Visioning without planning leads to messy urban development
It is said that Columbia has no need for “experts” to guide its future development. Citizens can perform that function in a so-called “visioning” process. But what is to be done with a collection of thoughts of laymen in the process if that is to be the primary thrust of the city’s planning efforts? Columbia’s development future cannot be secured by relying exclusively on citizen input any more than the future development of science and the arts would be secured by asking a casual assembly of citizens to develop a curriculum for the university, or any more that the public health would be protected by a body of laymen diagnosing and prescribing for the medical needs of the community.
What is needed in conjunction with the current “visioning” effort is a systematic professional review, updating and a further articulation of the city’s comprehensive plan. We should not expect that a citizens advisory group would develop coordinated strategies and implementation plans for a complex of systems that constitute modern urban development. That would overlook the obvious shortcomings of citizen groups and misconceive the contents of a coordinated development policy. Citizen groups have no training or experience in the several relevant fields, such as urban planning, civil and traffic engineering, landscape architecture, land use law, municipal finance, etc. Neither do they have the resources or stamina needed to undertake the numerous inventories, surveys, analyses and projections, or to prepare the maps, tables, graphs, charts and other visual materials needed to portray existing and future development conditions or to prepare, revise and refine workable plans. To give to an untutored and time-starved citizenry such responsibilities misleads the community into thinking that planning is a casual affair, that a composite of citizen opinion will substitute for systematic analysis and careful research.
This is not to deny the value of citizen participation. Urban planning requires citizen participation to help identify a desired community character, to help establish priorities to follow and the exceptions that should be made, if any, to the application of widely accepted urban development standards, to help select among alternative paradigms for organizing land use and community facilities. It also needs citizen advisory groups to identify hidden and unique human and natural resources of the city and to comment on preliminary drafts of technical reports. But these are “sounding board” and “oversight” functions—not working technical staff functions.
In short, citizen advisory committees are ill-equipped to serve as technical staff in the preparation of long-range, comprehensive and general urban plans. Such plans, if properly prepared, involve the coordination of residential, commercial and industrial land use, vehicular and pedestrian traffic circulation and sewer and water, school, recreation, library, fire protection and other community facilities. For example, the planning of just one function, namely, the major street system for the metropolitan area, should involve, in barest outline, at least a four-step process in which the metropolitan area is divided into traffic analysis zones and 1) trips by purpose are generated for each zone based on socioeconomic variables such as household size, income and auto ownership; 2) total inter-zonal trips are estimated; 3) inter-zonal trips are broken down by mode, e.g. auto, walking, bike; and 4) motorized trip results are loaded on a street network with projected traffic volumes compared with calculated street capacities. Other methodologies are applicable to the coordinated planning of other community facilities. Implementation measures should be undertaken in tandem with the preparation of plans, namely, an updating of zoning and subdivision ordinances and the preparation of a capital improvement program, a long range financial plan, an official map, an urban renewal program, downtown and neighborhood plans, an impact fee ordinance are a partial list of the general dimensions of the kind of planning program the city needs.
To limit the planning program to the current “visioning” process risks co-opting the legitimate interest of the public in sound planning, allocating limited public resources to a technically superficial enterprise, and leaving the field to community development open to temporizing, ad hoc decision-making and political influence.
—Sid Sullivan, Columbia, Mo
—Max Anderson, AICP, Columbia, Mo