Cities where planning is valued...

Planners are always being asked, especially by cynical critics, for examples of “wellplanned cities”. It is not always clear what such critical inquirers have in mind, but I often use as examples cities such as Amsterdam and Vancouver. Recently, I found myself re-visiting both cities, leaving one on a sunny morning, and arriving to a sunny afternoon in the other. Both are such pleasurable places to be in—one compact, flat, watery, and intimately intriguing, the other with towering buildings and sprawling suburbs dwarfed by surrounding mountains and seas. Both are easy to get around in, and eminently liveable, with strong traditions of attention to walking, bicycling and public transport, and quality neighbourhood services, combined with a tolerant inclusivity to diverse lifestyles and backgrounds. The two cities are also major international commercial centres and tourist destinations. Both have a strong planning tradition, continually contested, but yet valued by citizens. People are proud of these cities and of their planning. How does this come about? What does it take to create a strong planning tradition which promotes everyday liveability and sustainability, reflected in the built form and ambience of a city? How far can other cities create such an outcome? How robust are the traditions and what could destroy them? When we unravel the city’s development story, in each case the particularities of history and geography underline the uniqueness of the developmental process. The Amsterdam story can be traced back to the early twentieth century, with the planning office an important part of municipal government from the 1920s onwards, although the city’s distinctive urban form of canal-side streets and multi-storey mixed-use buildings dates back to the seventeenth century. In the mid twentieth century, the city council was the major landowner and developer, and it still retains the ground freehold of much of the city. Land for urban extension was garnered from national government’s efforts to drain surrounding water meadows and lakes. A famous strategic plan, produced by one of the leading lights of the CIAM movement in the 1930s, guided this expansion, emphasising the provision of parks and open spaces and connections with public transport. City council politics has been dominated since the 1920s by a social democratic philosophy, underpinned by a powerful working class movement (though industrial and port activities were undermined by global re-structuring, a social democratic politics was revived in the 1970s by social movement activism). This has kept attention on the quality of the daily life experience of ordinary people as the measure of what planning should achieve. The city council is powerful, with considerable command over resources, but yet it is situated in a multi-layered government system, with a strong national government on which it has depended for resource transfers. Three factors have helped the city maintain a strong role in defining its own future. Firstly, the relation between government levels has always been as much a partnership as a hierarchy, especially for a city council such as Amsterdam, which is the national capital and has helped to shape national policy in many areas. Secondly, spatial development has always been a major national policy interest in a densely-urbanised country, much of it in the delicate water system of a large delta. Thirdly, most of the time, the city has had a strong economy, though it underwent a major shift from an industrial to a service economy during the twentieth century. But citizens have not Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 8, No. 3, 287–291, September 2007