The Fallacy of Urban Planning

Nick Bowden
Better Planning
Published in
2 min readMar 6, 2017

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Long-range planning. Long-term vision. Planned serendipity. The value proposition(s) of most professional urban planners. It’s flawed logic. Fool’s gold.

The greatest cities and places in the world are not a result of planned serendipity. They are a result of unpredictable, step-function improvements in technology. Rather than accept the sheer randomness of these inventions and their impact on cities, we create a narrative of the past that feels explainable. We invent stories that imply we expected the steam engine, personal refrigeration, cheap electricity, mass adoption of personal vehicles, etc… In reality, we didn’t plan for or expect any of these things. They happened to cities.

As humans, we overestimate what we know and wildly underestimate what we don’t. We attribute the best parts of cities to great planning and the worst parts to events outside of a planner’s control. Most problematic, we continue to assume the future of cities will bear some resemblance to the past, that cities improve in some kind of linear and predictable pattern. If cities developed in linear and predictable patterns, Detroit would still be the 4th largest city in America (1940 Census) and Silicon Valley would just be a collection of cities in California.

In many ways, cities resemble the stock market. Urban planners are city’s version of financial planners. Both operating environments are unpredictable and full of random gyrations. Planners in both worlds sell predictably in the midst of chaos. They provide “investment guidance”. Naturally, when the market is up we attribute success to foresight and expertise. When the market is down, well…

The simple awareness of this flawed logic is unlikely to produce any significant changes in how we think about city development. Admitting that we, planners, are simply the facilitators of random-acts-of-technological-development is about as likely as financial planners admitting they mostly just guess.

As urban planners and designers, our commitment to cities should include the following elements:

  • The plans and designs we develop are not personal possessions. We should willingly and actively part ways with prior plans when new information suggest they are no longer accurate.
  • The plans and designs we develop should be intentionally adaptable and flexible. Avoiding catastrophic errors (inflexible infrastructure) should be valued more than guessing right once-in-a-generation.
  • The plans and designs we develop should actively and explicitly recognize uncertainty. The only thing we should be certain about is not being certain.

This post isn’t advocating for the extermination of the planning profession. It’s a plea to accept that we have far less power over the future of our cities than we advertise and our approaches should accept the uncertainty. Cities are complex webs of physical, social, and emotional attributes. Employing knowledgeable people in these areas is important to ensure cities can and do capitalize on unexpected and new technologies.

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CEO, Co-Founder, Replica. Editor of Better Planning; previously @sidewalklabs; founded @MindMixer & @mysidewalkhq.