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I was asked by Roger Hedrick, the local program chair for this conference, to present an overview of the comprehensive plan in America in the 20th century. Originally intended as a slide-illustrated excursion through 20th century American planning emphasizing the derivation of the master plan / comprehensive plan concept, the ups and downs of the concept in practice, and an evaluation of the significance of the comprehensive plan in defining the American planning profession and professional practice, I found myself unable to prepare the slide portion of the presentation due to personal and professional conflicts that arose in the last few weeks. So I stand before you totally intellectually naked, unable to hide behind my projected images as I usually do, and challenged to hold your attention and good will without benefit of graphic diversions while I delve into the 100 years of promise, frustration, and current rebirth that define the American experience with the comprehensive plan in the 20th century.
"Comprehensive plan", "master plan" and "general plan" are all terms that have been used to describe what has often been primarily the same thing. The terms "master plan," "community plan" or "city plan" were commonly used to describe a citywide physical plan describing the location of streets, parks and public buildings from the later decades of the 19th century to the late 1920s and mid-1930s, when the Soviet "five year plans" and the German "master race" concept muddied the communication waters considerably and did in "the master plan" as a descriptor. "General plan" was a common descriptor in the 1940s and in the heyday of "701" planning in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the term "comprehensive plan" with all of its omnipotent connotations somehow entered our vocabulary along the way and stayed to dominate our usage at our turn into this 21st century.
A comprehensive plan is an omnibus guide to public action; a statement of the public will; its defense, and an integration of community objectives, intentions, and their ends in a projection of what the community will be like when these objectives are fulfilled; a statement of what the public is buying into. It states, "This is what we are willing ourselves to be." It covers a range of civic affairs, the breadth of that range, the nature of that public will, and the actions required to fulfill it varying with the choices made by the community, its location and the historic setting for the use of the plan.
Robert Mager wrote a delightful little paperback called Writing Educational Objectives that had a major impact on American education in the 1960s and the 1970s. That book changed my life as a professor of planning. In it, Mager observed, "If you don't know where you are going, you might not get there." Where you are going as a community, and why, is what the comprehensive plan is all about.
A "comprehensive plan" in American city and regional planning practice deals with multiple functions, in the early days just a few, as time progressed, many. It provides integrated plans (physical, social, economic, political) to fulfill each of these functions as a part of a single program. It is not just a packaging of multiple plans, but their integration in such a manner that each plan is dependent for its success on all of the others. A comprehensive plan provides guidelines to alternative means for fulfilling these multiple functions and realizing their necessary interrelationships. The comprehensive plan comprises public policies and their explicit intended outcomes as a result of planned (consciously directed) beneficial community growth and change. Comprehensive planning is rational willed change.
So "return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear" (words that are familiar to all of the old timers, like me, who huddled around their radios listening to "The Lone Ranger" so many years ago) as we explore the historic roots of the comprehensive plan in America.
The modern American comprehensive plan had its genesis in parks and boulevard plans of mid-19th century Europe, and had its socioeconomic foundations in Napoleon III's Paris in the 1850s and the 1860s. Napoleon III needed plans for employment of the poor during periods of economic depression to assure social peace: to preclude hunger riots against his regime. These plans focused on public works projects, such as streets, parks, sewers, public buildings, etc., that presented no competition to private sector investments. When private sector unemployment rose, public sector employment took up the slack, precluding the desperation of labor that had led to earlier riots against French regimes and, not incidentally, assuring the continued viability of a capital-directed society while acquiring public infrastructure at low labor and material cost. Public sector investment in fulfillment of planned change of the Paris community, for socioeconomic-political as well as community service purposes, coincided with recessional periods when wages were low and materials were available at discount prices. Thus, Paris got the biggest "bang" for the lowest tax "buck" from planned change to the Parisian infrastructure, which made a lot of sense to the business community. Paris is still drawing benefits from those public investments.
American applications of the comprehensive plan idea emerged in the last half of the 19th century through development of the new landscape architecture profession and its application to public works. As early as the 1850s, at New York City, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's long-range plan for the development of Central Park served as a basis for work assignments for the employment of new immigrants. George Kessler's Metropolitan Parks Plan for Kansas City, prepared in the 1890s, used parks and park-focused boulevards to shape future urban development. The Boston Metropolitan Park System by Charles Eliot and others, the Buffalo, New York, park system by Olmsted and Vaux, the Cincinnati Park System by Kessler, the work of Horace W.S. Cleveland at Omaha and Minneapolis, and the works of many lesser known landscape architects paved the way for the further development of the comprehensive plan idea in the 20th century.
The early 20th century roots of the comprehensive plan include the integrated park, boulevard and public building siting plans such as those undertaken at Washington, D.C., (known as the McMillan Plan) in the first few years of the century, the Cleveland Group Plan, a centerpiece of Mayor Tom Johnson's reforms, undertaken shortly thereafter, and the Chicago Plan of 1909, the first American metropolitan regional plan, directed by Daniel Hudson Burnham. All of these early 20th century plans, although expanding on earlier plans in terms of detail and complexity, were still limited to implementation through the taxing power and the eminent domain power of American governments and, thus, were limited to public works constructed with public dollars on public land. They could not deal directly with the development of private land uses generating the need for public investment as the "police power", the power of governments to regulate private actions in the pubic interest, was relatively undeveloped. This limitation on public plans and planning began to be overcome with emergence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions supporting the public control of private land and the qualities of its development: height of building control in 1909; setback and yard requirements in 1912, and a possible implied constitutionality of land use controls in 1915. These legal developments raised the potential for effective public planning for the future development of private land and for the control of that future by public regulation of private actions.
Based on these legal foundations, the first "comprehensive zoning plan" was realized at New York City in 1916. It integrated land use controls, height of building controls, and setback and yard requirements in a single ordinance covering the entire area of jurisdiction. This "comprehensive zoning plan" is often confused with a "comprehensive plan." This first comprehensive zoning plan, stimulated by the overbuilding of Lower Manhattan, the invasion of a black residential neighborhood by the garment industry, and creation of the Harlem ghetto, had no comprehensive community vision, specified no community objectives other than limiting invasion of land uses and assuring light and air to buildings and public streets, had no time frame - it was not a plan for the future - and when adopted it was immediately effective as a legal control on construction. A comprehensive zoning plan is commonly unrelated to reasonable estimates of demand for land uses and is usually unrelated to functional plans and programs required to provide the facilities and services needed to meet the needs of the permitted uses if and when they appear in the concentrations allowed.
Immediately following New York's passage of this first "comprehensive zoning plan" in 1916, direct large-scale integrated government-directed construction of complex and economical community systems at the neighborhood scale were realized in the new towns built by federal government corporations for workers in war-related industries during the First World War. Mostly designed by members of the American City Planning Institute (the ACPI) that was founded in 1917 (now the American Institute of Certified Planners - AICP), these projects were built upon a longstanding European tradition of direct government involvement in town building. These new towns proved the value of creation of carefully planned and executed total environments, including site planning, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, coordinated and directed by city planners. This model had been tested earlier at Forest Hills Gardens, Long Island, New York, by the Russell Sage Foundation, a community built to be a model for the future development of America.
But this direction in community building was forestalled by post-war conservatism in the Harding Era of the 1920s and the opposition of the building industry: the economy of large-scale construction made the one-house-at-a-time industry look bad. And the potential for legal control of private development through zoning, requiring little tax money and being primarily private-market directed, was most appealing to a government committed to a "return to normalcy" and reduced taxation after the First World War. In abandoning the promise of holistic, coordinated, and community-public-interest-directed urban development planning as experienced in World War I, it was postulated that no-cost zoning controls could be coupled with provision of streets, utilities, parks, schools, etc., as, and after, their need arises in an environment of market-directed and commonly unrestrained growth. Zoning in combination with separate short-term functional plans was seen as an alternative to comprehensive planning, forestalling both comprehensiveness and community vision.
Meanwhile, the concept of "the comprehensive plan" as we know it today emerged in Cincinnati in the early 1920s, created by Alfred Bettman, a Cincinnati lawyer, Ladislas Segoe, an immigrant planner from Hungary, and George B. Ford and Ernest P. Goodrich, who created the first American planning consulting firm in New York City a few years earlier. The Cincinnati plan was an element of a political reform movement intended to replace corrupt "political machine" capital investment control with decisions made in the public interest by a citizen-dominated city planning commission. This commission was charged with preparing a long-range integrated city plan to become the basis for development of a capital budget to be implemented by a politically neutral city manager. This plan was completed in 1923. The "Charter" reform group won their campaign for a new city charter in 1924, and in 1925 "Charter" won control of the new city council.
Adopted by the city planning commission of the city of Cincinnati in 1925, the first modern comprehensive plan interrelated future private land use patterns (to be controlled by zoning), transportation facilities needed to service these uses, and related public works in a long-range (50-year!) plan for the city's development. Land use studies of the public interest in future private sector development drove the Cincinnati plan, leading to policies that were then translated into a zoning ordinance that was enacted by the city council before the transportation and public works elements of the comprehensive plan were adopted, resulting in considerable confusion later on, as we shall see.
Why this comprehensive integrated plan? Because separate functional plans (highway plans, trolley car plans, subway plans, sewer plans, park plans, etc.) had failed to provide more than an expensive short-term amelioration for existing or immediately imminent conditions. And since each isolated functional plan is a response to conditions beyond itself, virtually all being driven by longer-term land use changes, changes in land use demand and demographics, these functional problems are incapable of economic long-term solution without control of, and integration with, future long-term community land development policy. Cincinnati had been bankrupted by corrupt politicians raking in millions of dollars in graft in capital construction projects and public utility franchises in uncoordinated projects, resulting in one of the highest tax rates for the level of public services in America. The comprehensive plan was an element of political reform intended to take control out of the hands of the corrupt elected officials and to place it in the hands of a citizen-dominated planning commission charged with producing the plan, and adopting it as public policy. Under a 1916 Ohio planning enabling law drafted by Alfred Bettman a city council was required to comply with such a planning commission adopted comprehensive plan in both ordinance and appropriation, overriding the corrupt elected officials. This 1916 Ohio law, our first comprehensive-plan-based planning enabling law empowering the plan, was stronger in support of the plan, planners, and the planning process than most current proposals for enabling law reform.
In the year following adoption of this first comprehensive plan, in 1926, in Euclid v. Amber, the type of zoning control undertaken at New York in 1916 and utilized in Cincinnati to control land development in such a manner as to be consistent with a comprehensive plan, was constitutionally validated by the Supreme Court, thanks to an Amicus brief by Alfred Bettman. Bettman offered his brief to save the Cincinnati reform movement, for without land use controls one of its primary objectives, efficiency in the use of tax dollars, would be jeopardized. Thus, 1925 and 1926 were the watershed years for initiation of both the widespread adoption of zoning controls in America by virtue of the "comprehensive zoning plan" model, now validated for constitutionality by the Supreme Court, and creation of long range integrated "comprehensive plans" predicated on the Cincinnati model.
The finding in the Euclid case held that zoning executed "in conformance with a comprehensive plan" was constitutional. Bettman consistently wanted to believe that zoning must therefore be consistent with the type of long-term aspirational and comprehensive look to the future he had directed in Cincinnati. And he propounded that view perennially. Edward Murray Bassett, framer of the New York zoning code, did not agree, simply holding that a comprehensive overview of the city's current needs and problems before adoption of a zoning ordinance was sufficient, and he propounded this view in a book entitled The Master Plan, further muddying the terminological waters.
Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge in the 1920s, expressing the then common views of Chambers of Commerce throughout America, was a strong supporter of zoning. Zoning increased land values and the profits of everyone who made a cut in land development. Hoover saw planning and zoning as good for business in this era when, as Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business." Hoover appointed Edward Murray Bassett to write a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (1922-1926) to promote adoption of a uniform zoning system throughout America. Following adoption of the Cincinnati plan and the Euclid decision, Hoover followed up his zoning initiative with preparation of a Standard City Planning Enabling Act (1928), and hires Alfred Bettman to tour the country promoting state-by-state adoption of this standard act. In brief, the Standard City Planning Enabling Act was seriously flawed. It followed the introduction and adoption of the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. Thus, zoning without a basis in Bettman's explicit aspirational and comprehensive future-focused policy guide was generally already on the books when the Planning Enabling Act was proposed. The Act suggested that: (1) zoning must only be executed in conformance with a master or comprehensive plan (Bettman's primary interest, OK so far), then; (2) there are three elements of a comprehensive plan - transportation, public facilities, and zoning (Zoning! Not land use policy!), and (3) since plans are expensive to prepare, all three of these components need not be adopted at the same time. This was catastrophic! Since "zoning," the immediate legal control of land development, is deemed to be an element of the plan, any zoning ordinance that is adopted will automatically be in conformance with itself! And, since the three elements need not be adopted at the same time, a zoning ordinance adopted without concern for long-term land policy and without concern for its impacts on transportation or the public facility needs it generates is OK. It is simply the first of three parts, the others to come later . . . if at all. Many cities adopted the "zoning component" of their standard-act-required comprehensive plan in the late 1920s and just never got around to the other components since then! Because of these errors, today, three-quarters of a century later, most zoning in America is engaged in free of a foundation in an aspirational integrated comprehensive plan, the exact opposite of Bettman's intentions.
Simultaneous with this, the potential of a great long-term plan for the New York Metropolitan Area raised the hopes of believers in the value of comprehensive planning. But the directors of the Regional Plan for New York and Environs (1922-1929+) rejected the pleadings of the Regional Planning Association of America (Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, etc.) that it must produce a future-oriented comprehensive plan to direct the growth of the New York City metropolitan region. Instead, the view was adopted that the job of the plan was to expedite the suburban expansion of New York by provision of highway networks and perimeter recreation facilities for the new automobile suburbanite. Stein, Mumford, et al, explicating the views of the emerging planning profession, argued the need to nucleate the development, to preserve the older centers, the farming communities, and the agricultural districts, to concentrate development along alternative transportation facilities, to provide for a broad range of housing style and price in designed neighborhoods bounded by greenbelts and providing for pedestrian activity conducive to building face-to-face community relationships. Do the words "New Urbanism" and "Neotraditional Neighborhood" come to mind? They should, for these movements are currently rekindling the objectives and means of the founders of the planning profession in America.
Although the Regional Plan was impressive in its scale, its limited scope and non comprehensive nature unfortunately set the norm for postwar regional, metropolitan, and community planning efforts: functional planning for highways, parks, and statistically projected land uses, facilitating projected growth rather than redirecting or structuring it.
Few comprehensive plans were adopted during the Depression Era of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s. During the Œ30s, although a few "model" Greenbelt towns were built by the federal government, all emphasis was on making work for the unemployed today and tomorrow, which was the motive for building those towns. During the Œ30s when people questioned impacts on the long run they were met with "People don't eat in the long run, they eat tonight." FDR and the New Deal were not strong supporters of comprehensive planning beyond the building of new towns. The focus of the New Deal was job creation, in spite of the creation of a short-lived National Planning Board headed by FDR's uncle, who directed completion of the New York Regional Plan and carried it's philosophy to the federal level: accommodate projected growth with functional plans.
In the mid-1930s, Frederick Adams, son of Thomas Adams the technical director of the New York Regional Plan, joined the faculty of MIT, the second institution in America to grant a degree in city planning, after Harvard (1929). At MIT, Adams introduced courses in the social sciences and faculty members with a background in the social sciences. The Harvard program was primarily staffed with landscape architects and architects, creative environmental designers. Adams added the descriptive and analytic social sciences to the prescriptive fields of landscape architecture, architecture, and engineering that had been the foundation of the profession - "design" being "the realization of ideas," a prescription for their realization. The designers were trained to analyze a problem, draft a program for its solution in three dimensions, and then prepare a physical response to the challenge presented that could be criticized for the degree to which it meets the needs of the analysis and the program. These new social scientists (sociologists, economists, political scientists) introduced at MIT were intended to strengthen the first step of the design process: analysis of the problem based on past data and experience. Being descriptive-analytic fields, they had no compelling background in writing solutions to these problems, let alone designing to meet such programs. Shortly thereafter. admission to graduate degree programs in planning was opened to those with undergraduate degrees not only in the creative design fields, but also in the social sciences, people lacking background in the art of creative synthesis. Recognizing that one could not develop a competence in creative synthesis in physical design in the course of a one- or two-year graduate program, it was argued that these new people entering the planning field as professionals would find valuable roles in practice as contributors to a team of planners directed by those with synthesis-design skills.
To address anything but the war effort during the first half of the 1940s was tantamount to treason. So, with little private development of any kind from 1930 to 1945, the old zoning ordinances from the late 1920s were often the only community development controls in effect in America in the postwar boom years of the returning GIs. Very few comprehensive plans were produced from 1930 to 1945, yet at Cincinnati the concept of continuous comprehensive planning was introduced by Alfred Bettman and Ladislas Segoe, and a new comprehensive plan for Cincinnati was adopted in 1948 that extended the range of the plan to a multi-state regional area surrounding the city. Where comprehensive plans were adopted, they were advisory only, having no control authority, serving only as guides to the formulation of zoning ordinances, capital budgets, street and park plans, etc. Lacking the power of enforcement, and intended as the policy bases for control and budgetary actions, the comprehensive plans that were produced in the 1940s had a land use component, a transportation component, and a public works component, much the same as the Cincinnati Plan of 1925. But these plans were now being framed in a 20-25 year planning horizon and, thanks to the addition of social scientists to the field in the 1930s, were beginning to include a significant amount of population, employment and transportation statistics and projections intended to validate the plan. Jack Howard, at Cleveland in the late 1940s broadened the comprehensive plan concept considerably, introducing far more than just land use, transportation and public facilities, introducing, among other things, housing policy, employment and industrial development, and community redevelopment.
The comprehensive plan, or the "general plan" as it was termed at that time, came of age in the 1950s. The US Housing Act of 1949 required conformance with "a plan" for receipt of federal funds in support of community redevelopment programs. The type of "plan" required was explicated in the US Housing Act of 1954, requiring conformance of federally subsidized clearance, rehabilitation and conservation projects with a comprehensive plan (general plan) as then defined in professional planning practice, a plan integrating land uses, transportation, and public facilities in a physical plan for community development within a 20-to-25-year time frame, introduced with a statistical analysis of past trends and a projected future. Title 1, Section 701, of the 1954 Act (the "Planner's Full Employment Act") provided federal financial support for the production of these comprehensive plans, at first just for small communities, but the Act was subsequently amended to provide such support to virtually all communities and at all scales of urban development, city, county and regional, by the end of the decade. The "701" provisions stimulated growth of the private planning consulting industry in America focused on production of general plans, and resulted in increased municipal employment of professional planners. It brought the concept of the comprehensive / general plan to thousands of communities throughout the country, but it did little to promote its necessary continuous nature and its implementation beyond the boundaries of clearance and rehabilitation projects.
By the late 1950s, sometimes seen as the "Golden Age" of the designer planner due to the era's focus on urban design and physical redevelopment, leadership in both the profession and academe still resided with those with creative-synthetic skills, but with an ever increasing number of newcomers from the descriptive-analytic social sciences.
In the 1960s, the "housing" and "housing demolition" foci of the 1949 and 1954 acts brought housing inequities to public attention. The clearance and rehabilitation programs of these acts, coupled with construction of the Interstate Highway System, dislocated hundreds of thousands of the lower-incomed. Calls for planning for all citizens, not just to accommodate the new suburbanite and business and real estate interests, expanded the concept of the general plan to include issues of social equity, and brought issues of population diversity and civic pluralism to the fore.
"701" plans, general plans produced for the wrong reason, solely to obtain federal funds rather than to attain a better community, were commonly ignored except as required within a particular project boundary. Never intended to be seriously implemented on a city-wide basis, the "701" plans were "cranked out" by many planning consultants using boiler-plate elements. Although virtually always stated as requiring an update every 4-6 years, few "701" plans were updated after their initial fund-getting purpose had been fulfilled. These plans fell first into obsolescence and then into disrespect. "Oh, yeh. We made a comprehensive plan once. It's around here somewhere. What a waste of money!"
Jack Kent's book, The Urban General Plan, (1964) addressed many plan deficiencies and redirected the plan away from the citizen planning commission and toward the city council as the primary client for the plan toward the end of increased plan implementation. But In the mid-1960s Alan Altschuler and others condemned the comprehensive plan, arguing that analysis has shown that decisions are not made that way, but are made in isolation, and that, therefore, because life is this way, comprehensive planning cannot work. They promoted "disjointed-incrementalism," a fancy word for non-comprehensive, short term, short-sighted, limited functional planning. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, planning practice and theory shifted from "the plan" (outcome focused) to "the planning process" (means focused). With this shift away from ends and toward means (administrative processes) entry into the planning profession became less and less attractive to those with a creative-synthetic background. In the 1970s, students with undergraduate backgrounds in sociology, economics and political science dominated graduate admissions to planning schools as student admissions from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and engineering declined sharply.
Rather than stimulating continuous comprehensive planning processes, the shallow purposes and often irrelevancies of poorly executed "701" plans generated a revulsion against comprehensive long-range planning. Disjointed incrementalism spawned non comprehensive planning specialists in the 1970s and the 1980s who entered academe as transportation planners, economic development planners, social planners, infrastructure planners, etc., usually with advanced degrees, but often not in planning, many never having taken a course in planning or set foot in a planning agency. Based commonly in the social sciences, this new cadre in academe promoted mathematical modeling and abstract after-the-fact analysis as a substitute for creative vision, social ideals, and community goal setting. They promoted non comprehensive functional planning.
While stifling comprehensiveness and policy integration, the disjointed-incremental approach had some positive impacts. It opened up the planning process to include far more elements than it ever had before, including fair-share housing, energy conservation, environmental protection and historic preservation; And in the 1970s and the 1980s, in "The Plan Called Comprehensive," anything goes: the aborted New York City comprehensive plan (1970) proposed a minimum wage as an element of the plan. The Second Regional Plan of New York and Environs exposed the need for transit as well as highways, and the need for the rehabilitation of close-in subregional centers, but unlike the First Regional Plan for New York and Environs, never actually produced a plan!
The 1973 Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act explored new relationships between state and local governments in the setting of 19 goals for state development, one of which led to creation of the concept of an urban growth boundary requiring a renewed emphasis on physical comprehensive planning. The environmental emphases of the 1970s brought recognition of land as a nonrenewable resource to be cherished, conserved and managed, rather than just an exploitable commodity to be bought and sold. Farmland and woodlands are no longer shown on land use maps as "white: vacant, not yet developed."
The social disruptions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the gross injustices perpetrated on the poor through "slum clearance" and urban renewal demolition of their homes without comparable improvement in the number and quality of housing made available to them raised serious issues of social equity in American public programs. The Cleveland Plan produced in the mid-1970s under the leadership of planning director Norman Krumholz, initiated the concept of "equity planning" in long-range community planning, adding social equity within the community and within the region to the conditions every reasonable comprehensive plan must meet: "Who wins? Who loses? And why?"
Tackling the problem of out-of-date "701" plans head on, the State of Minnesota passed a new land planning act in the mid-1970s requiring the updating of comprehensive plans, mandating the continuous comprehensive planning process originally instituted in the 1940s by Alfred Bettman at Cincinnati.
Rationally, a general plan should be checked for continued relevance, updated and extended in its time horizon every four years; every two of the three two-year units of the capital budget cycle. A relevant comprehensive plan answers the question, "What are the physical, social and economic objectives of our future actions as a community and what are their implications for spatial relationships as an integrated geographic and environmental system?" It must answer not only what is wanted, how much, and how it is to be attained, but also where, in what quantities, with what qualities, and how related to everything else. These responses must be explicated in measurable terms and in spatial relations capable of being tracked for both compliance and proven relevance to the intended ends. All planned actions are based on assumptions of cause and effect that must be constantly tested. The plan must be comprehensively revised as quickly as possible when an assumption fails the test.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration's loud verbal denial of all government planning except short-term business-based "strategic planning" was coupled with a massive shift in production industry and business administration to Sun Belt communities lacking the supportive infrastructure required by those uses and the people they employ. In response, many states, most notably Florida in 1985, created or expanded upon legislation demanding that the local sub-units prepare, adopt and implement long-range comprehensive plans and adopt zoning controls consistent with these plans. In a number of cases it was required that these comprehensive plans be consistent with state-adopted goals that included such elements as housing equity, energy efficiency, and environmental conservation. Thus, the Reagan administration, and the Bush (George H.W.) administration that followed, inadvertently promoted long-range comprehensive planning of a far more overreaching kind than of previous periods, bringing the professional planner to public attention in the 1980s and 1990s, and creating a market demand for professional comprehensive planning services. Meanwhile the de-emphasis on comprehensive planning within the planning profession and within planning academe continued.
Annual awards were made by the American Planning Association (APA) in the 1980s, only one of which was awarded each year, among many, for comprehensive planning. Clearly, comprehensive planning was viewed as a specialization in planning rather than as its primary focus. And, in a rather telling sign of the times, in the late 1980s, "visionary planning" was introduced. "Visioning" was clearly viewed as a separate exercise some planners might wish to engage in; a subfield specialty within planning itself that was commonly derided by the "practical" plan economists, modelers, processors, as being engaged in by "impractical" utopians and dreamers. "Visioning" became a hot key word for that creative imagination that is generally lacking in the descriptive sciences. Long-range practical dreaming of better human conditions was once what planning was all about. As Atlanta would discover in the 1980s, very expensive and intensive visioning exercises without detailed backup in the preparation of integrated creative plans fulfilling these visions can result in frustration, public rejection of planning itself, and total negation of the value of the exercise. Visioning without the ability to produce concrete long-range plans to fulfill these visions violates the promise of planning. In the late 1980s the need for excellent graphics in plan making and plan communications was rediscovered, but graphic thinkers ("designers") were no longer entering a profession now characterized by and dominated by numbers and words, and going outside the profession to hire graphic artists lacking the ideas and understandings of the planner usually obfuscates with "flash" rather than illuminates and explicates planning concepts. I address your attention to virtually every canned Power Point presentation.
No longer capable of educating students to produce long-range physical-specific comprehensive plans (the experienced professionals having virtually all retired from academe; the first generation of design-profession-based planning-degreed professors also having retired, leaving just the social science "analysts" and the functional specialists to educate the planners of the future), many planning schools in the 1990s stopped requiring that the "Master of Planning" degree holder must be capable of producing and defending a comprehensive plan. "Policy plans" (planning in words), and "comprehensive components of plans" (an oxymoron) became popular in the 1990s, the schools and the planning profession producing as plans what used to be considered the preliminary programs for the making of a plan. In 1992, Frank So, then deputy director of APA, observed, "In an effort to be even more comprehensive, the field of planning specialized to the point that many planners and agencies deal only with single issues."
From 1992 to 1997 an intensive focus in Maryland on wetlands management and on saving Chesapeake Bay brought the imminent "paving" of the entire state to public attention. This led in 1997 to adoption of the Maryland Smart Growth legislation using capital investment policy at the state level to "steer" development into compact growth areas, bringing Maryland Governor Parris Glendening to national attention and bringing causative comprehensive planning, rather than reactive functional planning, to the fore.
If the comprehensive nature of planning is lost, does the profession itself still exist? During the 1980s and the 1990s, as the planner coped with acceptance as a professional, the comprehensive plan and the ability to plan comprehensively came to be accepted as the primary touchstone of professional planning practice. They are the only qualities of the planner's professional practice that are not drawn directly from a practice claimed as the rightful role of others. There is no other profession that claims to be preparing its members to fulfill the comprehensive community and regional planning function.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, while the profession was building a national organization recognizing the professional status of the planner by examination (AICP) and distinction (FAICP), the academic branch of the profession responsible for training future professionals did not recognized this unique comprehensive planning function as being central to professional recognition and success. Academe concentrated on the pieces of planning, on administration and mathematical analysis (pulling things apart) rather than on comprehensive integration (creating implementable unified multi-faceted plans for future change). And that is the key to maintaining the future status of the profession.
The literature of planning was dominated in the early 1990s by computers and GIS, data handling, data mapping and graphics: the means of planning. From 1995 to 1999, the focus on the planning profession itself in APA articles declined precipitously. Yet, since 1970, 14 states have comprehensively reformulated their planning enabling laws to recognize the distinctly different and interrelated roles of the comprehensive plan and zoning. But the depressing fact is that more than half of our states are still operating with the flawed and antiquated "model codes" of almost 80 years ago.
Modern comprehensive plan issues have expanded far beyond the classic trilogy of land use, transportation and public facilities to include long-range sustainability, the cleaning up of "brownfields," assurance of clean air and water, provisions for waste disposal and recycling, and provision of affordable housing by public policy. If we are to give credence to the Millennial Survey taken last autumn by AICP, and the comments of Mr. Grogan at the opening session of this conference, the highest priority John Q. Public expects to see fulfilled by the planning community is improvement of the American education system - and they weren't just talking about school siting.
It is clear that creative comprehensive planning responsive to the challenges of the 21st century, planning other than that of the analytic-projective mode ("this is probably what is going to happen so we had better facilitate it"), must be founded in a framework of imaginative, creative and foresighted national, state and regional policies, priorities and programs if it is to succeed. No single community can shape itself into a viable component of a rational regional community by itself. Experience has shown that without a statewide development policy, such as those developed by Oregon, Florida and Maryland, giving support to local efforts, local comprehensive plans to fulfill such aims as curbing urban sprawl are significantly weakened. State frameworks, regional guidelines, local implementation, in descending increased specificity, make for real change. At the base is complex comprehensive planning at each level.
Now, in 2001, as the Growing Smart project initiated by APA in October of 1994 nears its end, a program to update our state planning enabling laws to deal with 21st century problems and conditions, Stuart Meck, the Growing Smart project director, who has traveled extensively throughout the country, notes a resurgence of interest in mainstream physical planning in general and in comprehensive planning in particular, isolated functional planning having failed once again to cope with the most pressing problems of an emerging 21st century America.
If the current attacks on regulation, the so called "taking issues," are successful, government in America in this new century may be forced to rely on the two remaining powers, taxation and eminent domain, the only powers we had at the beginning of the last century, to shape the communities of the future. Were we to do this, we would recognize that our 80 year diversion into "soft control" of private development failed, and then return to the processes of direct public construction of neighborhood scale districts so admirably fulfilled by the federal government corporations almost a hundred years ago. This would bring the physical designer planner back into the forefront of the American planning movement just as our academic institutions complete the process of removing the last vestige of their ability to fulfill this need and the last generation of designer-trained professional planners retire from practice.
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Copyright 2001 by Author
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