Urban Design Professor Emeritus Allan Jacobs on City Planning - The Profession

Last month, The Planning Report interviewed Joel Kotkin about his latest book, The City: A Global History. Kotkin identified three major characteristics of great cities: that they are sacred, safe, and busy. What, Prof. Jacobs, are your thoughts on what makes a great city?

There are many things that contribute to making cities great. They are diverse; they have areas of centrality to them, and they have a certain density. Good cities always have a shortage of parking and are public transit oriented. Good cities are messy. They have good dense places to live. In a good city, you meet people and expect to meet people. You can shop for your daily needs without getting into a car, although you may choose to do so. Good cities have a graciousness about them at the same time that they are messy. Good cities are not only diverse in terms of the people who live in them, but they are diverse in terms of their physical qualities and activities also.

Both the City of Los Angeles and Santa Monica are searching presently for new city planning directors. What should the leadership of these two urban cities be looking for in their next planning directors? What makes for a great planning director?

The primary concern should be to find a director of planning who really is a city planner – not an administrator – someone who knows about the physical arrangement of urban environments. Los Angeles needs someone who has expertise in urban design or environmental planning – expertise in some kind of planning and awareness of all the other approaches to planning. Finding someone who has done physical planning may not be easy, though. These days most people are process-oriented.

What else must civic leaders in these two cities be concerned about as they search for their next city planning director?

I don't know Santa Monica well enough to discuss it in detail, but one thing that has to be kept in mind is the scale of Los Angeles. San Francisco is about 43 square miles; Los Angeles is over 400 square miles – ten times the size. To plan for such a large area, you need a person who can work at least two critical scales. One scale is that of the city itself and its relationship to the region. The other scale has to do with working in detail on a few absolutely critical locations.

In the late ‘80s I was being considered for the director of planning position in Los Angeles. When I was in town for the interview, I spent a lot of time touring the city, thinking about how to handle such a large area. It wasn't so hard to figure out. The strategy involves roughly what I just talked about. I also said at the time that I would work as an administrator running the department a number of days a week, and the rest of the time I would be doing actual planning. I would be involved with the detailed planning of the critical areas. If I couldn't do that I didn't want the job.

Los Angeles needs someone who has strategies for striking the same kind of balance between planning the broad city and working in detail on specific, critical areas. A new planning director must find a balance between actual planning and administering the department.

A number of interviewees in The Planning Report over the last decade have asserted that city planning has become little more than a process of mediation, and that there is neither the political will nor capacity to move beyond this.

I gave a speech at the American Planning Association Conference recently, during which I made the same point, that the planning profession seems to consist of either mediators or conference people these days. As I travel the country as a consultant and a speaker and I ask the question, "Is the city planning department important here?" the answer is almost always no. This is the result of planners having become mediators or discussion leaders. I suspect that the field has largely gone to hell, to put it simply.

How did you conclude your speech to the American Planning Association?

I connected the state of the profession to planning education. Compared to the education that I received, planning education is largely academic today. Now the ultimate degree is the Ph.D. rather than the Masters degree in city planning. There is much less studio work and the coursework does not deal with the physical environment.. The Ph.D.s graduate and teach other Ph.D.s who then graduate and teach. The result is generations of people who have never practiced planning, yet who are responsible for educating planners. This helps to produce the kind of planning that we see now that is focused mostly on process or mediation.

I also commented that historically schools of planning have been associated with schools of architecture or landscape architecture and that planners are really policy analysts if they aren't concerned with the physical environment of cities and how that environment relates to real people and their needs. These policy and process oriented planners should have the good manners to leave planning schools and enroll in other programs.

If you were asked to be the director of city planning in Santa Monica or Los Angeles for a year, do you think you could change the culture and output of either department?

It might take a little more than a year, but not much more.

When I took over the planning department of San Francisco it was in deep trouble. It hadn't been effective. The problem was not that they weren't doing physical planning, they were, but the quality was low and the department was being beaten up by the redevelopment agency. Within a year though, we had people knocking on the doors trying to get jobs with us. How do you do that? It's very simple. You make sure that the department is doing what it is supposed to do -- what the enabling legislation says planning departments are supposed to do in most cities. You need to organize well, have a good ideology and state it clearly. If you do that, young people will flock to the department. Then it is just a question of keeping them busy and supporting their reasons for wanting to be there in the first place. I'd say that within two years, we had the best planning department in the country in San Francisco.

The last issue of TPR included interviews with both Sunne McPeak, the Governor's Secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing, and State Senator Lowenthal. Each was asked about projected population growth in California and the resulting infrastructure needed to accomodate this growth. From where must leadership come regarding planning for this growth in California?

I think the discussion needs to originate in the governor's office, possibly under the auspices of a task force. We used to have task forces and commissions in the Bay Area; they led to the Bay Area Plan. I think you need the same kind of thing at the state level. You could also have commissions to conduct regional studies.

Finally, many planners around the country have looked to Portland, Oregon as a model of growth management. However, Measure 37, which significantly weakens state land use controls, was approved by voters by a significant margin. What lesson should we take from Measure 37?

I think the lesson is that constant advocacy on behalf of good planning is needed. It is easy to become complacent when you have done things the same way for many years. But, all of a sudden, someone with another point of view shows up, and you get caught unaware.