ancient cities

904 Urban Planning
built environment. Accordingly, 50 years ago,
most urban planners were architect-planners or
civil-engineer planners, and, in Britain, the bodies
representing the professions of architecture and
civil engineering resisted the recognition of a separate
professional body for urban planning on the
grounds that their own professions already dealt
with this activity.
This “architectural” conception of urban planning
has been largely superseded or, at least, come
to be seen as just one part of urban planning. Yet
the physical design view of urban planning still
lives on in some countries of the world, and it also
persists in much of the public’s perception of
urban planning, as is shown by the fact that, when
programs on urban problems and planning are
broadcast on television or radio, it is usually leading
architects, rather than people directly trained
in urban planning, who are called upon to pronounce
on the issues.
Systems Analysis and Rational Action
It was precisely the emphasis on the physicality
and design of cities that contributed to much of the
insensitive urban planning that took place in the
post–World War II era in Europe and North
America. Faced with large industrial cities containing
a large legacy of poor, working-class housing,
often mixed up with heavy polluting industries,
and lacking green open spaces for recreation and
visual relief from the gray monotony of uninterrupted
built form, urban planners embarked upon
the drastic redevelopment and renewal of urban
areas by demolishing huge swathes of workingclass
housing and inner-city industrial areas, and
replacing them with massive modern architectural
schemes of high-rise housing, new office and shopping
developments, and new urban motorways to
accommodate the rising use of the motor vehicle as
the main means of urban transport. What was
lacking in this “clean-sweep” approach to urban
planning was sensitivity to the existing social and
economic life of old industrial cities, so that, in
sweeping away the physical slums, urban planning
simultaneously swept away vibrant communities
too, with their richly faceted cultural and economic
life. By the early 1960s, the disastrous
effects of this kind of urban planning came to be
recognized and criticized, nowhere more trenchantly
than in Jane Jacobs’s seminal book The Death and
Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961.
Echoing many other critics of contemporary urban
planning, Jacobs’s main charge was that urban
planners did not properly understand the cities
that they were so dramatically replanning, precisely
because they had not first studied or understood
the life of real cities but were, instead,
guided primarily by modern architectural visions
of “the city of the future,” such as those of Le
Corbusier, which advocated a radically new physical
layout and form for the city. In other words, it
was the very emphasis on the physical form and
design of cities that was central to the physical
design conception of urban planning that had led
the rich social and economic life of cities to be
overlooked.
It was against this background that, in the
1960s, two alternative conceptions of urban planning
emerged. One of these—the systems view of
planning—focused on the very thing that urban
planners were accused of having ignored or inadequately
understood, namely, the environment
that they were engaged in planning. According to
urban systems theorists, cities should be viewed as
functioning systems of interconnected people and
activities, from which it followed that urban planning
should be viewed as a form of systems analysis
and control—that is, an activity that should,
first of all, seek to understand how urban systems
are functioning and then intervene to improve, and
ideally optimize, their functioning. Here, then, the
emphasis was on understanding cities prior to
interventions to plan them, and the kind of understanding
required was primarily of the social and
economic life of cities that had hitherto been lacking
in urban planning thought and practice.
The second innovation in urban planning
thought in the 1960s was to view urban planning
as a continuous, ongoing process of intervention in
the control of urban systems, rather than as a oneoff
exercise in producing “end-state” master plans.
This “process” view of urban planning was coupled
with a model of planning, borrowed from
decision theory in management science, that viewed
urban planning as a methodical step-by-step process
of rational decision-making and action, involving
the identification of urban problems (and
hence urban planning goals), the identification and
evaluation of alternative plans or policies to