Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 30

One of the earliest visions for regional planning described how it brought together several fields of expertise – economists, surveyors, town planners – in a ‘product of a “composite mind”’ and distinguished regional planning from metropolitan planning, which ‘assumes a continuously expanding metropolis as an inevitable if not desirable condition’ (MacKaye, 1962 [1928]: 35, 39).

However, the problem of defining an appropriate scale for urban planning to operate at is at its most apparent here. With the exception of a few countries, regions, as ambiguous scales ranging from the metropolitan to below the national, have frequently failed to capture the popular or political imagination. Perhaps as a result, and in contrast to MacKaye’s hopes, regional planning has often been reserved for particular, not composite, purposes. These types of regional planning include physical and economic planning, allocative planning and innovative or development planning, multi- or single-objective planning, or indicative or statutory planning (Glasson, 1978). That is, ‘regions are an intermediary level, both territorially and functionally, and their power depends on their ability to integrate various levels of action, on their knowledge and mastery of decision making networks’ (Keating, 1997: 393). Rarely, it would seem, have regional institutions been able to mobilize power, let alone consistently over time.

In the UK, weak reforms were made in the 1990s to regions established much earlier to administer policies and disburse funds, while regional spatial strategies that were a decade in the making at the start of the twenty-first century were abandoned overnight by central government, indicating just how insecure regional planning can be. In the US, the Regional Planning Association most clearly espoused the logic of regional-scale planning and was successful in promoting the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The passing of the TVA Act in 1933 granted the TVA statutory responsibilities pertaining to water resource management and an ambiguous remit of regional development and planning. In the course of its practical affairs, the TVA was soon shorn of this latter remit (Schaffer, 1986).

Physical geography ensures that some instances of regional planning persist and have effects. Only 16 of the 229 different types of plan in existence found in one recent survey (OECD, 2017a) did not fit into the scalar hierarchy of national, regional and local. These were, for example, Turkey’s coastal plan, the Czech water catchment plan, and the German open pit lignite mining plan. However, functional urban regions, while they can be defined on the basis of, for instance, labour market catchments or commuting patterns, have rarely gained traction and permanency in urban planning in themselves beyond being references for the collection and reporting of data. The sorry tale of the failure of proposals to reconstitute archaic local government boundaries on travel-to-work areas under the Redcliffe-Maud Commission (reported in 1969) – despite a history of frequent local government reorganization in the UK – is testament to that. The rejected proposals have been looked back on fondly as something of a missed opportunity (Leach, 1997).

While something of the sentiments of regional planning has been apparent with respect to the metropolitan areas that planners and politicians accept as coherent functional regions and that most citizens can identify with, local politicians have been reluctant to change constituency boundaries, while national politicians have always hotly debated the electoral implications of bigger units of urban government. Proposed local government reorganizations – such as those in the 1960s and 1990s in the UK – founder on these issues (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 2006). In the US, the theoretical idealism of regionalism has given way to a more pragmatic and limited sense of metropolitan regionalism. This is both more geographically pragmatic in focusing on major urban centres and their hinterlands (of 50,000 population or more) and more substantively limited – being driven by federal funds directed towards transportation planning in approximately 400 Metropolitan Planning Organizations across the US (Salkin, 2015).