomes. The author defends the continued use of the just-city model and a modified form of the political economy mode of analysis that underlies it.

Cities and Diversity Should We Want It? Can We Plan For It?

Diversity has become the new orthodoxy of city planning. The term has several meanings: a varied physical design, mixes of uses, an expanded public realm, and multiple social grouping sexercising their “right to the city.” Its impetus lies in the postmodernist/poststructuralist critique of modernism’s master narratives and more specifically in reactions to the urban landscape created by segregation, urban renewal, massive housing projects, and highway building programs. Privileging diversity raises significant issues. Can planned environments produce diversity or only a “staged authenticity”? Does emphasizing diversity obscure the economic structure? Is there a connection between diversity and economic innovation? Does social diversity necessarily contribute to equity and a broadly satisfying public realm? Rather than setting diversity as the principal goal of city planning, I argue for the model of the just city, based on Nussbaum’s concept of capacities and a recognition of the inevitable trade-offs among equity, diversity, growth, and sustainability.

Planning Theory and the City

The distinction between urban theory and planning theory is not intellectually viable. Reasons include (1) the historical roots and justification for planning, which depends on a vision of the city rather than simply a method of arriving at prescription; (2) the dependence of effective planning on its context, which means that planning activity needs to be rooted in an understanding of the field in which it is operating; and (3) the objective of planning as conscious creation of the just city, which requires a substantive normative framework.

Promoting Economic Development Urban Planning in the United States and Great Britain

Abstract Within the United States and Great Britain, the focus of planning has switched from regulating to promoting development. The causes of this change have been economic restructuring, conservative national administrations, and a learning process resulting in a pro-active approach. Planners now engage primarily in dealmaking and negotiation rather than land use designation. The result is a planning mode that is realistic and flexible but primarily oriented to the needs of private capital. The cases of Londons Strategic Planning Guidance, New Yorks housing plan, Battery Park City, and London Docklands, as well as some instances of neighborhood planning, are analyzed in this article to illustrate the argument.

Competitiveness, Cohesion, and Governance: Their Implications for Social Justice

The formulation of this program assumed, in the words of the Economicand Social Research Council framing document (ESRC, n.d.), that ‘social cohesionfacilitates urban economic development and, conversely, [that] social exclusion erodeslong-run competitive capacity’; that is, the competitive advantage of cities is enhanced bysocial cohesion.

Inequality in Global City-Regions

Within the developed countries, business and governmental leaders of large cities typically aspire to reach global-city status. Yet no convincing evidence shows that the inhabitants of global cities and their surrounding regions fare better than the residents of lesser places. Indeed “the globalcity hypothesis” argues that these metropolises are especially prone to extremes of inequality (Friedmann 1986). Despite being, in aggregate, the wealthiest areas of their respective nations, global-city regions tend to have large, dense groups of very poor people, often living in close juxtaposition with concentrations of the extraordinarily wealthy. According to Sassen (1991), the particular industrial and occupational structure of global cities produces a bifurcated earnings structure that in turn creates the outcome of the “disappearing middle”. This paper shows that global-city regions in wealthy countries do display high levels of income inequality (although not necessarily of class polarization), but that the explanation given by global-city theorists in terms of earnings is not wholly satisfactory. It further indicates that the five wealthy global-city regions of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and the Randstad (Netherlands) vary in terms of the extent of inequality. It concludes by examining the reasons for inequality in such regions and the effects of public policy on it.

Economic Restructuring and the Rise of Urban Social Movements

The rise of social movements in postwar American cities has been associated with economic reorganization and urban redevelopment. But we argue that although economic change in the cities and social migration motivated by national economic forces provided the objective conditions within which movements arose, specifically political factors were determinative. The first part of this article explores in theory the linkages between economic change and social mobilization. It concludes that urban movements must be under-stood within the context of both routine urban politics and national political events. Using New York City as a case, we go on to show that before and after the national black movement of the 1960s, popular urban protest was commonplace, yet was channeled and contained by the political system. Thus, in recent years, despite enormous economic reorganization and decline in the situation of the lower classes in New York, urban movements have not arisen. Rather, communal protest is isolated, institutionalized in various mechanisms for citizen participation, and results, at best, in a few concessions. The final section of the article assesses the possibilities of social action rooted in urban movements. It argues that only a national movement and political party can establish the context for powerful mobilizations at the urban level.

Spaces for Play: The Impacts of Entertainment Development on New York City

The economies of many American cities have shown signs of recovery after the deindustrialization of the preceding two decades. Tourism has been one of the principal components of inner-city economic growth. Although building facilities for tourists represents a gamble for urban leaders, numerous examples of success exist. New York City possesses a sizable competitive advantage in the tourism sector The authors examine New Yorks tourism market. Case studies are presented of three tourist-based developments: the Jacob Javits Convention Center; the 42nd Street entertainment district, and a proposed stadium plan for the Yankees. These cases are typical of the type of tourist-based developments currently being pursued by many U.S. cities. It is concluded that tourism facilities are promising investments; this is tempered by considerations relating to the high levels of public subsidy demanded for projects-like the proposed Yankee Stadium development-that do not offer a sufficient return on public subsidy.

The Ambivalent State Economic Development Policy in the U.S. Federal System under the Reagan Administration

The Reagan administration reduced federal spending on urban and regional development just when the American economy experienced massive restructuring. Federal withdrawals, however, rather than simply reducing governmental intervention in markets, produced a shift of action to the state and municipal level. The impact of restructuring caused state and local governments, often under pressure from business, to create a de facto national economic development policy. Governments fiercely competed with one another in a system of subnational mercantilism, the net effect of which probably was to reduce taxation on business. Whether the U.S. economy was strengthened as a whole remains unclear.

City Planning and Political Values

demand for social planning. In response to the many criticisms of master planning and urban renewal design as naive attempts to change society through manipulation of the physical environment, city planners have begun to seek wide training in the social sciences and to produce grand designs for social change. The recent New York Master Plan is an archetypal example. Moreover, the requirements of much federal urban legislation mean that cities must produce plans or forfeit aid. As the breadth of planning increases, as it affects more and more aspects of the urban environment, and as a growing number of cities enact plans of various sorts, it becomes important to understand the political implications of different kinds of planning. While the planner himself may not be a political figure, an enacted urban plan constitutes the substance of a political decision. In Lasswell’s terms (1958: 13), it determines who gets what. Thus, even though many aspects of the planning process are technical and &dquo;nonpolitical,&dquo; the way in which a plan is formulated and implemented can be treated in the same terminology as political decision-making. For the purposes of this paper, we shall define planning as futureoriented, public decision-making directed toward attaining specified goals. Although a plan once enacted constitutes a politically determined public policy, it differs from other kinds of political decisions in that it is based