The Difference Between Private and Public Planning

Community plans written for public entities have a completely different objective and require an opposing view of cities than what is required to prepare community plans written for private developers. Too many planning consultants who have made a career out of preparing specific plans and other planning documents for private developers expect to be able to use that expertise to prepare specific plans for cities. Not only is the process different (it requires a lot more public input to prepare a plan for the public), but the entire planning philosophies underpinning each type of plan are diametrically opposed to each other.

The goal of planning for most private developers is to build a community to a finished state. At the end of the project, roads will be built to their final right-of-way width to accommodate any future growth in traffic, all of the homes will be in situated in the middle of their lots and covenants in place to prevent changes in the future, and retail centers will have their big box stores and national credit tenants in place for the next decade or more. This sells to the new residents the feeling of certainty, stability, and permanence. It also allows the developer to make their profit and walk away from the community without concern for its future.

While these types of planned communities provide a superficial sense of order, they forbid any future change or growth. Jane Jacobs described this type of community preserved for eternity as underlying a deep disorder.

“If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is—sameness—it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is me same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented. Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos.”

On the other hand, community plans for public entities must embody the complete opposite goals. Local jurisdictions do not have to option to take their profit and walk away from the community. They must care about the long term vitality of the communities they design.

With these opposite goals in mind, public planning documents must allow for a changing, evolving, growing city. Instead of a community plan that envisions a neighborhood built to a finished state, public plans must embrace the seeming disorder of city life.

Here too, Jane Jacobs describes the underlying order in a seemingly disorderly city.

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city. wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

These two views of the city, the view of the private developer that brings what seems like order but is truly stasis and decay, and the view of the public planner who accepts a messy city that is vibrant and growing, are diametrically opposed. Planners that come to public projects from the private developer’s viewpoint will kill the vitality of the communities they plan.