24 May 2009 (London)
Encounters with Development Planning
John Friedmann
When I was asked to give this talk, my first thought was that since this
conference celebrates the first 30 years of the International Development
Planning Review, and that many of you would probably be tempted to engage in
reflections about the past, I would focus on the next thirty years instead. But on
second thought, this didn’t seem as promising a topic for our common concerns
as some reflections on my own experiences with “development planning.”
Towards the end of my comments, I will venture to take a peek beyond the
visible horizon, with some remarks about the current world situation and what it
augurs for development, but will keep them brief. My main concern today will be
with what is already safely behind us.
I won’t entertain you with anecdotes, but I do have a message, and it is this.
Development planning is necessarily concerned with the future. Inevitably, it is
also situated in circumstances that, as Marx reminds us, are not of our own
choosing. The past may hold some lessons for us that are relevant when
decisions must be made. But planning decisions are never based on scientific
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evidence, because a future that is grounded in actual space and time cannot be
foretold except as one among several possible scenarios. Although we can posit
an abstract future (for instance in the form of specific development objectives,
i.e., a normative future), the policies we prescribe are merely uncontrolled
experiments. Under the circumstances, they may be the best experiments we
can devise, but we cannot claim to know their eventual outcomes. If we are
honest with ourselves, development planning is essentially a way of learning
about the future, a future in which we have chosen to involve ourselves through
policies and other institutional interventions, but one that we cannot in any
meaningful way design. Typically, development planning initiates something—for
instance, a new way of harnessing locally generated power from alternative
sources, but whether and to what extent this will accomplish our purpose remains
an open question. Let me put this succinctly and then move on to my stories.
Good development planning involves continuous social learning. But what is
good in one place and time is not necessarily good in another. And inevitably we
have to ask ourselves: who is engaged in learning, and what is being learned?
For in reflecting on policy outcomes, there are many lessons to absorb.
For most of the remainder of my talk, I will speak about myself and what I have
learned about the art of policy planning over the course of the past 60 years or
so. I begin my story shortly after Christmas 1945 when, as a young intelligence
officer with the American forces, I arrived in a Germany most of whose cities lay
in ruins. I stayed on for about 18 months, and when finally returned to civilian life
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at the ripe age of 21, I wrote an article for my hometown newspaper, the
Kalamazoo Gazette, about my experiences abroad. I vividly described a
conquered nation exhausted by six years of war and concluded that the former
master race that I had seen vanquished, demoralized, scraping together a bare
existence among the rubble of its cities, would never rise again. I wrote about a
people for whom I saw no future.
Now we know, of course, that this prognosis was dead wrong. Once stability had
returned through a currency reform initiated by the Occupation Forces and the
democratic election of Konrad Adenauer, the former Lord Mayor of Cologne and
leader of the Christian Democratic Party, as Prime Minister in 1947, a whole new
Germany rose from the ashes. Its cities were destroyed, but now they were
quickly rebuilt. The German people had the embodied technical and scientific
knowledge, the work ethic, the discipline and organization that within a relatively
short time would propel their country to the front rank of industrial nations. This
was my first experience with making a complete misjudgment about a country’s
chances for development; years later, there would be others. I had thought I
knew the future, but I didn’t know enough.
I began my graduate studies in planning at the University of Chicago in the Fall of
1948. After earning my master’s, I found a position as industrial economist with
the regional studies division of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville.
Having read Lewis Mumford’s Culture of Cities, a book I adored, I was keen to
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find out more about the way planning was done in this world-famous institution
which, many thought, represented the epitome of actually existing regional
planning in the world. For weeks I scoured the technical library of the TVA
searching for the Master Plan of this region, but to my dismay, there was none to
be found. TVA was a planning agency with a mission; about this there was no
doubt. But its planning was done without a comprehensive regional plan. I was
stunned by this discovery. For if there was no plan, how was planning done? It
would take me decades to find the answer to this question, or better: How shall
we think about planning?
I also collected data for my doctoral thesis in Knoxville, which concerned
economic development. When the TVA was given its legislative mandate, it was
heralded as an agency that would harness the Tennessee River and its
tributaries for multiple purposes, among which were flood control, navigation, the
generation of hydro-power, and recreation. More generally, the objective was to
revitalize what had been a poor, largely rural region through the development of
its water resources. The more ample term, “economic development,” was not yet
in common use. What my study revealed, however, was a significant discovery.
Overlaying the original river basin that constituted the heart of this bio-region was
a much larger power service area in which the TVA had a monopoly in the
generation of low-cost energy. It was the electrification of this larger area that not
only brought power to rural communities via cooperatives but, more significantly,
hooked up the larger cities on the Valley’s rim—cities such as Nashville and
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Memphis—that could now buy low-cost hydro- and later also coal-generated
power, and which in turn allowed them to industrialize. Thus the initial
development of water resources in the Tennessee Valley was turned into a
dynamic regional development scheme for a much larger area through the
agency of urban centers and their surrounding regions. As it happened, many of
the new industries had moved from their old locations in New England to the
Southeast, where surplus rural labor was not yet unionized. Though lacking a
general plan, the TVA had helped to promote the region’s economic development
along with a major restructuring of the “space economy” of the eastern United
States. None of this had originally been intended, and in the early 1950s,
concepts such as “regional development,” “city-region, and “space economy,”
were still virtually unexplored concepts.
The next stop on my journey was Brazil. I was initially detailed to Belém do Pará
to participate in a course on development planning in that vast ocean of rain
forest called the Amazon. The date was 1955, and I had just received my
doctorate in regional planning. I knew virtually nothing about Brazil nor spoke
Portuguese. All I knew about regional development was what I had learned
during my two years with the TVA. An inauspicious beginning, one might have
thought. But during the next two and a half years, when I finally did learn to
speak the language of the country, I ended up in the colonial city of Salvador,
Bahia, in Brazil’s northeast, where I helped to set up a research and training
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center in regional development planning at the economics faculty of the Federal
University. During my time in Bahia, I learned three things.
Development, I found, was not part of the vocabulary of ordinary people, but was
chiefly an obsession among a small group of elite intellectuals. What ordinary
people did talk about was the concrete, specific things that would improve the
quality of their lives: a job, a roof over their head, electric power, clean water, a
basic education, access to good health. Development was an abstraction. But
what ordinary people got instead, was Brasilia.
President Juscelino Kubitschek had committed himself to moving the nation’s
capital from the fleshpots of Rio de Janeiro to the austere Planalto Central, a
thousand kilometers in the interior of the country, a location where, it was
claimed, a vision of the Virgin Mary had once appeared to devout believers in the
19th century. Clearly, then, this was the sacred site where Heaven was joined to
Earth, the axis mundi of Brazil. In a frenzy of construction that he hoped would
make his dream of a new capital city irreversible by subsequent governments,
funds were siphoned off from the sorts of development that ordinary people
hoped might make a difference in their lives. Nonetheless, it was a bold
undertaking, symbolic of the dynamic and ebullient modern nation that
Kubitschek envisioned, and that in time would change the political geography of
the country. Planning Brasilia had been an impulsive act. As is well known, the
initial sketch of the city was the inspiration of Lúcio Costa who had won the
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international competition, which Oscar Niemeyer, a close friend of the President
and Costa’s former student, would subsequently turn into an architectural master
piece. None of this fits the model of development planning that we normally write
about and practice, beginning as it did with mystical visions and a charismatic
leader who managed to persuade Brazilians that a new capital city is what they
had always wanted.
But there is a tragic epilogue to this story. Three years after Kubitschek’s term of
office had expired, a military coup abolished democracy in Brazil and imposed an
authoritarian system from Brasilia that would last 21 years.
Meanwhile, I had moved on to Asia. For two years, from 1958 to 1961, I worked
on the staff of the United States Operations Mission in Seoul, Korea. It was the
period of reconstruction following the Korean War which had brought about a
shaky end of hostilities between North and South Korea along the 38th parallel.
Here, I thought, I would at last have a chance to engage in real development
planning. But things took a different turn. Following massive student protests
throughout the country, President of the Republic of Korea, Syngman Rhee, an
autocrat who had ruled with American support since 1948, was forced into exile
in Hawaii in April 1960. A brief democratic interlude came to an abrupt halt when
a military coup raised General Park Chung-hee to power. It was during Park’s 17
years as head of the government, that South Korea’s economy made impressive
gains, largely a result of tight links between government and private capital that
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served to enrich both, and the continued military alliance with the United States.
Perhaps, I wondered, development planning is an illusion after all. What’s at
stake are not the technicalities of planning, whose mastery is claimed by
professionals, but games of power and the obscure dynamics of history.
In early 1961, I returned to the States, where I was recruited by Lloyd Rodwin to
teach regional planning at MIT and join a research team that he together with
Martin Meyerson at Harvard were putting together to help the Venezuelan
government design and build Ciudad Guayana, a new “growth pole” in the
eastern part of the country. Ciudad Guayana was to become a center of iron and
steel production which, it was hoped, would help to diversify Venezuela’s
economy while drawing population into the under-populated, resource-rich
Orinoco region. The project of building the city was entrusted to General Alfonzo
Ravard, an MIT graduate, who in turn contracted the MIT-Harvard Joint Center
for Urban Studies to provide both technical and research services.
Like many South American countries, Venezuela has a unitary, centralized
system of government; its regional economies are highly diverse; and its
distribution of population and cities is heavily skewed towards the national center
of power. In the 1960s, it was President Rómulo Betancourt’s hope to promote
new regional growth centers, among which, and by far the most promising, was
Ciudad Guayana. But as I noted at the time, the three-year Plan de la Nación
had failed to articulate a national policy for regional development. The most likely
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reason is that a conceptual language for such a policy had not yet been invented.
Stubbornly, and against the advice of Professor Rodwin, I decided to make it my
business to suggest such a policy and provide for it both a theoretical and
empirical framework. Published in 1966, Regional Development Policy: A Case
Study of Venezuela was published by the MIT Press. But by then I was already in
Chile, where I would have an opportunity to actually help implement such a
policy.
The Ford Foundation had asked me to lead a large-scale technical assistance
effort in regional development, urban policy, and social programming to the
incoming Christian Democrat government of Chile under Eduardo Frei. Initially,
we had the support of Jorge Ahumada, a Chilean academic whom I had first met
when he still headed CENDES, a development center at the national university in
Caracas, and who now served as economic advisor to President-elect Frei.
Unfortunately, Ahumada died shortly before my arrival in Santiago de Chile;
nevertheless, he had helped to lay the groundwork for what we proposed to do,
especially the emphasis on a national policy for regional development. Like
Venezuela, Chile was a unitary state, and Ahumada who had attended my
research presentations in Caracas, was familiar with my theories and a strong
advocate of the regional approach for diffusing development throughout highly
centralized countries.
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It took me some time to realize that what we in Chile were engaged in was
something altogether different from what I had learned at the University.
Mainstream planning in America was chiefly about the allocation of urban lands
to their “best” use. But what the Frei government was attempting to do was to
shape new institutions that would enable the country to achieve specific
development objectives. I called such planning innovative, a term I coined to
refer to the introduction of institutional innovations into the central guidance
system of a society. In the specific case of Chile, a central planning office was
established in the Presidency, with separate sections for macro-economic and
regional planning; a Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs was created to bring
together diverse offices and corporate units concerned with the urban; and a new
agency called “Popular Promotion” would operate out of the President’s Office to
devise and implement programs for the poorest sectors of the urban population.
A rural land reform agency was also established, but was not part of our charge.
I remained in Chile from 1965 to 69. During these four years, I learned many
things about development planning, and would like briefly to mention four of
them. First, it turned out to be impossible significantly to change the spatial
development pattern Chile had inherited from the past, but it wasn’t for want of
trying. The Ciudad Guayana project in Venezuela had opened up a vast region of
the country through a process of industrialization and city building; in Chile, there
was nothing remotely similar to that experience. The various programs
undertaken by the Frei government to achieve a wider spread of development
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were well-intentioned, but in the end were overwhelmed by the drawing power of
the capital region. Today, the metropolitan area of Santiago holds over 40
percent of the national population and generates 45 percent of Chile’s GDP.
These are roughly comparable to what we had found a half century earlier.
Second, popular expectations outran the government’s capacity to meet them.
No matter how many so-called housing solutions were provided in Santiago (the
destination of most rural migrants), demand for housing continued to rise. I
remember a radio address by the President who pleaded for patience, but his
words were spoken into the wind. A few years later, Salvador Allende was
elected to preside over a popular unity government in the vain hope that the Left
would make an even greater effort to meet urgent social demands than the
centrist Frei government that had preceded it. As we all know, that hope was
never fulfilled. A military coup, engineered with the blessing and help of the
American government, resulted in Allende’s being killed defending the
Presidential Palace. The coup initiated a military dictatorship under General
Pinochet that lasted seventeen years. Most of the leadership on the Left was
either “disappeared” or escaped into exile.
Third, the Pinochet regime adopted privatization and deregulation policies that
led to the rapid expansion of the economy while increasing the incidence of
poverty, which by the end of the dictatorship in 1990 stood at about 34% (with
extreme poverty levels of 12%). This outcome is in some respects similar to
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South Korea’s under General Park Chung-hee, and leads to questions about the
relationship between democracy and economic growth. The director of Chile’s
national planning office, ODEPLAN, once confided to me that what Chile lacked
was entrepreneurial talent, and that the statist investment corporation (CORFO)
was no substitute for genuine entrepreneurship, the type of “creative destruction”
which, as early as 1911, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had
identified as the prime mover of capitalist accumulation. As it turned out, given an
appropriate institutional framework, Chilean’s entrepreneurial capabilities were
no less than any other people’s. Frei’s hopes for an equitable development under
the rule of law were defeated by the traditional rural oligarchy who clung to their
landed wealth and had little interest in entrepreneurial adventures. On the other
hand, the military regime, which had promulgated a new constitution, allowed
young technocrats to experiment with Milton Friedman’s neo-liberal theories and,
indeed, now that social order was ensured and no longer threatened the
oligarchy’s landed wealth, young entrepreneurs did emerge to take advantage of
the new institutional arrangements.
The fourth thing my years in Chile taught me was that learning from practice is
central to development planning. I had come to Chile as an “expert,” but an
expert in what? Whatever I knew I had learned in my previous assignments, but
none of them had taught me that simply identifying “growth poles” was in fact
sufficient to generate regional development, in Chile or anywhere else. At best it
was a speculative theory about the future rather than hard-won knowledge
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gained from experience. In fact, what my spatial development theory had missed
was precisely the entrepreneurial energy that the right-wing dictatorship of
General Pinochet managed to release a few years later, simply by suppressing
democracy. Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys” were of course also engaged in
speculative thinking, but they could afford to ignore the severe social problems
that their actions caused, because they had military backing. As it turned out,
their own experiment was successful while that of the law-abiding, middle-of-theroad Christian Democrats was not. Democracy had lost the game.
In 1969, I decided to accept a call to head up the new urban planning program at
UCLA. A full-time academic now, my subsequent encounters with development
planning were limited to short missions to Japan, Thailand, Mozambique, Egypt,
Nigeria, among other places. I will therefore skip over the next 32 years which,
academically speaking, were my most productive period as a scholar, and pick
up the thread again in 2001 when my wife, Leonie Sandercock, and I—I was now
what is euphemistically called retirement —moved from Melbourne to Vancouver.
During our five-year stay in Australia, I had become interested in China and
decided to pursue that interest in our new home at the University of British
Columbia. My first visit to China—a five cities lecture tour that took me to Beijing,
Nanjing, Wuxi, Shanghai, and Guangzhou—took place near the beginning of the
reform era in 1985, and I was fascinated by the contrasts with my Latin American
experiences. Ever since my Korean days, I had been a Sinophile, and it was a
desire to learn more about China that led me to embark on a serious study of
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China’s urbanization, using whatever English-language sources I could find. The
first result of this encounter-at-a-distance with China’s “development” planning
was a small book, which has since appeared in both a Japanese and Chinese
translation. I put scare marks around the term development, because I’m not
convinced that the Western development literature helps to illuminate the
remarkable transformation China is undergoing. André Gunder Frank’s last major
work, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, is a polemical attempt to
reposition China on the map of world history, arguing that what we call China
today was never “underdeveloped” in the conventional sense, but an advanced
civilization and trading power whose relative backwardness and weakness in the
modern period was chiefly technological. Until the onset of the industrial era in
the late 18th century, Frank writes, “the entire world economic order was—
literally—Sinocentric. Christopher Columbus and after him many Europeans up
until Adam Smith knew that. It was only the nineteenth-century Europeans who
literally rewrote this history from a Eurocentric perspective” (p.117). Tim Brook, a
leading historian of the Ming period, concurs: “China,” Brook writes, “not Europe,
was the center of the world” (p. 116).
I believe that we must take this historical revisionism seriously if we want to
understand (and account for) China’s rise to its present position as a global
power. Her rise is not the “miracle” of media headlines, but rather a long and
painful recovery of its former status as a world power under the leadership of the
Communist Party. The end of the imperial age in 1911, the struggle for power
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during the Republican period, the expulsion of the Japanese invaders, the
assumption of power by the CCP under Mao Zedong in 1949 and the events that
followed—the communalization of farming, the centralization of the economy, the
emphasis on heavy industry, the Cultural Revolution, and after Mao’s death, the
ensuing Reforms encompassing the opening of China to the world, the
marketization of the national economy, and hyper-urban growth—are all chapters
in that story. This is no longer a story of “development” as we tend to think of it,
but of a long historical process of restoration to global pre-eminence driven
primarily by forces internal to China rather than by foreign powers and global
capital. Restoration involves, of course, overlapping processes of
industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, but their successful unfolding
is made possible by the accumulated social and cultural capital that was already
emplaced—for example, in the forms of village governance, in the strong sense
of collective identity, in bureaucratic experience, in a high degree of literacy, and
most important of all, in the pervasive cultural foundation of a Confucian ethos
that continues to shape China just as the Judeo-Christian tradition has shaped
the West. Development properly understood is a technical term that makes
sense only in the embracing context of history. Its relative successes and failures
cannot be explained except as we look at the historical context. This is the lesson
that my encounter with China has taught me.
Rather than sum up what I have learned from my long encounters with
development planning, which would be tedious, I would like to peer into the fog of
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the future, speculating what the development agenda might look like as we
approach mid-century. Of only one thing can we be certain: it won’t be anything
like what we’ve witnessed in the past.
Let me begin with some trends that are likely to continue. By mid-century we will
have a global population that will be leveling off at around 9 billion people. This is
an unequally distributed one-third increase over today’s population, in
demographic terms an addition of two Chinas. While this is the case globally,
however, dozens of countries will actually lose population during this 40-year
period, notably the mature industrialized countries of western Europe, Russia,
Ukraine, and Japan. If it were not for continuing immigration from abroad, North
America would experience a similar demographic inversion. And as we all know,
demographic decline leads to a rapidly aging population that, as it ages,
becomes more interested in holding on to its possessions than participate in the
competitive frenzy of constant innovation.
World urbanization, which now stands at more than 50 percent, is likely to
continue to rise, perhaps to 75 percent, and in many world regions,
notwithstanding the millennium goals, so will poverty levels in both absolute and
relative numbers. It is these impoverished and imperiled regions that will continue
to feed the migrant streams converging on the major metropolitan areas of their
respective countries as well as of the wealthy countries in the Global North.
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These are the familiar trends. But there is a new consciousness now, which
completely changes the way we will have to think about development and
planning in the future. Let me list some titles of books that hint at what’s at stake:
The Turning Point: The End of the Growth Paradigm; Limits to Growth: The 30
Year Update; The Long Emergency; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed; Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future;
The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing
from Crisis to Sustainability. The authors of these best-selling books are by and
large fairly optimistic about our chances for physical survival, but all of them insist
that the rules of the game have radically changed. There is now massive
evidence that we are already living in an era where global warming, climate
change, water scarcity, desertification, peak-oil, the destruction of rain forests,
and the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and bio-diversity make headline
news. The convergence of these ecological disasters is what forces us to re-think
what we mean by the over-used term “development.” We are at a major juncture
in world history.
There is no shortage of good ideas about how we should redefine what we do.
Obviously, this is not the time to talk about what some already call the Great
Transition to a (more) sustainable world. Let me close then with a few thoughts
about what we, as development planners, might want to do as we cross the
bridge at the end of the world. First, let us recognize that in the finite material
world we inhabit we will always encounter limits; there is no such thing as
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limitless growth. Second, we will need to devise and work with new measures of
macro-economic performance that include in their accounting the harm that we
do to the material world that nourishes us. Third, we should refocus our work on
the sustainability issues we face in our own, the world’s rich countries, the very
countries that have contributed the most to the “overshoot” of the Earth’s
ecological footprint, because it is these countries that set the standards for the
rest. Finally, we must seek to prevent or put an end to the deadly conflicts that
ensue when different national interests compete for access to or control over a
shrinking life space and the critical resources that feed our unsustainable habits.
I’d like to close with an old verse by the German poet/playwright Bert Brecht. The
year is 1929, and the verse goes like this:
It takes a lot of things to change the world:
Anger and tenacity, science and indignation,
The quick initiative, the long reflection,
The cold patience and the infinite perseverance,
The understanding of the particular case and the understanding
of the ensemble.
Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.
(“Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis” 1929)
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