From: Who Are These Planners, Anyway?
By Randal O’Toole, The Antiplanner [excerpts]
. . .Utopianism and hubris would not be problems if planners and their architect gurus merely said to people, “Here are some ideas that will improve your life. Why don’t you try them out?” According to Peter Hall’s history of modern urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow [excerpt], most “of the early visions of the planning movement stemmed from the anarchist movement.”
. . .Sadly, most planners ended up following the authoritarian model. As Hall observes, “in half a century or more of bureaucratic practice, planning had degenerated into a negative regulatory machine, designed to stifle all initiative, all creativity.”
Yet I would argue that such authoritarianism is an inevitable result of the planning process. After all, if you have a vision of how people ought to live, and if you really believe that vision will significantly improve the world, then you don’t dare risk letting that vision be corrupted by the vagueries of the free market. So you turn to government to impose that vision on the world.
In sum, planners have historically believed that they could use urban design as a form of social engineering to perfect the world and the people in it. They acted on this belief by using the power of government to impose their designs through zoning and other regulations. The planning profession today continues to be shaped by these ideas.
In principle these are good ideas, however, in the context of the TRW’s weekly ECN attacks on the BOCC, treating them as whipping boys and girls for their leftist agenda, and considering the virtual certainty that no matter what the BOCC did, the beatings would continue (because the BOCC are not leftists and never will be,) these moral arguments ring as hollow as the pumpkins on my front porch.
