"We're in a planning race against ourselves.
Overpopulation drives us to planning. Planning in the U.S. became necessary when more and more settlers became increasingly interconnected and inter-dependent, and employed increasingly complex technology to survive. It is ironic that in today's "modern planned community," we must deliberately allow for "a system of pathways so that pedestrian and bicycle traffic is separated from automobile traffic." (p.3) One of the most profound contradictions facing planning is that the further we "progress" with our planning, which in turn allows more people to survive using even more complex technology, then the more critical becomes our need to "progress" further with our planning. So far, in the U.S., we've kept ahead of this overpopulation/planning downward spiral, but at the expense of developing nations (i.e. Shell Oil, to protect its refinery and our source of petrol, gunning down protesting African nationals, etc.).
Since 1800 in the U.S., population growth, increased agricultural productivity, factory production, and low-cost transportation caused rapid concentration and high population density in growing urban areas. Railroads, elevators and steel-frame building technology led to unprecedented and unhealthy industry and worker density in transportationally strategic geographic locations (like Chicago, San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston). In the 1880s, the electric streetcar technology enabled an era of urban decentralization and suburban growth.
The Columbian Exposition inspired the widespread implementation of the General Plan, key tool of the City Beautiful Movement, which was society's response to the ugly urban areas beleaguered by dense industrialization, land speculation, tidal waves of immigration, wretched physical conditions, and corruption of the late nineteenth century. Vegwell & Brown, as early representatives of the new planning profession born in 1909, designed San Francisco's City Hall to mirror the Columbia Expo, and its parks to recall Delphi, Greece. (V&B's stately architecture and water areas remind me of Indian Hindu temples, which were constructed in a reminiscent style, even down to the water areas, which were called "temple tanks." The irony is that these ancient structures, most of which are thousands of years old themselves, were built in strict compliance with comprehensive plans contained in Agamic and Vedic scriptures another five to ten thousand years older than the oldest temples.)
When Planning Commissions were separated from politics during the 1914-15 Good Government movement, two significant dilemmas came to face planning in the U.S.: 1) how could civil service administrators, which were middle- and upper-class, presume to plan for the lifestyle preferences of "lower" class and "foreign" immigrants? 2) how well can appointed City Managers and their staff actually remain non-partisan and politically neutral? Planning has been used to segregate and exploit peoples of different "ethnicities" or "classes" in the U.S. Baltimore's 1910 "racial zoning" plan reminds me of South Africa's more recent Apartheid Cities. Those same comprehensive plans in the ancient Indian scriptures also described social class structures and "demographic zoning" for land and housing use that rigidified into today's caste system. I find it ironic, again, that after thousands of years and much "progress," we are still segregating and exploiting each other, de facto if not de jure. I am pessimistic and believe that this stratification in distribution of wealth is partly due to limited resources relative to an over-populated situation, or "not enough to go around," and is therefore largely inevitable given human nature. However, I am optimistic for a few reasons: "progress" toward increased grassroots, "from the bottom up" planning, the overtly independent-from-elected-council-members tone and function I saw the Pleasant Hill City staff exhibit, and the general adaptability and resilience I believe our species possesses.
Like many Americans, I was raised believing I could exercise basic rights however I pleased as long as it didn't infringe on anybody else's doing the same. However, I have also come to believe that overpopulation is the classic core cause of problems that increasingly threaten our survival. Historically, there have been two solutions: move (as the Protestants migrated from overcrowded Europe to the New World) or improve technology to allow the increased population to survive. I believe that the Earth now has the largest population it has ever had, made possible by our unprecedented technological level, including our planning technology. (No human civilization we know of has developed like we have, not even the Romans, who had technical skills to industrialize, but hadn't the ideological stance to be, as they would have considered it, as "heretically" self-deterministic as we are.) Overpopulation is infringing on the fulfillment of many people's basic needs for shelter, for example, as well as on the fulfillment of basic needs of future generations for breathable air, for example. Therefore, I believe that in order for us to survive, because we can't move off the planet yet, we must improve our technology specifically in the area of population planning. One example of population planning, though likely to be controversial, would be providing institutionalized societal incentives for a man to get a vasectomy, after having, say, two children (like I did).
The best plan for us to win this race may be to slow down."
Work Cited
Levy, John M. Contemporary Urban Planning. Copyright 1997: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Simon & Schuster/A Viacom Company, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458.