ancient cities

906 Urban Planning
values should be given priority, or how different
values should be balanced against each other, is a
matter that—in a democratic society at least—
should be openly debated and resolved politically
rather than left to professional experts. Ergo, fifth,
urban planning decisions, either about general
urban plans or about specific development proposals,
are matters of value and political choices, not
matters of technical expertise.
Urban Planning in a Liberal
Market Society
In liberal capitalist societies, in which there is private
property ownership, exchange, and development
(whether by individual homeowners or
large-scale property developers), the ability of
government, through public sector urban planning,
to achieve publicly agreed upon goals
depends not just on plans for and statements of
those goals by government planning authorities
but also on the willingness of private property
owners and developers to undertake the necessary
development to realize those goals. For, in liberal
capitalist societies, the economic power and
resources required to undertake the development
needed to realize publicly agreed upon goals lie
largely in the hands of private property owners
and developers, not with government planning
authorities.
These facts about the socioeconomic context
within which state urban planning operates came
to be more sharply realized in the 1970s when,
alongside the unpopular urban development plans
and proposals that had been realized, it also
became apparent that many desirable government
plans and policies often failed to be effectively realized,
and not just because of deficiencies in the
public resources required to make good those
plans, but also because of a lack of development
initiatives from private sector developers. As two
American writers, Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron
Wildavsky, pointed out in their seminal text
Implementation, published in 1973, many public
sector plans and policies failed simply because they
failed to be implemented. Urban planners in the
Western capitalist world were thereby reminded
that the urban planning systems that had been
established in most Western liberal democracies
after World War II had not replaced the liberal
market system of property ownership, exchange,
and development (by, e.g., the nationalization of
land and development companies) but had, rather,
been given only the power to influence and regulate
this market system through being granted the
power to make urban development plans and then
control development proposals through granting
or refusing planning permission. To be sure, these
powers are not to be underestimated. But equally,
where public sector plans and policies depend for
their realization on the compliance of other private
sector actors and agencies, and that compliance is
not forthcoming because the development required
to realize the plans is not profitable to those actors,
then—as Pressman and Wildavsky showed—those
publicly endorsed plans and policies could go
unimplemented, or be implemented in ways that
disappointed the lofty aspirations contained in
them.
It was against this background that urban
planning theorists and practitioners in the 1970s
came to realize that, to achieve more effective
implementation of public plans and policies,
urban planners had to work cooperatively with
the prevailing market system and private sector
developers rather than against them. And this, in
turn, required urban planners who possessed not
only an understanding of private sector developers
and development economics but also the
interpersonal skills needed to contact, communicate,
negotiate, and form cooperative partnerships
with developers and other relevant actors in
order to secure the best urban development
“deals” for the public.
All this brought yet a further perspective on the
nature of urban planning, for now the effective
urban planner was seen, increasingly, not only as a
professional planner and policymaker, but also,
and equally, as a person whose job it was to manage
and negotiate the realization of plans. In other
words, he or she had to be someone who could
initiate and take effective action, just as much as
someone who could make good plans. So, from
the late 1970s onward, the activity of urban planning
came increasingly to be seen as an exercise in
the effective management of urban change, rather
than the centralized direction of it through grand
plans and policies. And hence the key skills of the
urban planner came to be seen as ones of good
management, communication, and negotiation, as