The Evils of Urban Planning

 

Here in Saint John, back in the Sixties, they tore up Main Street, full of old shop fronts and city life, the traditional immigrant neighbourhood, to widen it to six lanes.

After all back in the early Sixties, one did not want ghettos. Ghettos were segregation. One did not want slums. So one wanted to knock them down to improve the city. Urban renewal was the thing. 

Moreover, in the Sixties, planners assumed rapid growth; the hugely expanded road capacity would surely be needed. Saint John would one day soon have a population over a million, and everyone would have a car. Overpopulation was the future. One needed to plan for the future. 

Saint John has not grown since the 1960s. Main Street is a dead zone—a stretch you drive through to get from here to there. There is no street life. There are no shops, and no residences. Just drive-ins and large institutional buildings. Historic buildings are gone. Many lament the loss of their old home, their old neighbourhood. The area is referred to locally as “The Lost City.”

Seeing the excess capacity and wasted space, town planners are now cutting Main Street back to four lanes, and putting in two dedicated bicycle lanes.

My cyclist friends say they will never use these new lanes. They cross on-ramps from the highway below. Cars cannot see a bicycle zip by until it is too late. The bicycle lanes are too dangerous.

Why does urban planning always cause more problems than it solves? 

I feel urban planning has been a blight on my life; on the lives of all of us. Consider the old towns and cities of Europe and Asia, which grew organically through a million individual decisions. Each has a distinct character; each block and corner has a sense of place. Compare the numbered grids of so many North American towns and cities. One place is just like another. The individual seems as insignificant as an ant, and daily life feels meaningless. There is no reason to be any one place rather than another. This was urban planning. 

Worse are the postwar suburbs, with their spaghetti streets and zoning prohibiting any storefronts or workplaces or diversity. They are designed to force everyone to own a car and burn fuel to do anything, to prevent you from knowing your neighbours or developing a community. It all seems deeply sinister. Among other ill effects, I think these suburban deserts prompted much of feminism: housewives felt trapped and isolated in their homes.

It is consistent: allow urban planning, and everything gets uglier. In Bulgaria, they refer to such Stalinist architecture as “roughneck baroque.” In the UAE, it is breathtaking to drive from freewheeling Dubai across the border into urban-planned Sharjah. It is as if a light suddenly goes out. 

Urban planning is always central planning. It is some expert or experts controlling the lives of other people. Since people are not objects, this cannot work. 

Worse, anyone who seeks to do this cannot have good motives. No one wants to be controlled; everyone wants to make their own choices. And so such planners are always breaking the golden rule, of “do unto others.” They are looking down on others as their inferiors. It tends to follow that they are acting with malice. It is not just that they will not foresee their subjects’ wants and needs. To show their superiority and confirm their control. They will tend to deliberately make the lives of those they control worse.

And make us pay for the privilege.

If we want to fix the current housing shortage, the quickest and most effective thing we could do is ban municipal zoning.

Hell on Earth

 Since childhood modern suburbs have horrified me. What could be worse than living in one? The deadening sameness; the lack of any sense of community; the labyrinthine streets designed to be hostile to escape. They are the stuff of nightmares. They seem designed to promote conformity. Just as might be most desirable to an oppressive totalitarian government.

It is apparently not just me who thinks so. Locally, there have always been jokes about having to live in "Scarberia." Yet people are forced to do so, everywhere, against their will.

They are also oppressive to the poor. They make it necessary to own a car, and to use it to do anything. They require you to pay for a front yard, of no use to you. They offer no inexpensive row housing or apartments. They prohibit any jobs nearby.

The cities of Europe or Asia are infinitely more interesting and charming; and not because they are older. When I lived in Seoul, it was a revelation that even the remotest suburbs had charm, street life and amenities. And densities to support decent public transit.

The problem is zoning bylaws. It seems to me that zoning bylaws have always been used maliciously. Urban planning has always been malicious. Give somebody such power over others, and you will attract the power-mad. Other than setting aside some land for parks, streets, and public utilities, a mere absence of rules would have produced a better result. The market would have forced development of just what people wanted and most needed. We would have diversity. We would have services and work nearby. We would not have the frightening housing shortages and high housing costs we now face in Canada. Nor would we have the urban sprawl and high carbon dioxide emissions environmentalists so lament.

It could all be fixed, if not quickly, by repealing zoning bylaws. That’s a cause I wish some provincial or municipal political party would take up.