draft 12/04/09
Crossing Borders: Do Planning Ideas Travel?
John Friedmann
One of the main themes of this volume is the transfer of planning ideas from one
country to another, what happens to the ideas in the course of this transfer and
with what results. Interesting as these stories are in themselves, each a unique
tale from the past, what I miss from their telling is what anthropologists call a
thick description of the process of the transfer itself.1 I would like to fill this gap
with a story from my own practice when, in the latter part of the 1960s, I worked
for the Ford Foundation in Chile, in charge of a large-scale, multi-year technical
assistance program to the national government concerned with regional
development planning and a variety of other issues regarding housing, urban
policy, and social programming. Although also unable to adopt the
anthropologist’s method of “thick description,” I hope at least to evoke some of
the things that happened when an overseas technical mission worked in close
collaboration with a reform-minded, democratic government on a range of
planning issues.
1
Among the contributions addressing the traveling of planning ideas are Bing Wang (planning
Chinese cities “scientifically” during Republican and early Maoist eras); Ananya Roy (Bangladeshi
microcredit programs traveling to the World Bank where, once stripped of their original context
and meaning, they were re-circulated to poor countries around the world as a “best practice.” In
this process much was lost); Sanjeef Vidyarthi (the neighborhood unit, an early American
planning idea inspired by a noble purpose re-emerges in India after Independence, where it is reimagined as an appropriate design for ‘producing’ modern citizen-neighbors who will be secular
in orientation and freed of caste identities); Dominic Stead and his collaborators (sustainable
transport policies are exported to central and eastern Europe where enthusiasm for cars after
decades of communist austerity trumps earnest western planners’ advocacy of investments in
public transit), and Carolyn Whitzman and Jana Percovic (progressive planners’ invention of
women’s safety audits [Toronto] and the “walking school bus” [Australia] meets with often
unexpected receptions when inserted in local contexts around the world).
1
I will follow this with a second story that calls attention to some of the difficulties
of inserting what appear to be desirable planning practices from one country into
the political and cultural context of another. The general tenor of the essays in
this volume is, one could argue, fairly optimistic about transferring planning
practices around the globe, especially from presumptively more developed
countries to those still undergoing a process of “development.”2 On the whole,
western planners tend to be an optimistic bunch, yearning for improvements in
the lives of humankind. I am one of them, and have staked a large part of my life
on the hope that modernization, as I used to understand this concept, is a global
aspiration, desired by most. Naturally, I thought that as an unquestionably
modern man and as a planner to boot, I had an obligation to help others to
become modern in turn. My long experience has taught me, however, that to be
modern doesn’t come in a single version, as it were prêt-à-porter, and that the
modernity I wanted to help others to attain might for various reasons be resisted
or, as in Sanjeef Vidyarthi’s chapter, re-imagined by indigenous modernizing
elites.
This second story begins in 2007, when I was appointed (honorary) adviser to
the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD), an autonomous
agency within the Ministry of Construction (today the Ministry of Housing and
Urban-Rural Development). It concerns my admittedly limited efforts to persuade
the Academy to follow up on what to me seemed two attractive ideas: first, to
2
Various authors use a variety of words to talk of traveling planning ideas, among them transfer,
copy, emulate, and re-imagine. Resistance, or more strongly dismissal, is scarcely mentioned,
however, though it is often encountered in practice.
2
undertake a series of experiments with development planning at the
neighborhood level and second, to promote the idea neighborhood planning in a
revision of the planning curricula in leading universities, such as Tsinghua and
Tongji, respectively in Beijing and Shanghai. To date, my efforts have failed to
win support. I will therefore try to identify what I perceive to be some of the
reasons why the idea of neighborhood (community) planning, involving a high
degree of civic participation, which so appeals to us in North America, meets with
profound skepticism in the Chinese planning bureaucracy. My analysis of these
reasons is meant as a cautionary tale for those who advocate the universalism of
planning ideas and for whom, as in Tom Friedman’s words, the world is flat
(Friedman 2007).
I
In the deep winter of the Cold War during the 1960s and 70s, Chile, a long, thin
strip of a country along the western edge of South America, became one of a
number of battle fronts of this ideological confrontation. The American aid
program (USAID) was spending millions in direct economic assistance to Chile
for the construction of social housing but was getting worried about the lack of
community facilities which, they hoped, would help calm the rising swell of
popular discontent. Accordingly, the Ford Foundation was approached to fund a
program that would design and put in place a few pilot projects of so-called
equipamiento comunitario and instruct Chilean architects and planners in how to
link these facilities with large-scale social housing programs. In 1963, Ford liked
the idea and invented what turned out to be a Byzantine arrangement for what
3
should have been a relatively simple task, involving five institutions—a firm of
architectural and planning consultants and Rice University in Houston, an ad hoc
group of academics from Harvard and MIT, Harvard University’s Graduate
School of Design, and the International Institute of Education—to undertake this
mission. The Chilean government under President Arturo Alessandri, an archconservative and scion of a large land- owning family who was notorious for
refusing to shake hands with his peons, signed the agreement but soon
afterwards lost the elections. The winning Christian Democrats were led by
Eduardo Frei, a moderate liberal who stood for social reforms ranging from
housing to land redistribution. Chile was about to reach the half-way point on its
urban transition and was ready to trounce the feudal oligarchy that had
traditionally ruled the country, but was determined to do so within a democratic
framework.
Aware of the in-country criticisms of its community facilities program and in light
of the new political situation, the Foundation approached me to assess the
program and make appropriate recommendations. After a flying visit to Chile, my
report suggested a complete restructuring of the existing program involving a
broadening of its objectives and the re-centering of advisory services in Santiago.
The Foundation liked what I had written, and asked me to head up the newly
named Urban and Regional Development Advisory Program in Chile (URDAPIC).
4
I left MIT where I had been teaching for four years, arriving in Santiago in June
1965.3
The new mission included four activity areas: community facilities planning in the
context of urban development; the social integration of “marginalized”
households by acknowledging their claims to housing and other citizen rights;
regional development planning as a way for guiding the location of public
investments; and a program for graduate education and applied research in
planning. The counterpart agencies for this effort, and the agencies to which
advisors would be attached, were to be the Ministry of Housing (which was then
being formed), the Office of Popular Promotion, a new agency directly
accountable to the President of the Republic, the newly established National
Planning Office (ODEPLAN), and the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago
where the Ford Foundation would help establish a new Interdisciplinary Center
for Urban Development (CIDU) to provide the training and research aspects of
the program. My own role as coordinator of the Foundation’s efforts stood
outside this institutional framework, and my name hadn’t even been submitted to
the government for clearance. Quite simply, I represented the Foundation’s
interest in the program as a whole.
The situation in which we found ourselves was very edgy. The young lions who
spearheaded the reforms of the new regime were suspicious of the Foundation’s
I draw here on the detailed account of URDAPIC’s activities by John Friedmann, Urban and
Regional Development in Chile: A Case Study of Innovative Planning, dated June 1, 1969. A
copy of this 251-page report can be accessed at the UCLA library.
3
5
motives, and themselves uncertain about how to proceed with the new initiatives.
Moreover, there were tensions concerning power relations, particularly with
regard to ODEPLAN, where we had hoped to provide assistance in regional
development planning. The Ministry of Finance was loath to relinquish its power
over the budget, regarding ODEPLAN as an interloper whose job, they thought,
should be focused more on drawing up a national plan that could serve as bait
for foreign financial assistance than to actually have the executive power to steer
development through budgetary allocations. In the end, the Ministry of Finance
retained the de facto planning powers via a program budget, while ODEPLAN
divided into three sections: one concerned with the preparation of a long-range
national development plan; another with managing foreign assistance; and a third
to draw up plans for the regional decentralization of national administrative
offices that would include technical planning as a staff function of regional
governors to be appointed. The latter, which was of direct interest to URDAPIC,
was fortunate in having the support of the President and his closest advisors.
Decentralizing government was seen as a way of putting a halt to the further
expansion of Santiago by identifying development projects at strategic locations
throughout the country.4 The Foundation had deep pockets, and we could
emplace up to ten technical advisors in these new institutions. But how legitimate
our presence, given the negative history of the earlier Foundation program in
equipamiento comunitario and the unproven abilities of the advisory staff being
4
A key program of the Frei government, a radical land reform, was all but aborted by a
recalcitrant Congress, which limited its impact to only a small number of model reform
settlements. The rural exodus to Santiago therefore continued and even accelerated during the
Christian Democrat administration.
6
recruited? None of us had experience in advising a national government on the
specifics of housing, urban development, regionalization, and so forth, and our
assistance had not actually been requested by the present government, but was
inherited from the defeated Alessandri administration. It would only take a letter
from President Frei to send us packing.
The very fluidity of the situation, however, allowed us to make our case. Over
time, trust was established through interpersonal dialogue, advisors were
recruited, and we were able to move ahead, working closely with Chilean
colleagues. The account of what we jointly accomplished would take too long to
relate here. What I would like to do instead is to lay out some of the things we
learned over the course of the next four years. As I think back on this period of
my life, I am astonished how little we, as government advisers, actually knew that
was directly relevant to Chile and could somehow be “transferred.” We had no
“bundles” of planning knowledge into which we could dip that would fit the
Chilean situation. The very idea of a national policy for regional development, for
example, was no more than some thoughts I had put together in three years of
study in Venezuela, but none of them had actually been tested in practice. 5
Together with our counterparts, we had to learn by doing, by putting into practice
this most pragmatic of planning epistemologies. Below, I will briefly comment on
four things that I personally took away with me from this experience.
5
John Friedmann, Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1966.
7
1. As advisors, we were engaged in what I came to call innovative planning. This
was a term I coined to distinguish the process in which we were engaged from
traditional forms of allocative planning. Budgets and land use plans allocate
scarce resources. By contrast, what we were doing in Chile was to help devise
new institutions and try to make them work in real time. As planners, we were not
bound to planning documents but improvised solutions in accord with the
accelerated time line of the reform government.6
2. The URDAPIC team practiced a form of mutual learning, which I subsequently
proposed as a new planning approach I called transactive.7 Formally defined,
mutual learning is a process by which, in given situations, the abstract theoretical
knowledge of planning experts is conjoined with the practical knowledge of
ordinary people. It is a process through which theory and practice are brought
together, each complementing and strengthening the other, thus generating new
knowledge. In our situations, the “ordinary people” were our counterparts and
professionals themselves. Still, we came together, working side by side as we
jointly considered the problems at hand, exchanging ideas through dialogue. The
idea was that neither expert nor local bureaucrat had sufficient knowledge of their
own, but that together, they might be able to come up with a workable approach.
6
For further discussion of this concept, see John Friedmann, Retracking America: A Theory of
Transactive Planning. Garden city, NY: Anchor Press, 1973.
7 Friedmann, op. cit. Decades later, transactive planning based on dialogue would morph into the
communicative planning paradigm as formulated by John Forester.
8
There were certain preconditions before mutual learning could occur. We were
an advisory group that was composed principally of experts from abroad. Only a
few of us initially spoke Spanish, yet this was the country’s language of everyday
communication, and we had to master it quickly or become irrelevant. In
addition, each one of us had to acquire knowledge about the country itself, its
history, geography, economics, culture, and politics, so that what technical
knowledge we possessed could be transformed into strategic advice. The expert
also had to learn something about the dynamic institutional and interpersonal
fields in which he had to work.8 He would be obliged to become familiar with the
bureaucratic subculture within which he worked, to whom to talk (and whom to
avoid), and how to get things done. All this proved to be a challenging
assignment. It also made it clear to me that one of the most important if elusive
qualities of a good planning advisor is to be a quick learner. To be effective in a
situation such as ours, he would need to learn all these things during the first few
months of what was typically a two or three-year employment contract.
3. In innovative planning (and probably in every sort of planning), politics is
inevitably in command. As advisers, we had to “go with the flow,” as laid-back
Californians like to say. The political direction and the priorities of our Chilean
colleagues had to be respected if we wanted to be heard. In the case of the
Office of Popular Promotion, for example, where URDAPIC had initially placed a
senior adviser, we actually had to withdraw our participation, once it became
8
URDAPIC was an entirely male staff: hence, the gendered pronoun.
9
evident that the Office was being used chiefly for partisan politics. This was an
extreme case, but there were many instances, where advisers were unable to
prevail because of the government’s priorities, or where the solution that was
“obvious” to the adviser would take a prolonged process of persuasion testing his
patience. It was difficult to remind ourselves that while our counterparts would
presumably remain in Chile forever and would have to live with the
consequences of their actions, the foreign adviser would depart within a few
years for another life elsewhere.
4. Political dynamics can wipe out most if not all achievements of innovative
planning. In Chile’s case, this happened, first, when the United Front government
of Salvador Allende was elected to office in 1970, and definitively in 1973, when
the military coup, sanctioned by the American government and supported by the
CIA, invested General Augusto Pinochet with dictatorial powers.9 The coup
annulled Chilean democracy for seventeen years, a victim of Cold War paranoia.
We had been allies of the Christian Democratic regime, and most of what we had
achieved was almost instantly dismantled. The Interdisciplinary Center for Urban
Development at the Catholic University was shut down and restarted under new
leadership in the Faculty of Architecture where it remains to this day, principally
focused on urban design and physical planning. The National Planning Office
remains as well, as does the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, but
only as bureaucratic entities, with new priorities. In short, the two regime changes
9
President Allende died of a gunshot wound defending La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential
Palace.
10
(of which the second was imposed at the point of a gun) had created a series of
discontinuities, and instead of permitting normal democratic processes to do the
slow work of social reconstruction, the highly ideologized temper of the times
(and foreign subversion) sought to incorporate Chile into the expanding American
empire. Under the neo-liberal order decreed by General Pinochet, unemployment
soared, reaching 40 percent at one point, while enriching a small minority at the
top. Democracy did not return to Chile until 1990, 21 years after I had returned to
the United States to head up a new Urban Planning Program at UCLA. But my
Chilean experience had left me with a treasure of ideas about planning that I
could transfer back into my teaching. I made social learning central to my writing,
seeing planning as a form of praxis, that is, as the constant alternation of
knowledge and action, theory and practice as a way of planning in the dynamic,
rapidly changing situations of our time. For innovative planners, the past is not a
reliable guide to the future, and what we think we know because we have read it
somewhere or have had an experience that taught us a lesson, needs constant
revisiting and critical re-examination.10
II
My second story is why an idea such as neighborhood or community planning,
which has been popular in North America since at least the 1960s if not earlier
(see Vidyarthi this volume) fails to find a responsive audience in contemporary
China. A neighborhood planning that directly involves the local community can be
traced back, at least in the United States, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on
10
John Friedmann, Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1987, describes the social learning tradition of planning as one of four
traditions that include, in addition, social reform, systems analysis, and social mobilization.
11
poverty” which, among other things, led to the invention of community
development corporations and other community-based organizations, and
changed American planning practice forever by introducing the concept of
“advocacy planning.” The turbulent sixties also gave rise to the idea of
democratizing planning through the direct participation of people likely to be
affected by proposed interventions.
Now more often referred to as community planning, neighborhood planning was
reinforced by the rise of neo-liberal policies during the 1970s, when the federal
government devolved responsibility for welfare and pro-poor development to
local areas. These changes in national policy spurred the active participation of
what we now refer to as civil society, that is, the self-organization of social groups
for public causes.11 This tradition of democratizing planning all the way down to
the grassroots continued in the new millennium, as political philosophers turned
their attention increasingly to what they called a deliberative politics. Although
most of these discussions turned on the politics of the nation state, a few, such
as Archon Fung, saw the future for a deliberative politics chiefly at the local
level.12
11
Mike Douglass and John Friedmann, eds., Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil
Society in a Global Age. Chichester (UK): John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
12 Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004. See also John Forester, The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging
Participatory Planning Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. In a more recent
contribution to the literature on the democratization of planning, deliberative politics, and
communicative action, Xavier de Souza Briggs focuses on the ability of communities to give
policy direction and carry out specific projects which he calls “civic capacity.” See his Democracy
as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008
12
With this as background, it is not surprising perhaps that I should wonder
whether Chinese planners, given their country’s accelerated march to become
modern, might not be ready to think about a form of local planning that would
enable the hundreds of millions of people now living in cities, to register their
neighborhood concerns through a participatory process of self-study and setting
priorities. A word is perhaps in order here about Chinese city planning. Physical
planning and design are taught at many universities throughout the country,
typically in schools of architecture. Young planners are trained to draw up twentyyear master plans for cities, which are then detailed at successively diminishing
scales down to specific site plans. But Chinese cities are now growing at very
high rates at the same time that they are being restructured as a result of rapidly
rising incomes and auto-mobility. Commercial centers are soaring skyward at key
intersections throughout the metropolitan area, and new towns are being built on
the periphery, where city joins the countryside in so-called peri-urban zones.
Along the seaboard, cities such as Shanghai, Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Nanjing, to
mention only the Yangzi delta urban cluster, each reports a population of multiple
millions, without counting the extensive rural areas for which central cities are
now administratively responsible. Given this massive scale of city building, it is
not surprising that planners should focus primarily on mega-projects of elevated
roadways, bridges, undergrounds, shopping malls, office towers, sports arenas
and the like instead of, say, local neighborhood parks and playgrounds which in
the urgent rush to modernity are easily forgotten.
In the 1990s, the immense dislocations of people from their accustomed habitats
became a major concern of central government. Between 100 and 150 million
young rural people were surging into coastal cities from all over China. Most of
them found work but were denied the right to take up permanent residence in the
13
city. At the same time, urban redevelopment was razing inner city neighborhoods
whose inhabitants had to find alternative places to live in distant suburbs. The
peri-urban of the new metropolis was becoming a fragmented life space for
people who had little to say to each other. Recently arrived migrant workers from
beyond the region might constitute a majority of the population of a peri-urban
village, speaking dialects that to indigenous ears sound unintelligible and rude.
But many of these same villagers were now enjoying rental incomes from these
migrants, while middle-income urbanites were buying into adjacent high-rise
apartment buildings, and the wealthy were constructing walls spiked with broken
glass and razor wire around their luxury enclaves. For the authorities in Beijing,
this new mobility bordered on chaos, and they began seriously to study ways of
how a sense of order might be restored.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) was charged with responsibility for this
problem. After a number of experiments in different parts of the country, what
they came up with was an ingenious adaptation of an existing institution, the
Residents Committee (jumin weiyuanhui). Its existence was already enshrined in
China’s constitution as a people’s organization and therefore as a realm of
(relative) autonomy from the state. Residents committees were supposed to be
elected in imitation of village elections, but the typical committee was headed by
a member of the Communist Party. Their neighborhoods were small, their
authority was limited, and their leadership was often short on education and
commitment. The basic idea of the MCA specialists was to enlarge these
committees together with their area of competence that would now encompass
from 1 to 4 thousand households; to create a central facility for each newly
designated neighborhood area that would be called shequ (pronounced shĕchü); and to assign to each of them a small number of trained professional staff
who were referred to as social workers and would be paid by the competent
Street Office, which is the lowest level of public administration in an urban
administrative District. The responsibilities of these enlarged shequ residents
committees were left somewhat vague. They were supposed to deliver welfare
14
checks to retired workers, provide care for the elderly and re-training for
unemployed workers, develop youth programs, mediate local conflicts, and
ensure public order. With the official blessing from the State Council, MCA
initiated a massive community construction (shequ jianshe) effort throughout the
country. Large coastal cities now have hundreds of these new neighborhood
areas with their respective social worker staffs and residents committees. The
Communist Party has a leading presence in each, and all them are able to draw
upon large numbers of volunteers to accomplish their work. 13
In an attempt to answer my question about the feasibility of a neighborhood
planning that might be articulated through these shequ residents committees, I
conducted a research project in Ningbo, a large industrial city located across
Huangzhou Bay South of Shanghai.14 What could neighborhood planning
accomplish in this city? We came up with three questions, which a neighborhood
planning process involving self-study could, in principle, seek to answer:
Social inclusion: What is needed to make significant progress towards
equalizing access to the city across the new class divides? Are existing schools
and health, transportation, and recreation services in the neighborhood sufficient
to avoid a deepening of class divisions with, on the one hand, an educated, wellfed, and well-housed middle class and on the other, a poorly educated, poorly
fed and poorly housed underclass of manual workers. Some steps are already
being taken in Ningbo and in Zhejiang Province to relieve present housing
shortages. But unresolved questions remain: how should the new housing be
allocated, and does the example of Libang Village provide a viable model for this,
For details, see David Bray, “Building ‘Community’: New Strategies of Governance in Urban
China,” Economy and Society, 35:4, 530-49; and Yuan Ren, “Globalization and Grassroots
Practices: Community Development in Contemporary Urban China,” in Fulong Wu, ed.,
Globalization and the Chinese City. London: Routledge, 2006, 292-309. There are various
“models of shequ organization. Shanghai, for example, has opted for an administrative approach
in which residents committees are somehow conflated with the Street Office level.
14 John Friedmann and Chen Fang, “Towards Sustainable Neighborhoods: The Role of Social
Planning in China (A Case Study of Ningbo). Chinese version in Urban Planning International
(Beijing) 2009:1.
13
15
or should mixed housing projects be furthered? What are the possibilities of
public/private partnerships in housing provision?
Ecologically sustainable development: How much is being done to create
greater awareness among the local population of environmental issues as they
affect life in the neighborhood? What practical issues arise from an
environmental perspective at the neighborhood scale, such as pedestrian access
(sidewalks), noise abatement, tree planting, solid waste recycling, low-energy
lighting, mixed land use, working with local businesses and work units to reduce
or eliminate air and water pollution? What possibilities exist, working in
collaboration with the Street Office, for inter-shequ collaboration in job creation to
place more jobs within walking or bicycling distance from homes? Encourage the
use of the 10-minute service circle pioneered in Ningbo as a means for creating
more walkable neighborhoods in peri-urban shequ and so reduce the need for
long-distance commuting.
Livability or quality of life: Investigate what can be done to create a
neighborhood that is friendly and inviting to live in: are there sufficient “places of
encounter” such as parks, playgrounds, and sport facilities where class barriers
can be surmounted? Are there tea rooms or other places where retired people
can spend time socializing? What can be done to promote street festivals? What
possibilities exist for neighborhood beautification? Can schools provide space
for public use when they are not in session? What can be done to strengthen the
collective memory of important neighborhood events and personalities? How can
cultural activities be promoted, such as drama, story-telling, dancing, poetry
contests, musical performances, etc.? How can local creative talent be
encouraged?
As our paper pointed out, a neighborhood planning process could lead, as the
next step, to the identification of projects together with a listing of priorities
according to whether a project (1) must be urgently addressed, (2) implemented
16
in the intermediate future, or (3) safely postponed for a later time. The list of
priority projects would then be presented at the Street Office level (or above) for
approval and implementation. To engage the neighborhood in such a process,
however, would require outside help, and here we saw an opportunity for a new
type of planner who does not yet exist in China, but whose mission as a
professional would be to guide shequ neighborhoods towards a sustainable
development.
This was the essential message. I presented it at a planning conference in the
Fall of 2008 in Xiamen and a few days later also at the China Academy for Urban
Planning and Design in Beijing. But the reaction was at best lukewarm. This
doesn’t mean that the idea of neighborhood planning was dead on arrival, but it
did force me to think about some of the difficulties that would have to be
overcome before something like this idea could begin to take root. What are
these obstacles?15
An obvious but nevertheless significant difficulty is that the conditions for a
participatory approach to planning are not present in today’s China where
hierarchy continues to be relied upon when making decisions. It is true that there
have been occasional attempts to draw on academic and professional expertise
from outside the government in making important decisions, but this is a far cry
from what is at issue here, the participation in neighborhood development.
Another way to put this is to say that China has yet to develop a culture of
participation, and such a culture would presumably require an unfettered media
and a permissive public sphere where opinions can be freely expressed without
fear of being reprimanded or worse. Even in university classrooms, there is a
good deal of self-censorship, and professors have on occasion be asked to
15
Neighborhood or ward planning is officially the lowest of three planning levels in Kolkata
(Calcutta) and has been for some time. But according to a detailed study, in the highly politicized
environment of the city, the absence of non-partisan civil society actors and the lack of political
opposition to the ruling party have rendered ward-level planning moot. See Arniban Pal, Planning
from the Bottom Up: Democratic Decentralisation in Action. IOS Press under the imprint of Delft
University, 2008.
17
explain themselves to agents of Public Security when a student denounces them
for harboring “dissident” views. It could of course be argued that neighborhoods
should have their say in drawing up the master plan of the city, or even to
embark on projects of neighborhood improvement on their own or in collaboration
with District government, and that this would not run afoul of the principle of
hierarchy, since authority of what to permit or not would rest with District
planners. One could imagine then that here and there experiments of this sort
might be run, and if they were successful, perhaps the idea of participatory
planning might spread. But at present, this is no more than an outside chance,
given that there is no pressing reason in the perspective of the central
government why such experiments should be undertaken in the first place.
Another difficulty is that neighborhood planning in the sense used here is not a
government priority at this time. In my Chilean story, I mentioned how expert
advice was frequently taken when it accorded with broad policy directions, but
tended to be dismissed when this was not the case. The same holds true for
China. The formation of shequ resident committees was taken seriously by the
State Council who was fearing chaos, and the revival of this old institution along
the lines explained above is indeed progressing rapidly. But no one has seriously
considered linking shequ neighborhoods into the formal planning system of the
city. Physical planning stops at the District level. It is much easier, instead, to
apply certain neighborhood facility standards that are applied nation-wide and
identify their hypothetical location on a detailed master plan, a task that can be
accomplished in a matter of weeks, than to go through the laborious process of
involving a whole community in a neighborhood improvement process that would
eventually lead to the identification of priority projects from below.
A third problem is that neighborhood planning would require expert help from
outside, and our proposal suggested creating a special training program for
neighborhood planners in the context of planning departments at the university.
Some elite institutions already teach something we might call urban sociology,
18
but these courses are not part of the required curriculum, and do not involve
hands-on experience in specific neighborhoods. To create a neighborhood
planning curriculum would obviously require extra resources, which might or
might not be found but which would only be forthcoming if there were a
significant demand for such a specialization within the standard planning
curriculum. So long as demand cannot be demonstrated, it is unlikely that any
university administration would fund a request for expanding the curriculum in
this direction.
Finally, there is a question of which Ministry would have to promote the idea of
neighborhood planning. My colleague and I had no choice in the matter, and
presented our ideas to CAUPD which is part of the Ministry of Housing and
Urban and Rural Development. But the revival of the shequ residents committees
is the responsibility of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, just as “city planning” is seen
today as intrinsically about city building, and “regional planning” (to the extent it
exists) is identified with geography. It is therefore entirely possible that our paper
will never be read outside city planning circles, just as most planning professors
rely chiefly on the specialized literature in their own field, and cross-disciplinary
work is the exception even in North America unless it is internalized within
professional education.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. Yet I believe that the odds are against
neighborhood planning in China at this time. Change may come, but it may take
many years before the country is ready to consider an approach such as the one
we suggested.
III
This comment began with a question: do planning ideas travel? There is
obviously a range of answers, though the short answer is that some ideas travel
while others do not. The Walking School Buses described by Whitzman and
Perkovic were soon abandoned on arrival. Roy’s micro-credit finance mechanism
19
for poor women invented in Bangladesh appealed to the World Bank which
stripped the financial mechanism from its Bangladeshi institutional and cultural
context and sent it around the globe as a “best practice,” one planning idea
among many in the continuing struggle against poverty. From Vidyarthi’s account
of how the American idea of the neighborhood unit was received in Nehru’s India,
we learn how it was re-imagined as a quasi-magical design, something akin to a
mandala, that (some hoped) would turn devout, caste-conscious Hindus into
secular neighbors living peacefully side- by-side in bungalow-style housing.
In the first of my own case studies, I question whether I had anything to transfer
at all, even though our advisory team worked alongside Chilean counterparts for
four years. On the other hand, I succeeded in learning a great many things that I
subsequently could put to use in my own educational practice and would write
about so that others might benefit from my experience. They were intangible
planning ideas, such as “social learning” or that a planning consultant needs to
be closely attuned to his/her client if they expect their ideas to be taken seriously.
My second example is about a planning idea that will probably not travel
successfully, in this case to China, precisely because it is not tailored to current
policy priorities as well as for the other reasons given above, chief of which is
that China’s planning culture is not in thrall with the Jeffersonian idea of
grassroots democracy, preferring the top-down model which has served it so well
over thousands of years.16 By the same reasoning, Americans would reject the
hierarchical model of decision-making should someone ever be foolish enough to
seriously propose it, say, to the Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD).
China’s planning culture is briefly discussed in John Friedmann, “Globalization and the
Emerging Culture of Planning,” Progress in Planning, 64:3, 2005, pp. 183-234. For a fuller
account, see Daniel Banjamin Abramson, “Urban Planning in China: Continuity and Change,”
Journal of the American Planning Association, 72:2, 2006, pp. 197-215.
16
20
Is there a grand conclusion, then, that can be drawn from both my own
experiences and the several essays in this volume that address the question of
traveling planning ideas? Perhaps not. As a profession we are increasingly in
touch with colleagues globally, and ideas do flow across borders. They flow, but
do not necessarily take root. Most of us continue to work locally within cultural
frameworks that are given and through institutional channels that remain largely
invariant over long periods of time.
Epilogue
As I was putting the finishing touches to this chapter, I read André Sorensen’s
chapter (….) on compact city ideas and how they have fared in the Japanese
policy environment. Sorensen is deeply informed about his subject, and his
conclusions supplement my own, but in a much more nuanced way. “Compact
cities” has been a currently fashionable, though strenuously debated idea in
western policy discourse, that was initially ignored by Tokyo bureaucrats,
because, as they quite rightly observed, their own national capital was already in
conformity with most of the criteria: a walkable city with the best public transit
system in the world, extensive use of solar hot water panels, and so forth. What
had not been high on their agenda, however, was the problem faced by small
and medium cities in the rest of the country which were struggling as declines in
population, business activity, and municipal revenues started to be a serious
policy challenge also for the Ministries in charge of planning policies. The new
rhetoric of compact cities allowed municipalities to frame and legitimize policies
that would strengthen and revitalize their flagging core areas while restraining
suburban and ex-urban growth.
Sorensen’s conclusion is at least partially worth repeating here. Though phrased
with respect to Japan, his words have a more general applicability.
The Japanese case suggests that ideas can be important, but they don’t
always have the impacts that their originators intended, and they are
particularly unlikely to mean the same thing when they have been
21
translated into a different cultural setting, political system, and policy
context. The ways that urban sustainability issues are perceived and the
solutions that make sense in different contexts are strongly influenced by
the available and effective policy levers, and by past patterns of
institutional development, that create both capacities and preferences
among relevant actors. As sustainable cities ideas are so varied, and
possible policy approach so diverse, it is not surprising to find that different
actors will interpret the imperative to promote sustainability differently, and
will adopt those aspects of the idea that best fit their own
situation….Finally, it is significant that key elements of ideas are lost in the
process of translation. For example, during the processes of translation,
dissemination and adoption into policy of urban sustainability in Japan, the
issues of inter-generational, trans-frontier and social equity that are such a
central part of the sustainability debate elsewhere have been almost
entirely lost. The most influential elements of the sustainable cities and
compact cities ideas in the Japanese context have been those that
promise to solve major Japanese spatial and economic problems, and can
be implemented within the framework of existing policy tools and
programs (pp…..).
22
23