“Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.” Daniel Burnham
Daniel Burnham’s biggest influence on urban planners was not in urban design but in their DNA. Burnham created the model of large, comprehensive thinking in the 1909 Plan of Chicago. And many if not most planners today focus on orderly and harmonious development.
This has brought a lot of benefit to the places we serve. When property owners know what their neighbors can do with their property, there is less risk, and property values go up. Planning that provides a clear set of goals and objectives can give stakeholders more hope about places that are unsafe and unhealthy.
But the lust for order nurtures intolerance. Anyone who makes order their watchword is going to be uncomfortable with diversity. Maybe not a diversity of land uses, because zoning maps don’t talk back at you. Tension builds when people with different perspectives, beliefs and demands share space. This tension is usually not orderly or beautiful.
But diversity is valuable, if not essential, for enhancing creativity and helping communities find better and more sustainable solutions to difficult problems. (There are a lot of scientific studies that prove this point. Start with Scott Page’s The Difference) Planners who want to help their communities succeed in the 21st century need to do better at balancing the discomfort of diversity with the demand for order.
If you read the works of Leonie Sandercock, Stacy Harwood, and the authors they reference, you’ll see how planners use racially neutral language and methods of problem solving to perpetuate structural racism and stymie innovative thinking. I believe that most planners are open-minded and welcome creativity, so I think that what we’re seeing is the impact of decades of incomplete or misguided professional training.
Oyster Bay is the latest in a long string of communities to use the “order defense” to make it more difficult for low-income Latinos to look for work there. A new ordinance prevents a pedestrian from soliciting employment while standing on a sidewalk. Of course, there is no specific language targeting Hispanics (there never is). It just happens that the people who are most affected by this are low-income Latinos. More than 90 years ago, the city of Louisville, Kentucky used the order defense to justify zoning that prevented African-Americans from buying property in white communities. (The city argued in Buchanan v. Warley that the ordinance was to protect the safety of African-Americans, who would be attacked for moving into white neighborhoods.) Burnham’s most powerful descendants, including Robert Moses, used urban renewal to clear away neighborhoods and build housing projects that looked orderly on paper but failed in real life. Even the New Urbanists display their order gene through their formulas and intolerance of urban design that doesn’t fit their romanticized visions of pre World-War II American communities. (That’s probably why a couple of New Urbanist leaders got their hats handed back to them when they tried to push a diverse area of Biloxi, Mississippi to adopt new urbanism.
Is all this the fault of planners? No. But they do often unintentionally aid and abet. And this is again a result of the order gene. By focusing on orderly practices, planners in many cases are little more than coordinators, data jockeys and glorified jacket holders for powerful interests in communities. Unable or unwilling to manage the complexity of diversity other than by avoiding it, planners in many cases squander their powers to lead.
In another essay, I wrote about how planners can more effectively work with diversity by being more culturally competent. And in that vein, I understand why Burnham placed so much emphasis on order and beauty. The industrial revolution changed American cities dramatically. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cities got packed with huddled masses who couldn’t breathe free because of the dirty factories that polluted their communities. The nation was only a few decades away from an existential struggle over who should have what civil rights, and the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had for centuries ruled urban centers were understandably distressed by so many people of different colors and creeds crowding cities.
But that was then. Why is the desire for order still so entrenched in the minds of urban planners? One reason is that the public sector, being focused on the efficient delivery of services, tends to be less tolerant of risk than the private or nonprofit sector. Public administrators are trained to focus on the efficient delivery of services. That, combined with the fear of looking bad in public when mistakes are made, tend to make public sector leaders value stability and fear change. But all organizations – especially large ones – tend to become more orderly over time. It simply is more efficient and less risky to repeatedly do the same thing. Another reason is that planning school students tend to be trained by social scientists. They are the core faculty members, which means they determine what is taught and how, who gets to teach, and the culture of learning. Though scientists learn by trial and error, the ideal scientific method is orderly (and frankly, a little compulsive). So planners are trained to value order, and then they see that maintaining order is the best way to get ahead in their organizations. It’s no wonder then that the person who most changed the way planners think was a self-proclaimed ‘housewife’ with no college degree and no formal training in architecture or urban planning – Jane Jacobs.
A third reason is that humans crave order in times of change. That desire is why relationships (even bad ones) persist, why cultural habits continue, and why charismatic individuals who offer easy solutions become leaders in times of crisis. Many planners want to serve the interests of the communities they work for, so it's natural that these planners would want to give people what they want: a sense of order.
But while order is a short-term relaxant, it makes societies vulnerable in the wake of changing conditions. (One of the best studies of how societies fail when they fail to change is Jared Diamond's book, Collapse)
So we can understand how Burnham’s words became a part of the planner’s genetic makeup. But we know that DNA is not destiny. Planners can learn to do a better job of working with diversity while effectively promoting order. But first they have to realize their genetic makeup, question their assumptions, and develop new ways of thinking and acting.
In the 21st century, let your watchword be balance and your beacon creativity.
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