When City of Minneapolis staff announced the preferred design for Hennepin Avenue between Franklin Avenue and Lake Street, it was a big win for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders. It was also a big win for planning.
The City has a whole family of adopted plans and policies that directly apply to the Hennepin South project. Chief among them is a “modal priority framework” which commits the City to give consideration to pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and drivers in that order. No less important is the city’s Transportation Action Plan, which specifically mapped Hennepin as a “Near-Term Low Stress Bikeway.” It’s not always the case that policy direction is so explicit.
Then, last summer, two design alternatives were presented for Hennepin and one of them did not include a bikeway of any kind. This flatly contradicted the city’s official directives. Next, the schedule for choosing a final design seemed to slip. Mutterings started about how powerful forces within the city were working against the more progressive design. Activists sounded the alarm and began to organize. The outcome of the process seemed genuinely unclear.
But on December 7th, City staff officially recommended the design with the bikeway included. The ratification of this design is not yet completely assured and powerful people are working to axe it. But an important hurdle has been cleared. Maybe more importantly in the long run, City staff defended the regular order of putting planning into practice.
Planning in an age of irrelevance
The public sometimes ascribes great powers to urban planners, either lauding or blaming them for every change that happens in a town or city. The reality is often the opposite. Planners and planning are more frequently sidelined and irrelevant than acting as master designers and builders. The career of Robert Moses—which is often portrayed as the apotheosis of planning and a justification for the profession’s modern-day humbling—is actually illustrative of the reverse; Moses clashed bitterly with New York City’s career planners and ran roughshod over them.
Urban planning as a profession exists in a diminished state because people like the idea of planning and plans but like far less the idea of being bound by them. My first childhood memory of planning was when my dad, who is an architect, served on a committee to create a master plan for our town’s biggest park. There were a lot of public meetings that I got very into, some attractive designs were produced, and then nothing ever came of all that effort ever again. My memory is that was at least the third such master plan for the park and the odds seem good that there’s probably been another one in the years since.
In my day job, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time working on the “planning” or “preliminary-engineering” stages of infrastructure projects, which occur before the “final design” state. In these stages, we go through plans that have been created over the years by a patchwork of organizations, from community groups to municipalities. As planners on these project teams, it’s our responsibility to read the work that was done in the past and represent those ideas in the present. It can be tough sledding. When real money, real laws, local politics, and hard-headed engineering get involved, a lot of early planning work ultimately gets redone or ignored.
This has been a crisis for planning for a long time and to become a planner is in part to reckon with the perpetual pull of irrelevance for your profession. Planners get criticized from every angle; for making unrealistic assumptions or for not dreaming widely enough, for trying to push unwanted change or for being held hostage by the demands of niche communities or monied interests. Yet planning remains in demand in spite of this because good planning is invaluable. Projects that didn’t start with good planning are invariably disordered and controversial. Projects that started with and were constantly informed by good planning are typically a lot more coherent. Eventually, most people discover this.
There’s a cliché that you encounter now and then and is usually ascribed to a famous general or political figure: "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The gist of this saying is indisputably correct, because nothing in life will ever proceed exactly as anticipated, and when things go awry it’s useful to understand the underlying factors that informed your original course of action.
But the saying shouldn’t be treated literally, because then it leaves you completely adrift. General Eisenhower (a common person to attribute the line to) didn’t do all of the planning for Operation Overlord and then just ignore it and send boats across the English Channel at random. Of course, he put the plan into motion, and then when events overtook it on Omaha Beach or the bocage of Normandy, he adapted from that framework.
All of this to say that planning is good and plans are also good, and it’s a good thing to take planning seriously and try your best to follow through on the result.
Some Reasons why It’s Good To Follow Plans
For starters, following plans is good because it protects broader interests and longer-term goals. The most fundamental purpose of planning is to examine issues from a wide perspective. Consequently, the systemic approach of planning is to start by establishing an overarching vision and work from there towards more narrow goals and objectives. If plans are not followed or consulted when more concrete decisions are made, that wide perspective and the benefits of that systematic approach are lost. An organization that consults (and updates!) its plans will capitalize on advantages and tackle challenges in an effective way.
Next, following plans is good because it legitimizes planning. In the United States, most planning efforts gain credibility by engaging with the public, hearing and recording their ideas, and then tracing links between that feedback and the ultimate recommendations. This ideally creates a virtuous cycle, where the more robust that engagement, the stronger the credibility of the plan, and the more likely the plan will be implemented. But if plans are not followed, the opposite cycle occurs, where people determine that their participation is not meaningful and don’t show up, future plans lose credibility, and the likelihood of their implementation is decreased. An organization that takes plans seriously will ultimately encourage participation in future planning efforts and build a positive relationship with its community.
Finally, following plans is good because it protects basic principles of representative democracy. At the local level, its extremely common that disputes are colored with complaints about an undemocratic process. People opposed to a specific change often complain that they were not adequately informed about it and blocked from allowed to have their full say. Controversial changes are often litigated through a series of public meetings and official hearings. This approach has the trappings of democracy, but effectively it empowers only the people who are most committed to the process. The more stages of approval or veto points that a process contains, the more opportunities that the deeply engaged have to influence the outcome.
Planning is the most democratic stage of any process, because it provides the opportunity for the widest possible spectrum of the public to be consulted and the earliest opportunity for the public to influence the outcome. The goal isn’t to exclude the contributions of more-focused groups like activists and near neighbors, but to temper their participation with an understanding of the overall community’s values. These provide a shared platform upon which specific interest groups can speak to (or do battle over) more specific details.
State Capacity and Hennepin Avenue
One of the most pressing issues in modern America is that of state capacity.
We have seen this problem become acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. While public health authorities have not always covered themselves in glory, it also has become clear how limited their options are. At no point did the United States attempt the kind of mitigation strategy that has been used to great success in East Asia and Oceania, with mandated and state-sponsored quarantines. That simply was never an available tool in the toolbox.
Similarly, the United States has allowed individual states to take the lead on crucial initiatives like testing and vaccination, revealing a patchwork of significantly different state capacities across the country. The federal government has primarily acted in a supporting role.
The pandemic has shone a spotlight on branches of American governments and institutions that are no longer capable of acting effectively. But these failures have come as no surprise to experts on other issues like housing and transportation, who have studied and worked against a common malaise for years. These parallels suggest a relationship. The United States cannot build housing at scale or build infrastructure effectively for the same reasons that it cannot test at scale or contain the virus effectively.
The issue here again isn’t a lack of planning, but a lack of follow-through. As a recent paper from the Niskanen Center convincingly argues, America is hamstrung by both “conservative anti-statism” and “progressive procedure run amok.” These twin forces have badly damaged the ability of governments, companies, and civil society at all levels to act.
The case of Hennepin Avenue—and other similar fights, common in cities and towns across the country—also shows how these two forces work together. Opposition to a multi-modal redesign of the street is a conservative, anti-change impulse, even if none of its representatives are Republicans. The progressive procedures of endless community feedback and a desire to achieve consensus is what gives these conservative impulses succor.
At wildly different scales and levels of importance, the streetfight over Hennepin Avenue and the stumbles over COVID testing and vaccination mirror each other and reflect upon the same theme.
In a small way, that’s why I take a lot of hope from the choice by Minneapolis staff to affirm the direction that has previously been adopted and planned for by the city. I am hopeful about the future of planning and especially hopeful for the future of plans. It has become clear how much we need to become better at both, and I am glad to see someplace that takes that charge seriously.