Note: this post is a version of an article published in the journal, Practicing Planner, in Spring 2013.
Researchers have documented numerous examples of the lack of broad-based commitment by planners to practice a more responsible environmentalism in cities throughout the United States and Canada (Brody and Highfield 2005; Tomalty 2009; Stevens et al. 2010; Garde et al. 2010). A key challenge for practicing planners is to create cities that are not compartmentalized from the environment. When planners propose to protect the environment, the most common response has been to apply conventional planning tools and processes: inventory the resources, pose policies to protect them, seek community acceptance, get local elected officials to adopt the policies in a comprehensive plan, and then implement the plan and policies with regulations, programs, and other actions.
The conventional approach to environmental planning has not functioned adequately for several decades. Communities, as served by planners, have not arrived at the desired end state of urbanization that is respectful of, and even enhances, the environment. Certainly part of the failure to achieve our environmental aims can be attributed to planners. In this essay we identify some possible reasons why we have not reached that end, and we speculate about what planners might do differently to reach the desired end of environmentally responsible land development and urbanization.
Target Refocusing: Creating Better Cities
Systemic landscape changes, such as habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity, are typically triggered by individual and coalescing local actions, such as cities built and operated as if they were completely unrelated to the environment. In North America, that topic has occupied the attention of many practicing urban planners (Campbell 1996). However, that focus on making cities more functional does not mean all or even most practicing planners are actively pursuing environmentally responsible urbanization, despite its having gained the status of an international “best practice” as New Urbanism, smart growth, sustainability, and ecological cities (World Urban Forum 2006; United Nations 2007).
Although many practicing planners are in the process of developing local and site scale solutions to the challenge of creating cities that are not compartmentalized from the environment, when North American planners as a whole are considered that movement seems to be in the initial stages (Saha and Paterson 2008; Upadhyay and Brinkmann 2010). A detailed survey by Brody et al. (2010, 591) of more than 1,500 agency personnel from key state, regional, and local agencies and interest groups involved in climate change policy and actions found that those agencies “were not engaged in climate change policy, nor is the issue on their agendas.” The study also determined that, for local and state decision-makers, climate change issues (including more environmentally responsible cities) were of low-priority.
Since the adverse effects of irresponsible urbanization and climate change are interrelated, the 2010 Brody study raises questions as to how to engage local decision-makers in needed urban-environmental change. A number of other studies (Brody 2003a; Tang et al. 2011; Brody et al. 2012) suggest specific techniques—education, ecological values, and targeted stakeholder participation—may successfully involve individuals and decision-makers in actions that result in more responsible urbanization. Since planners deal with socioeconomic and environmental variables and public education-outreach as a normal part of their professional responsibilities, they are perfectly positioned to address responsible urbanization at critically important local and site scales where almost all landscape change necessarily begins (Wilbanks 2003, 2006). Practicing planners need to actively pursue environmentally responsible urbanization and development at the site, local, and regional scales, where we can be most effective. The goal is to make existing tools more accessible to planners so that better cities and more responsible urban development may result from their application (Brody 2003b).
Assess Before Participation and Planning
It should come as no surprise to experienced planners, but any effort to arrive at policies and programs that improve settlement patterns in relation to the environment must begin with appropriate assessments. Planners should complete a detailed resource inventory establishing ecosystem zones, habitats, boundaries, functions, biodiversity of wildlife and vegetation species, land cover, soils types, geological-topographic features, natural and human-caused hazard areas, climate/micro-climates, watersheds, floodplains and wetlands, lake or marine resources, groundwater recharge areas, and dedicated conservation property and its ownership-management status.
Because natural resources and environmental challenges span local boundaries and regions, planners should invite other governmental jurisdictions to participate in the preparation of a shared, jointly maintained natural resource database using GIS. Where feasible to do so, the locality or region should partner adjacent political jurisdictions, as well as with businesses and institutions, to complete the inventory.
The assessment of natural resources and environmental impacts resulting from urbanization and land development must be completed prior to engaging in the planning process. If environmental inventories and assessments come during planning instead of before the process has started, the findings that enlighten planners and the public may be manifested too late to be fully appreciated and implemented.
Assessing the current situation regarding the urban-environment nexus should include a self-assessment by planning staff to identify the full range of adverse human effects urbanization and land development have on natural resources and the environment. A key to completing this step successfully is to identify interconnections between urban socioeconomic factors and the natural environmental resource system. We recommend that planners issue a “State of the City” report that clearly highlights the effects of urbanization on the environment. Before initiating a process of creating a plan, planners should formally request that the governing council adopt by resolution the findings in the State of the City report about how certain urbanization practices adversely affect the environment.
As a part of the State of the City report, or in a separate work product, planners should also identify best practices used in other communities (policies, regulations, programs, actions, and other measures) to mitigate adverse land development impacts on the environment and determine their potential applicability locally or regionally. Ultimately, planners will propose an initial set of guiding principles articulating what it means to be a better city in terms of the environment. Before publishing those potential best practices, however, planners must examine them for conflicts. Where conflicts exist, the principles must be revisedor otherwise reconciled. Hence, it is important that planners use the resource inventory to set objectives and priorities and identify management-action alternatives for each significant resource area.
Involving Elected Officials First, Not Last
Many public planning processes begin with appointment of a task force or steering committee that makes recommendations that ultimately do not gain the support of local elected officials. If that hasn’t happened in your community, you’ve seen or heard about it occurring in other localities. Perhaps planners should start with the jurisdiction’s political leaders, who must ultimately approve and implement new approaches and initiatives. This suggestion doesn’t mean planners should draft plans in consultation only with elected officials, but that some preliminary “buy in” to the process and discussion of likely policy outcomes (including actions) need to be established and firmly grounded before engaging in more inclusive planning processes.
Participation and Consensus Building in the Pursuit of Shared Values
It may be that we are failing to achieve better urban-environmental relationships because we are not executing appropriate citizen-stakeholder participation processes. Serious questions should be raised as to how to we engage local decision-makers, stakeholders, and citizens in effectuating needed urban-environmental change.
As planners, we know what we want to achieve in any participation program. So we imagine the jurisdiction’s future where the quality of life is enhanced for all. We create a vision statement, and we explore the full range of possibilities for achieving that vision. We seek participatory processes that are authentic, genuine, open, welcoming, transparent, and responsive to citizen needs and expectations. Planners want participants to gain ownership in the planning process and resulting product. Ideally, we want ideas, concepts, goals, and principles to bubble up from the hearts and minds of participants, rather than have them handed down from decision-makers. This desire may lead us to overlook the important power that elected officials have and will exercise during the process, usually at the end when asked to adopt a plan and implementing measures.
While not intentional, planners often overlook existing community networks or at least fail to capitalize on them during the participation and planning process. To be successful, we must determine the strength and nature of existing community networks and develop effective strategies to mitigate or minimize weaknesses and constraints in those networks. This would put planners into a role of consensus building and policy advocacy prior to full engagement of the community in the planning process. Ethics of the planning profession require us to engage populations not ordinarily active in jurisdictional affairs, especially minorities and lower income groups and individuals that may have reduced confidence in their ability to influence jurisdiction decisions.
Success depends on building the social capacity and public will to address real world environmental challenges. Planners sometimes use politically charged terminology such as the word, “sustainability.” We need to approach environmental problems in ways that avoid politically charged terminology and focus on shared communal values to achieve progress.
We must employ education and citizen involvement programs to arrive at those shared environmental values. Planners need to motivate our community members to pursue substantive changes to urbanization so it occurs in an ecologically beneficial way. We are not succeeding, in part, because we aren’t using all of the citizen participation and consensus building approaches at our disposal. We can improve our participation processes by addressing pre-conceptions and hidden agendas up front, and by soliciting statements of perspectives and experiences from participants. Again, the goal is to create a shared understanding about what it means to create a more environmentally friendly city.
We anticipate that planners will respond to our advice as “easier said than done.” It may be that to get to shared environmental values that planners must first conduct training workshops on urban-ecological relationships and strategies for improving those relationships. We must identify environmental values people of all political persuasions share and can support. These may include saving money by cutting energy and infrastructure costs, breathing fresh outdoor air, swimming in clean water, catching fish that aren’t laced with chemical poisons, bringing back wildlife diversity, restoring wetlands and riparian systems, and improving urban parks. Success may require providing opportunities for community groups and individuals that involve meaningful environmental improvement and restoration opportunities within the jurisdiction.
Revisit the Planning Toolbox
Not all planners are able to grasp the extent to which ecosystem science has informed us about how urbanization affects the environment. Further, planners may be overlooking the basic tools that can be employed to achieve more environmentally responsible urbanization. Quite a few toolboxes or toolkits are available for planners interested in contemporary urban environmental or sustainability initiatives (see Brody 2003b for an illustrative list). However, most of those toolboxes have not resulted in a meaningful integration of urban planning with ecosystem science.
We encourage planners not to overlook the conventional tools of environmental policy implementation: cost-benefit analysis to determine scheduling and budgeting parameters; capital improvement programming; planned unit developments, purchase and/or transfer of development rights programs, urban growth boundaries, landscape ecological principles of land use planning and design, mitigation banking, density incentives for compact development and clustered housing, stormwater management ordinances, low-impact development practice guidebooks, habitat and damaged ecosystem restoration projects, critical area overlay districts and ordinances, energy savings awareness campaigns, urban forestry management, intergovernmental agreements for protecting natural areas crossing jurisdictional boundaries, and many others.
Inadequate Implementation and Monitoring
Planners are undoubtedly skilled at directing our communities as to how to implement plans. But we suggest that planners have not spent enough time tying policies and implementation measures together before the policies are adopted. In suggesting environmentally responsible policy, it must be evident to planning process participants and decision-makers what policy effectuation means in terms of regulations and implementation measures. It is insufficient to propose policies without at least presenting tentative or interim schedules and budgets for the actions needed to implement the policy. And, it is not enough to suggest implementations and set out a tentative schedule. There must be mechanisms for reviewing progress. Milestones for every six months of the implementation phase should be articulated. Progress should be reported annually. The resulting plan must inform and guide policy decisions and operations at all levels of local government.
Conclusion
The goal of creating better cities is for political jurisdictions to be able to plan, design, and construct urban development so the environment is not typically altered, degraded, and even, in all too many cases, destroyed. That goal includes making the idea of a better city and region directly relevant to the public and to a full palate of stakeholders. In this essay, we have identified some of the reasons planners may not be attaining the goal of environmentally responsible urbanization and land development. In review, we recommend a refocusing on regional and local environmental problems. We urge the completion of environmental assessments prior to engaging in the planning process itself, and we suggest articulating non-conflicting principles and their most likely policy implementation measures to implement those principles. We suggest that elected officials should be apprised of those measures, and that they should buy into the process, before broader participation processes are undertaken. Participation processes have not but should emphasize identifying shared environmental values. We also urge planners not to overlook the obvious but growing toolbox of implementation measures that can help mitigate the environmental impacts of urbanization and land development. We also suggest greater attention to connecting policy and implementation and inclusion of monitoring techniques.
The primary advantage of the process outlined in this essay is that it focuses on building the social capacity and public will to address real world environmental, social, and economic challenges at local scales in a scientifically valid manner and is not limited to simply constructing more efficient urban socioeconomic infrastructure. Its coordinated approach links planning tools and incentives that integrate socioeconomic and environmental objectives in the context of local community involvement.
Leading effectively toward a more socially just, economically sustainable, and environmentally responsible future is like walking gingerly through a mine field of conflicting positions and opinions. But that complex skill is one planners must quickly come to perfect (Jepson and Edwards 2010) if we are to make a significant difference in terms of more responsible urbanization and land development.
Brief Bios
Robert Ernst has a PhD in Geography from the University of Florida and is a specialist in land-based systems, including comprehensive urban and regional planning, policy/strategic planning, economic development, land use, and environmental impact studies. His nearly 40 years’ practical experience includes managing large-scale assignments involving multi-disciplinary teams and devising and implementing public involvement strategies. He has provided consulting services to local political jurisdictions; regional, state, and federal agencies; foreign governmental agencies; and private land development and natural resource firms in the United States and overseas. Ernst recently retired and lives with his wife in the St. Louis metropolitan area.
Jerry Weitz, PhD, FAICP, is editor of Practicing Planner. He is an associate professor and director of the urban and regional planning program at East Carolina University and a planning and zoning commissioner for Greenville, North Carolina.
References
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