WELCOME

Senior Action Committee, "The Long Rangers," is a program, discussion and special activities body of the Washington Chapter.

A little more about us: We are a core (not of bad apples, but of good, we tell ourselves) of planners who are retired from regular professional responsibilities or anticipating to be, but who have a smoldering interest in planning ready to be fired up with new ideas, or leisured visits to old ones in conversation and/or new commitments.

Anyone who thinks and talks planning as an important part of their interests is enthusiastically welcomed to touch base with us - participate in our sessions, affiliate with our projects, keep plugged in. We are most interested in the long run, the big picture. We are also available to assist the Chapter’s Legislative Committee on long run issues in the Legislature each year in Olympia. Our legislative focus: the advancement of long run issues - better comprehensive planning under the Growth Management Act.

If you’d like to keep posted about us and our activities send us your name, addresses: USPS and e-mail, ask us any questions, and tell us a wee bit about your interests.

Steering Committee, SAC

Raj Joshi, AICP

rajjoshi@worldnet.att.net

or 1714 N.E. 58th Street

Seattle, WA 98105

 

 

PLANNING

IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

IN WASHINGTON STATE

(Revised – January 9, 2001)

A Reconsideration of the Scope and Status

of the Comprehensive Plan

 

 

Presented by

SENIOR ACTION COMMITTEE

AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION

WASHINGTON CHAPTER

MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE ON PLANNING FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY IN WASHINGTON STATE

Art Grey, AICP, Task Force Leader

Bob Cornish, FAICP

Bob Hintz, AICP

Walt Isaac, AICP

Raj Joshi, AICP

Dick Ludwig, AICP

APA WA Chapter Conference 2000

October 2-4, 2000

Yakima, Washington

 

AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION – WASHINGTON CHAPTER

SENIOR ACTION COMMITTEE (SAC)

THE TASK FORCE ON PLANNING FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY IN WASHINGTON STATE

In Memory of Walt Isaac,

an important contributor to this project

who provided steadfastness, ideas,

idealism, and optimism, irrespective of

how he personally was feeling

 

Conference Session 35

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WELCOME *

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS *

PREFACE: Who We Are, What We’ve Tried to Do, What We’ve Got to Say *

QUALITIES OF THE PLANNER:A Gentle Spoof On Ourselves *

PART I: KEYNOTE: Planners Need to Think a Lot about Their Opportunities to Share Their Best Advice *

PART II: COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING IN THE PAST DECADES - IN THE U.S. AND WASHINGTON STATE *

PART III: PLANNING LAW IN WASHINGTON STATE - THE SLOW EVOLUTION *

PART IV: HINTS FOR COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING IN FUTURE DECADES *

PART V: MORE IDEAS FOR COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING IN FUTURE DECADES *

PART VI: THE PANEL DISCUSSION AT THE CONFERENCE *

PART VII: SOME DISCUSSION QUESTIONS *

AFTERWORD *

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was a collaboration of the 21st Century Task Force and is a result of their collective authorship. We also wish to acknowledge the valued interest and advice of other members of the Senior Action Committee. We appreciate the encouragement of officers past and present of the Washington Chapter who foresaw the advantages of establishing the Senior Action Committee with its diverse intentions.

Joe Tovar, AICP has been especially helpful in encouraging this project and its presentation at the Yakima 2000 project and providing help in placing it on the Chapter web page. We are indebted to various organizations for from time to time providing our meeting space and we are especially grateful to the Home Street Bank for their hospitality and many splendid courtesies in giving us regular access to the conference room at the Wedgwood Branch office throughout the year 2000. Without it, this report would not have been possible.

PREFACE: Who We Are, What We’ve Tried to Do, What We’ve Got to Say

The Senior Action Committee is a unit of the Washington Chapter, American Planning Association. We say of ourselves that our assets are experience and that we are mainly free of ongoing work demands. Usually, as an organization, we concentrate our attention on the state legislative sessions in association with the Chapter Legislative Committee. Since the 2000 Legislature was a balancing act by the two Parties in the membership of the House of Representatives, we foresaw, correctly, that this year Olympia would be a non-event for planning. On the other hand, the turn of the century is being widely accorded attention as idea time. Who better to think about the future than planners? So here we are.

We have compiled the following paper as a memorandum of our interests and as a resource for what we hope is fruitful discussion at the Washington Chapter, APA Annual Conference in Yakima. This paper will not fully correspond to the presentation that our group will make and of course we can’t anticipate the contributions of the audience in discussion at Yakima. It reflects much of what we think is important in the course of six months of study and extensive talk. In our careers, each of us has compiled many reports. But - for obvious reasons - we are without experience of how to approach consideration of planning within a new century. We aren’t that old!

The Table of Contents lays out what we thought to be important. We have explored the subject incompletely and unevenly, reflecting our interests and abilities, and time. One thing our effort shows us is that, many twists in the road notwithstanding, the practice of planning is a continuum. It is a long and unending journey; expect it to continue as long as human civilization. We can’t threaten that "the sky is falling" unless some particular approach is taken to the future. We do think there are perils. We suppose that the best guarantee that they will not overcome the world or our places in it is by close observation and idealism which planning seeks to offer. It is important to read the signs that mark the way as they appear along the road to the future. We fell in with the notion that looking at the past would give us a running start on approaching the future, "past is prologue," so to speak. Professional planning was a presence throughout the 20th century, wall to wall, and those accomplishments, despite many instances of achievements falling short of intentions, give grounds for thinking that planning is going to be extremely and increasingly important for traveling the way ahead. This is because the problems, the stakes, and the opportunities for human society are, together, unprecedentedly high. To us, that is a most compelling thought.

Our fond hope is that the subject of the 21st century for planning will interest a corps of Washington planners. We have acquired renewed conviction of the societal importance of comprehensive planning - harnessing different and perhaps even conflicting factors in a unified conception focused on the long-run. We don’t think it is a "stretch" at all to say that planning must be a key part of the human future and that its importance will grow. Of course, we have been thinking mainly about this state, but accomplishments ahead will be interactive with the whole country and, indeed, the whole world that has already become so close.

And we have a final plea for your tolerance of the adventurousness of the Senior Action Committee. We have not been struggling to look at a pinhead, but a totally huge topic - one to which the moods of many people need to be attuned so that they will capture it in their attention.

 

Five transparencies:

QUALITIES OF THE PLANNER:A Gentle Spoof On Ourselves

THE EXPRESSIVE

PLANNER IS

NOT A FACELESS

BUREAUCRAT

(More will be said of this word "expressive" in a bit)

THE PLANNER MUST BE

ABLE TO GET AN OVERVIEW

THE PLANNER HAS A

LONGER VIEW OF TIME

(THAN LOTS OF OTHER FOLKS)

THE PLANNER HAS IMAGINATION

THE PLANNER HAS COURAGE

(BUT ADVERSARIES ARE MOSTLY

IMPERSONAL)

Images 1-4, Salvador Dali, Image 5, Walter Crane, in Everyman’s Library Classic edition of Cervantes, Don Quixote

PART I: KEYNOTE: Planners Need to Think a Lot about Their Opportunities to Share Their Best Advice

TO EXERCISE INFLUENCE AND AUTHORITY- What can be taken for granted? Not very much for very long. Not the security or importance of position. Power can be eclipsed or taken away altogether. You have to work to keep it. You have to work hard to increase it, but perhaps not harder. You may have to work very hard for it if you don’t have it. Also, you have to work smart. And of course, there is luck, but the odds of a big winning streak of mainly pure lock in the power game are about as in any other casino - not great. What is about to be said here is about power - empowering planners, the expressive power they need to fulfill their purpose.

THE EXPRESSIVE PLANNER- Beginning the new century is time to rattle the cage. For mainstream local planning, prominent topics to examine are: What are the expectations and challenges ahead, what are the methods for approaching them and how are we to be organizationally effective for our work? The following remarks are about the last question - what should be the organizing format for doing planning? A qualification: a hard line isn’t being drawn here of just exactly what should be done. There is, though, the conviction that something important is not right and needs consideration, as shall presently be explained.

Planners have developed a very great deal of technical know-how. When every day they must confront so many vexing issues of "niche" planning upon which their efforts are of vital importance to the functioning of their communities, it seems that planners are so immersed in problems and see the world so much from problem perspectives, that they don’t appreciate their own accomplishments, or is it that they don’t think others do? Planners’ work on the interstitial, niche issues is very important. It is very solid; it is the invaluable grounding for what is being brought up here.

This is an exploration of the present relative isolation of the profession from the more determinative involvements and separation from big picture formation and important action about it. You are free to disagree that this characterizes the times, but this definitely is the way it seems to us. We think that the world we thought we knew has slipped into another quite different. And that planners are not being taken along to help bring about positive accommodation to the change, in circumstances at all equal to the extent which the future shall need, disturbs us. Thus it appears to us that planning is at a point where it is ready, out of necessity, to reemphasize its competences to raise and discuss with the public the larger picture of the future.

We planners have cause to wonder about our ability to be effective in our democratic role unless we are both broadly, and quite specifically, expressive. Who else is going to contribute the needed expression? Speaking generally, not legislative bodies. And when planning senses cause to be deeply frustrated by major judicial decisions, it needs a way to link the results to widespread public understanding. We might paraphrase the ancient philosophers: The plan that doesn’t continue to be talked about isn’t worth planning.* (* "The life unexamined isn’t worth living.") We have to have opportunities to keep up the talk. When faced with quixotic turns in public affairs, we know that only informed, convinced, and organized public opinion can affect the disposition of institutions to see matters differently. Planning is needed to provide and maintain a mainframe of ideas that can recompose in discussion, as well as giving accommodation to smaller objectives.

BACKROUND - Organized planning has proliferated, yet there is no significant public sentiment that Washington State is ahead in the game of thinking through dominant trends and of deciding how to approach appropriately and increasingly crowded future A curious reversal seems to have occurred over time: In the past planners - episodically, to be sure, and with the advantage of novelty - offered inspiration , engaging with the public’s perhaps inchoate idealistic interests. Then there were few planners. Now there are many planners. But there seems to be a real shortage of opportunities to match some possibly very serious big problems with well articulated ideas that soak far or for long into the public consciousness. We are challenged to bolster our own determination that society should not wake up to needed actions so late and to unwelcome conditions very difficult to overcome. The planner Oliver Byrum repeats the following quotation from another observer: "Error is most difficult to correct when it has become a way of life."

Growing a strong rapport with the public at large is, itself, a big problem. Planning is expected to produce formalized programmatics, yet much informality should be important in getting there. There is foundation where the scale for dialog is small. Thus planners are visible at neighborhood/community levels in working relationships and where the size of the arena allows some informal "bonding" - a chance for planners not to be "virtual" and to be accepted as actual caring lasses and lads.

It is in regard to a bigger picture, if discussion fills out only to the borders of proscribed responsibility, that planners lose initiative to talk forthrightly and persuasively. It is believable that people thus can feel unfulfilled in their expectations of planning as a candid respondent to their idealism. Thereby, planning, it is desirable to hope, can find its audience that really wants to talk about the future, if planners are modest and are enabled to do so. First, planners have to speak openly among ourselves out of our full perceptions and our goals.

Little is heard of possibilities for modifying the organization of the planning function differing much from prevailing practice and as needed to release the expressiveness of planning. To raise the question of organization from the planners’ side is, of course, to be mindful of the risks of such boldness.

PROPROSITIONS- These are tentative propositions concerning advancing the status of planning. What follows is not claimed to be a well-defined strategy for giving planning needed freer expression. These are suggested steps which can be explored, to be worked separately and in concert with each other:

CONCLUSION - Does the present organizational status of planning actually ready most governments to prepare for the challenges of the 21st century? Shall we think about reopening the organizational box in which planning has been placed, or at least cut some slits in it? Planning has become more complex and reaching the public mind and receiving desirably high levels of public affirmation difficult and more important. Isn’t the expressive planner also an educator collaborating with the public in finding and renewing community understanding? Free conversation needs to take place with arguments openly presented. Trying to read the prospects of the 21st century, we cannot fail to notice that there is potentially great prominence for the work of planning ahead. Are planners ready to do it?

What is said here is about the expression of our principles: (1) Those ideals of the importance of thinking through making things better starting with familiar surroundings close to home and urging that action should come from such understanding. (2) The commitment we have to applying the potential developed by our profession. (3) The momentous demands which the future will expect of us if we are ready to fully engage with the needs of this new century. Planners don’t think that they are Greek gods to be lowered to the amphitheatre stage, but such an image may give solace to detractors, if we demark ourselves too sharply and at a remove and somehow better, because of our professional qualities. Planners do need to talk - openly. This commentary ends as it began: there are very significant questions here but by no means final answers.

 

APPENDIX

HOW THEY ORGANIZED US - Politics, or more generally speaking, "power," has been an ominous topic in American democratic planning. A few words about how we started out. Daniel Burnham’s work at the beginning of the 20th century and a little before was magisterial. He admired the physical achievements emanating from the power of European princes and popes in preceding centuries, or Washington, D.C. where he had recently worked and where there were no elections. When he came to preparing a plan for his Chicago, just about his first important precondition was to exorcise elective politics. Therefore, he created the "Plan Commission," the "blue ribbon" committee of financially important men nominally in charge, responsive to the grandeur of his proposals, but buffering him from official authority.

Shortly as we know, the municipal reform movement sought to place local government under skilled, apolitical management, install the merit system in employment in place of political patronage, and clarify and circumscribe lines of authority. The reform system settled into local government between1910 and the 1930s. Through the 1930s and the 1950s, the dominant ideas of the place and status of planning in the municipal structure were pretty much established. In what we might call the era of the "founding heroes" of American planning, planners were largely outside voices talking to the locality, not narrowly to government. (Professional history is much more fully discussed in the Senior Action Committee report on planning for the 21st Century which appears as the next major section of this study.)

After World War II, as planning grew rapidly in local government in Washington and elsewhere, it was accommodated as a "staff" function advisory to the authority of elective office holders or their designated executive (the "city manager"). Planning was bureaucratized. Bureaucracy is not "bad;" even if it is insinuating shorthand in the media and in political debate. Bureaucratizing has given planning more continuity and other desirable qualities. On the other hand, the present organization of planning wasn’t instituted primarily as the best intrinsic arrangement to further planning, but to adapt it to then prevailing trends and theories of public administration. While, in contrast to the times of "pioneers" and the "heroes," planning is now a large workforce, it has been obliged to lose power of inaugurating agendas and to publicize and persuade more directly for these views "in the raw" - that is before their adoption by governing authority.

POSTSCRIPT- After the foregoing was written, these further observations have struck us as germane: One, in the August 2000 issue of Planning magazine is a book review of The Profession of City Planning: Changes, Images, and Challenges, 1950-2000, edited by Rodwin and Sanyal. The reviewer, Harold Henderson, finds this book of 31 individually authored pieces a disturbingly gloomy and frustrating summation of our field. Compare this with the tenor of the much older work, Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890. The comparison exhibits a profound sea change in mood and assessment. Two, the problem of "planner burnout" is important enough that it became the topic of one of the panels at the Yakima 2000 Conference of the Washington Chapter, APA. (Coincidentally, medical doctoring long thought to be the tops in professional power, has also been marked with complaints of frustration and publicized stories of doctors leaving medicine in disappointment and disgust as managed care organizations have been looked at as displacing traditional conceived doctor power.) Three, looking around, the reality seems to be a tendency, not just toward planning being confined to one "box," but dismembering its unified practice among numbers of administrative units, probably, we suspect, not to produce "better" planning according to planner expectations, but for fear of planning not being duly subordinate to the nuances of elective politics. This may be supposed to mute the expressive voice of planning further, to mere peeps from several directions. A fairly unified entity of planning means, we suppose, greater possibility of a stronger expressive voice. Four, Charles Hoch’s marvelous window on the workings of the planning profession, What Planners Do; Power, Politics, and Persuasion, published by the APA Planners Press, 1994 elucidates the well known tension between planning school indoctrination and subsequent encounter with planning work. What Hoch says of the observant planning student entering practice unfortunately reminds of the unhappy history of the front lines in World War I. The object was to win, of course, but tactics were unmercifully bad for the givens of actual power: the compelling canon of commander strategies sending hoards of troops into frontline assault was no less responsible for the carnage than enemy cannon. Five, Hoch gives much attention to "the rational protocol" put in the planner’s tool kit as disabling. Growing disbelief in the rational protocol in philosophy, philosophy of science, etc. means that it was questionable to put so much emphasis on it within planner education, either specifically or without conscious attention. Six, Hoch sees that and in his closing chapter proposes modifications along lines sensed in our paper.

Is history useful or just old? The statement that follows seeks to perk up our sense of the importance of past footprints laid in the sands of planning time. History, the tonic for naiveté and falling over our past mistakes, or for finding forgotten paths we’d like to take. Difficult as planning is, the inspiration and courage of history waiting to be recovered is reassuring encouragement in the present.

 

 

 

PART II: COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING IN THE PAST DECADES - IN THE U.S. AND WASHINGTON STATE

 The 19^th Century

Most of the early history of planning was produced by easterners, who were involved with the evolution of urban development from Colonial times along the Eastern Seaboard. Planning in the sense of laying out new places was practiced before nationhood, often with a strong spirit of optimism and not infrequently with twinges of idealism. After the Revolution, two familiar leaders provided guiding legacies about planning.

Jefferson graced the Continental Congress with the very important rectilinear land survey system, the Ordinance of 1785, which virtually assured that towns would be grids within the larger grids. Washington, whose first occupation was as land surveyor, was a prominent speculator in land and organized a large "joint stock" land company (corporation). His real estate skills came in handy when he created the national capital on the basis of a joint venture between government and private owners, anticipating and showing the way toward successful real estate organization which has modern overtones. Thus it was possible for L’Enfant’s plan to be carried out. The capital George Washington created, dominated by its domed building, prompted shadowy replicas as county seats and state capitols arose across the growing nation. This was the visual analog for democracy (even in localities where the practice was weak) Jefferson’s grid, in general, won out, however; few places went in for diagonal streets radiating from their centers (which Lewis Mumford, the noted writer about planning, referred to as "asterisk" plans).

American planning history in much detail is beyond our grasp here, but we endeavor to indicate important generalities that make up the contemporary planner’s heritage. We also touch on some of the important features of planning on the West Coast and the tie-in and the characteristics specifically of Washington State. We want to provide insights into our State’s planning past and its planning future.

The modern planning profession grew out of the Reform Movement of the late 19^th Century that was a reaction to the unbridled, undirected development of the industrial revolution. In the last two decades of the 19^th Century, the size of cities was swelled enormously, partly by immigrants from Europe. In this heady expansionist climate, land was frequently subdivided prematurely, in anticipation of quick profits. Not until Boards of Survey were established, such as those in Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia, to check the worst abuses and assure a certain level of orderly development was the public interest asserted over those of private property holders. But it was rough going.

Today’s planners are aware that the requisites of housing have evaded public attentions since this country’s beginning. Foreseeing provisions for housing the great number of newcomers to the eastern cities like NY and Philadelphia were not made. Working-class families had to live close in to downtown to be near employment. The private market fit supply to demand on a makeshift basis, with no assistance and little direction from public authority.

The case of New York City exhibits the most acute crowding and the most degenerate housing. In this sense it was unique. But the development of mass housing there is important because it influenced construction patterns elsewhere and kindled the first concerted effort for housing reform. For example, the city plan of 1811 set a standard lot size as 25-by-100 feet, which led to the infamous "railroad flat", a four to six story tenement which was 80 feet long and had no side windows. Privies were located in the back, along alleys, or in cellars. No kitchens or heat were provided.

It was through the creation and enforcement of health laws that led to improved housing and eventually city planning. A cholera epidemic provided the thrust for government action and the creation of a Metropolitan Board of Health that had authority to regulate housing and sanitary conditions through provisions of the Tenement House Law of 1867. Although its provisions were very weak, they established the precedent for public regulation on a landlord’s property rights and for stronger codes in the future.

This well-meaning act led to the spread of the notorious dumbbell flats with their provision for a window in every room. An indentation on each side of the building was required which gave it the shape of a dumbbell, and when joined with that of the adjoining building created an airshaft five feet wide. These quickly became receptacles for garbage, vermin and insects and as a duct for fire.

Housing reform was subjected to the issue of property rights. Any interference with this right came to constitute a threat to a cultural inheritance. One of the primary aspects of the reform movement was the attempt by middle-class individuals and groups to control and mitigate the problems of inner cities, where conditions seemed most menacing.

By the 1870s most cities had assumed responsibilities for constructing water and sewerage systems and for insuring public health. But public responsibility virtually ended at the borders of private property. Fortunately for communicating the harsh realities of lower class urban life, the print media was changing from front-page political prose to news and features. Out of the screaming headlines of scandals and injustices, others articles began to appear which were based on careful investigation. A primary figure in the reform movement was Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who worked as a newspaper police reporter and as a photographer. His publication of How the Other Half Lives provided a first hand look at what he had learned in the slums of New York. Riis wanted to inform and arouse his readers to the plights of the "other half". Others such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell stirred public attention of political abuses.

City planning was gradually moving westward with the building of cities in the Midwest. In 1880 George Kessler, who had worked with Olmsted on the design of Central Park, prepared a city-wide plan in three years for Kansas City. Later, he submitted a park plan for San Francisco. (He died shortly after beginning a professional collaboration for the new town of Longview in Washington State which had a direct Kansas City connection. See below.)

Over a weekend in 1883 Horace Cleveland laid out the magnificent metropolitan park system of 29 parks totaling 1,200 acres which today link a chain of lakes in Minneapolis. He also completed a park system in Omaha and wrote essays on the potential of comprehensive planning, in The Art of Town Arrangement. He competed earlier for Central Park in New York and made a substantial contribution to the milieu of progressive thought from whence the city planning movement sprang.

By 1890 landscaping had merged with architecture and engineering to create the City Beautiful Movement, an attempt to improve life within cities by enhancing civic design. The apex of its expression was at the World’s Columbian Exposition, "The White City" which was such a striking contrast to the grit and grime of coal smoke, at Chicago in 1893-94. The exposition celebrated Columbus’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere. After Chicago won the competition for the Quadricentennial Celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America, Olmsted recommended the site along the Lake Michigan shore and John Root (Burnham’s young partner) sketched the basic plan. Burnham coordinated and chose the major architects. These were largely from New York and Boston and resulted in the imported classic styles of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. These reflected the deep longing of a nation suffering from a loss of continuity with history for visual assurance of maturity and success. The only building that represented home grown American design was the Transportation Building of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

By the end of the century the nation had grown rich and had become critical of its municipal institutions and was determined to remold them. Sylvester Baxter in Boston held to the essentials, the plan. Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, organized the first international exhibit on city planning. The emphasis was on aesthetics and negated the earlier more humanitarian efforts of social workers and housing reformers. Americans needed more than utilitarian essentials for their spirits, more boulevards, civic centers, and monuments. This alienated the humanitarians, yet it was probably necessary for evolving the new municipal function of city planning. It paved the way for the City Beautiful Movement that was composed of three elements: city parks, boulevards, and civic centers. It had an educational effect on many and led them to become involved in civic affairs. The early park plans usually led to an expansion of planning and to the creation of plan commissions.

 

The 20^th Century

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

The first two decades of the 20^th Century were known as the Progressive Era. The reform movement gradually shifted from elitist paternalism—the idea that the best men should rule—to bureaucratic control—the idea that experts and specialized agencies should determine social, political, and economic policies. This confused the independence of experts and bureaucrats with neutrality, when in fact bureaucracies have become as self-serving as the machines the reformers wished to replace. In the East, the reform-bent journalists included Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. Teddy Roosevelt called them "muckrakers."

Senator James McMillan of Michigan prepared a resolution requiring his committee to prepare plans for an entire park system for the District of Columbia. However, it resulted in a much broader plan and extended beyond the areas of the original L’Enfant plan. A team composed of Daniel Burnham, Olmsted Jr., Charles McKim, and the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens was retained and notable improvements included Burnham’s Union Station (now the visitors’ center) which required the tunneling of the Pennsylvania RR under the mall in front of the capitol. The plan, of 1901 and the grand plan commenced by L’Enfant upon which it was built, of course did not anticipate motor travel. In spite of this, it has revivified L’Enfant’s intentions and "Monumental Washington," - the Mall and governmental complex of structures - has faithfully brought a capital appropriate for the most important country in the world and certainly deserving of George Washington’s most farseeing expectations.

In San Francisco, Burnham was charged to design a plan for the entire city in 1904, not for parks and a civic center only. At the time, only half of the area of the city was developed. The private Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, led by former mayor James Phelan, financed it. Burnham charged nothing for his own time, but he insisted on a free hand in putting his ideas for the future of the city to paper. For the first time civic organizations met in neighborhoods to offer advice, and thereby created a great diversity of involvement. The team of Burnham, Edward Bennett, together with local architects Willis Polk and Henry Gutterson set up their quarters in a bungalow on Twin Peaks, Burnham’s "eagle’s nest." He greatly believed, at a time before aerial photography and remote sensing, in what another such believer, Geddes in Scotland, lauded as the "synoptic overview" from a topographic highpoint or taller building. Burnham’s plan traversed the hilly city already beset by its rigid gridiron street pattern with numerous radial arteries. Much more land was designated as parks. One page shows a principal source of Burnham inspiration: "Theoretical Diagram of the Plan of Paris." And there is a sense of zoned uses. And also an intention to preserve views in development and also care and attention to protecting and displaying topographic features. There was to be impressive public buildings, monumental fountains, ornamental balustrades, rond points (traffic circles "rapid underground transit," centers of expansion into the then barren areas southward.

The Burnham report (in an addendum by Phelan) was perhaps the first to publish the term "comprehensive planning" somewhat as we now use it. The earthquake and fire followed on the Tuesday after the report was delivered to city hall on Saturday. What might have been a great opportunity for completely re-planning the city was bypassed in the press to re-establish commerce and daily life. Like Christopher Wren’s and John Evelyn’s desires to re-plat inner London after the great fire in 1689, such was not to be. In their earlier histories many cities have had consuming conflagrations. Though the three dimensional place may have gone up in smoke, enduring private ownerships of land are too forceful and enduring usually to allow any serious reconfiguring on the ground. Seattle after the fire of 1889 was no exception, although there was re-grading in streets downtown (the present Pioneer Square area). Despite the seeming disregard for Burnham’s plan, it was a most important resource for civic projects in three decades that followed and in the formulation of San Francisco’s official comprehensive plan after World War II.

Phelan in San Francisco was a rich man, a philanthropist, we saw, whose benefactions directly related to planning. In Chicago one of the early philanthropical players in the conservation game was William Kent. He provided the site for Chicago’s first playground in 1903. He operated on a broad scale: Later Kent also donated the virgin woodland in Marin County, Northern California for Muir Woods National Monument, and the land for Kent Woodlands and Seadowns on the Pacific beach.

Chicago’s Commercial Club retained Daniel Burnham and associates to prepare a comprehensive plan for the entire city in 1906. It successfully guided the city’s growth for the next five decades and remains one of the most influential documents in the history of city planning. It created huge forest preserves around the city’s borders which remain intact, and developed public facilities along the entire length of Chicago’s shoreline. His motto was "Make no little plans. They have not the magic to stir men’s souls. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work…." Incidentally, the themes of Burnham’s professional work may strike us as rather inconsistent: His firm was the major designers and supervising architects of tall office buildings ("skyscrapers") at the time. Yet the renderings of his Chicago plan show the city hall and public buildings dominating a skyline of other (presumably commercial) uniformly low rise buildings. Such divergence is rather puzzling. Burnham Chicago’s central core from a tawdry state to the fulfillment of grand aspirations.

Walter D. Moody was a great promoter of the Plan and began to emphasize the "city practical" after discovering many thought the plan idealistic. He had brochures distributed to everyone paying more than $25 rent. He also wrote Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago, which was adopted by the board of education for use as an 8^th grade text – read by their parents as well, as Moody had foreseen. He also developed a slide collection and a motion picture "A Tale of One City," the first documentary on city planning.

Shifting Purposes. The reform movement gradually shifted from elitist paternalism—the idea that the best men should rule—to bureaucratic control—the idea that experts and specialized agencies should determine social, political, and economic policies. This confused the independence of experts and bureaucrats with neutrality, when in fact bureaucracies can become as self-serving as the machines the reformers wished to replace. Around the end of the first decade of the new century, though the City Beautiful idea still was influential until the Great Depression in the early 1930s, there was mounting criticism: Some probably believed Burnham, Olmsted, Nolen and others dangerous believers in "centralized government." Others, noting the wealthy and influential sponsors, minimized the relevance of City Beautiful to the general well being. City Beautiful was reproached as "superficial." The city beautiful "suggests the city impossible." "Let us have the city useful, the city practical, the city livable, the city sensible, the city anything but beautiful." Others felt that rather than putting money into boulevards, statues, fine bridges and elaborate public buildings, the immediate surroundings of the poor should be improved.

Although the situation called for public education, the universities showed no interest and neglected broad civic needs. These criticisms and inaction were the harbingers of the decline of the Movement. And the maturing American planning movement contained diverse inclinations.

Organization. 1909 was a benchmark in the history of city planning. In 1909 a number of groups concerned with urban congestion and city planning formed the National Association of City Planning, the forerunner of the American City Planning Institute, the American Institute of Planners (AIP) and the American Planning Association (APA). In the same year Benjamin Marsh, Secretary of the Committee on Congestion of the Population, arranged for the famous Congestion Exhibition at the Armory in NYC and supervised the first large exhibition on European and American city planning in the U.S. He also organized the first national conference on city planning. He also authored An Introduction to City Planning: Democracy’s Challenge to the American City. Some believed that Marsh’s heavy propaganda put the average man on the defensive. He feared he was getting into something socialistic, and, quite possible having some interest in land and certainly in taxes, was on his guard. It was less easy after that to convince him.

The first national conference on city planning was held in 1909. Attendees came to define their national purpose and to make economic power socially responsible, and to evolve political institutions capable of guaranteeing a larger measure of individual fulfillment. The City Beautiful was no longer the goal, but was replaced by new concepts of social and economic ends. Olmsted Jr. discussed European town planning and zoning and land ownership but it was not a copy of German or Swiss cities. He noted that adoption of zoning occurred only after full and repeated public hearings at which the views and wishes of the property owners are expressed and considered. John Nolen agreed, and honored the continuing endeavor of American cities to include local concepts. Open and skillful investigation of city problems seemed necessary. Those present became the nucleus of the new profession with much wider scope than had been possible under private auspices.

Zoning. Comprehensive planning failed to take hold in New York City, but zoning originated there in 1916. It was partly provoked by perceptions of incompatibilities of land uses. But the defining moment of enacting zoning in 1916 was directly traceable to s the great displeasure with the 1912 "New Equitable" building on Wall Street, 38 floors without setbacks - a "thief" of light and air. The Equitable still stands; planners should incorporate in a trip to New York a visit to the Equitable, which still stands on Lower Broadway between Cedar to Pine Streets. Professional homage of sorts. Zoning became so popular, e.g., Seattle 1923 which eclipsed interest in the Bogue general plan of 1912 (See below). Zoning was thought of by local governments and the business community as the shortcut equivalent of planning. This created widespread confusion. This Failure to distinguish clearly between the legally sanctioned use and the proposed or eventually desirable use was to cause endless difficulty for planning commissions for the next thirty years. At first planning didn’t recognize the mistake being made in identifying an administrative device as part of the plan itself. Some cities (including Seattle) had two commissions, one for zoning and one for planning.

Slow Materializing Ideas. Senator Newlands of Nevada supported the idea of a Bureau of the Arts, to become a federal department, like agriculture. It would develop common knowledge on city planning, city engineering, public buildings and the artistic side of waterway development. Newlands was too progressive for the Progressive Era. A half century would pass before the creation of the Housing and Home Finance Administration (HHFA), which evolved into the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). These were followed by the National Endowment for the Arts. Some major cities created design review bodies, such as the King County and Seattle design commissions to review public projects. These are not comprehensive, however, that is they do not apply to private building.

At the 1913 annual conference a model enabling act for the creation of municipal planning departments was proposed by the committee on legislation and became an early foundation for a state standard city planning enabling act later sponsored by Hoover. (See below.) As far as the emerging city planning movement is concerned, WW I was important as a demonstration of small community and neighborhood design when the wartime United States Housing Corporation carried out permanent developments. These demonstrated the use of curvilinear street patterns and were a precursor of tract development in the 1920s. The chief designer for the US Housing Corporation was F. L. Olmsted Jr. Although fully operational for just a year, the buildings and site plans with attention to landscaping was the much greater accomplishment than the war housing "projects" of war housing in the 1940s. The latter sometimes had the distinction later on of becoming the decaying slums of the economic underclass.

The end of WWI marked the emergence of the United States as a mature industrial power. In 1908 Henry Ford produced the Model T, the beginning of the automobile age. Industry began to decentralize. The automobile began to transform cities and whole regions. The Federal Roads Aid Act of 1916, the first legislation to create federal responsibility for highway improvement, revealed an ambivalence between support for arterial commerce between cities and aid for farm to market routes. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 provided federal aid to primary state roads that would contribute to a connected system of interstate highways.

Traffic. In the evolution of city planning, the "City Functional" was a logical phase with the gradual absorption of the park movement. In designing transportation and freight facilities attention was given to the need for spatial planning and separation from other use areas. When both residential and industrial areas were acknowledged to need protection it became a simple matter to adopt a form of zoning. Charles Mulford Robinson proposed the first planned industrial district in 1910 and advocated defining CBD densities to control traffic volumes. City planning evolved into the altering of spatial relationships to achieve efficiency and convenience.

Traffic problems were growing and downtown congestion was a primary reason Chicago merchants backed Burnham’s plan so strongly. As traffic grew, thoroughfare widening took great importance and areas of residential and other existing development were denigrated as front yards were foreshortened, sidewalks narrowed and street trees removed. With the development of freeways, these activities increased to a higher power. In Seattle, the civic cost of such changes is evident in the transgression of the Olmsted plan’s (see below) Ravenna Blvd. by the I-5 freeway and the segmentation of the Olmsted’s Lake Washington Park (and later Arboretum) by the State 520 freeway.

Such occurrences, as many American cities hastened to help themselves to federal freeway funds after 1955, led to an amendment to federal law originated by Senator Henry Jackson of the state of Washington prohibiting federal funding of traffic improvements which would take park lands. So strong was the subsequent public reaction against the invasion of freeways in cities that no more were built after about 1980. San Francisco dismantled the Embarcadero freeway, Seattle went in for freeway burial downtown. (It can be argued that Seattle has not done nearly enough undergrounding.) Boston is engaged in a fabulously expensive undergrounding of its central freeway. In 2000 residents of the San Gabriel valley of the Los Angeles area picketed and litigated successfully against a new freeway link which had been under consideration for years.

The Olmsteds in Seattle. Frederick L. Olmsted (Sr.), whose long shadow will extend even into the 21st century, was a man of many parts and never a narrow functionalist and his work was geographically far ranging. In the 1860s he designed an initial (curvilinear) plan for the topographically uneven site of Tacoma. (The railroad owners of the land scrapped it in favor of a grid which they thought would for quicker lot sales.) His breadth of vision and depth of understanding was informed by broad experience: Who else do we know that did so many things successfully - besides designing Central Park? Anti-slavery journalist, manager of a gold mining company, lobbyist responsible for the protection of the Yosemite, head of Union Army hospitals. The oeuvre of F.L., Sr. and his two sons is probably the most creative socially-minded benefaction in urban America. Between 1903 and 1911, John designed the "Parks, Boulevards and Playgrounds Plan of the City of Seattle." An Olmsted Plan Society was created to celebrate it over 80 years later. What you see around you, the more subtle and arguably the more enjoyable, owes much to the Olmsted genius and values. Unfortunately, not as much is now seen - owing to later shortsighted conflicting development. Like Pasadena’s civic center plan noted unhappily below, there has been a lack of commitment to confirm the intent in later action. To this day, Seattle has no mention of the Olmsted program in the City Code. Lack of specifics almost assures that city planning in such instances will go on its merry way with a serious brain lesion about its civic treasures that took form on the maps. Seattle has not yet focused on serious appreciation as has Boston on its similar Olmsted "green necklace" of parks and boulevards as a unified system.

On the strength of his previous work in Baltimore, San Francisco and Tacoma, the Municipal Plans Commission of Seattle in 1910 retained Virgil Bogue. (He had worked briefly for Olmsted in New York.). His report was long on detailed engineering drawings for transportation facilities, with space devoted to a civic center (at the southeasterly portion of today’s Seattle Center), boulevards, and esplanades, an expanded parks system – none of which were ever built. The plan was defeated by a 2 to 1 majority of the voters in 1912. Critics have said it would have involved an almost impossibly large amount of grading on the humpty-do Seattle site. The defeat of the Bogue plan seems to have had a traumatic effect upon the practice of planning by the city government making it almost invisible for a quarter of a century.

ATTEMPTS AT REGIONAL PLANNING

That year, a California State constitutional amendment was defeated which would have created a Greater San Francisco (on the 1900 New York City model) by annexing Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda. In retrospect, political consolidation alone appears as perhaps too simplistic a model for successful regional planning. During this period after WWI, attempts were made on both coasts for regional planning.

Surprisingly, in Los Angeles a move to establish a city planning commission was campaigned for by Gordon Whitnall, a pioneer planner in the Los Angeles basin in 1913. But city plans were not adequate for the array of related regional problems, including repeated flooding and fires. Attempts were made to form flood control districts, but the problems went beyond one problem. Whitnall next organized a regional planning conference in Pasadena in 1922 out of which came the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission. With 38 cities and 50 unincorporated towns, it was the first organization of its kind in the nation. Whitnall, the enthusiastic advocate of regional planning, incidentally offered a planning course, among the first in the nation, at the University of Southern California. Waves of immigration into the Los Angeles basin, coupled with land speculation and the need to provide the bare necessities of urban life, shattered the great expectations of planners. The opportunity of the Los Angeles region to set an example of superior planning and development for other metropolitan areas of the nation was irretrievably lost.

And speaking of Pasadena, one of the nodes in a Los Angeles regional scheme of things, Burnham’s younger associate, Bennett, made a civic center plan and designed the Palladian city hall and other principal buildings there. A later generation of community leaders changed the plan and allowed buildings of nonconforming character and incompatible architecture, which proved also commercially unsuccessful, to permeate the civic center area. Pointlessly, this compromised its distinctive attractiveness and later only marginally successful efforts have been made to moderate the seriously disruptive damage that had been done. The Pasadena civic center plan as originally accomplished had important lessons to teach, but there was a lack of implementing controls and more important, a failure to educate succeeding generations the significance and meaning of the plan. This is a challenge of general and widespread importance.

Several other notable efforts toward regionalism took place in the 1920s including Chicago, New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco Bay counties, and the Philadelphia tri-state area. Some achieved notable successes. Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye initially founded the Regional Planning Association of America. They were joined shortly by Tracy Auger, Catherine Bauer, Clarence Perry, Russell Van Nest Black and Edith Wood. It was felt at the time that a regional plan had to be elastic and capable of adjustment and readjustment to suit change and every varying circumstance in community growth. This led to a style of planning which produces broad outlines of proposals for guidance, with details left to local authorities, and a cooperative process with local officials. It was a style adopted later by T. Jack Kent, founder of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the annual national planning conference in 1920 the committee on regional planning recommended state and national legislation on regional planning organizations but urged informal committees to initiate action while waiting for ponderous government processes. Relatively few could appreciate the need for metropolitan regional planning even though rapid deterioration was evident; only to an intellectual elite were there indications of future emergencies and warnings that some of the interlocking systems of the urban complex were in danger of breakdown.

The need for an organization to address the special needs of those engaged in city planning full time was discussed by Olmsted Jr. and Shurtleff en route by train to the annual planning conference in Kansas City in 1917. The meeting stressed the need for full time planning staffs to render technical assistance, and the need for mutual learning. This led to the formation of the American City Planning Institute.

The professional city planners of the 1920s tried to make sense out of unwieldy cities. Planners generally were split, however, between those who considered sweeping schemes to bring order to huge and unmanageable mega-cities and metropolitan regions and those who specialized in narrow problems such as zoning and traffic control. Members of the first group had organized the Regional Planning Association of America, and included Lewis Mumford and Benton McKaye, the father of regional planning.

In the 1920s zoning became the principal activity of the scores of planning commissions that had been established in cities across the country. The earliest comprehensive zoning ordinance was passed by New York in 1916 to prevent skyscrapers and high-rise garment industry lofts from encroaching on the fashionable Fifth Avenue retail district. Shopping centers appeared. The first of which was in 1922 in Kansas City.

NEW TOWNS IN WASHINGTON STATE

There are two major new town developments in Washington, and a number of large scale unified developments, some of which could qualify as planned new towns. These would include Mill Creek, Pateros, Richland, Coulee City, Vanport, and several military bases, altogether a wide assortment of divergently classifiable places. Those built during World War II were chiefly of temporary construction. Fort Lewis has a permanent main post of some interest. The one time Coast Artillery installations, such as Fort Worden, now a Washington state park, are of some historic interest. Vancouver Barracks is a notable historic place. Vanport, close by in Oregon, was a very large World War II project of impermanent construction and the first location of Portland State University, but it absorbed and demonstrated the site planning which was applied in many instances to postwar multi-unit project building. It was destroyed in the 1948 Columbia River flood. Mill Creek, designed and built to fairly high standards showing resemblances to the Levitttowns in the East or the Reston, Virginia new town, was a case of the extensive Japanese overseas real estate investments in the 1970s and 80s. Not quite qualifying as a "new town," it is more precisely termed a satellite town or bedroom community. For a long time, Port Ludlow and the Kitsap peninsula was an attractive historic small community with a viable economic base in lumbering, and surrounded by a greenbelt. It demonstrated what it was possible to attain with private unified ownership, but recently new development and declining support for the mill is displacing this tranquil situation. Like Coulee City, Newhalem, a trim publicly owned "company town," originated with dam construction. Today Newhalem continues to be the operations base for the hydroelectric projects of Seattle City Light on the Skagit River. The isolation of some of the early military bases and logging camps was exceeded by the far-flung federally operated manned lighthouses.

Permanent public housing in Washington cities and outlying areas include some exemplary cases. Some urban renewal projects in Washington cities (Seattle, Spokane, Hoquiam, Vancouver, Tacoma), while not new towns, demonstrate both innovative and somewhat unsuccessful attempts to carry out revivifying project activities on substantial scales. These projects, whether recognized thus at the times or not, have been experiments for learning about urban development. The instances of new towns and other cases of loosely related large scale community or major incremental expansion and change constitute a large repertoire of means relating to the practice of planning. A planner with curiosity and some "archaeological" interest thus is presented with opportunities to identify and learn more about the building blocks of our communities.

The Most Noteworthy New Towns are Longview and Dupont- At the time of its conception, Longview, Washington was the only planned city of its magnitude to have ever been conceived of and built entirely with private funds. Longview was founded and named for Robert C. Long, a Kansas City lumberman eager to exploit virgin stands of timber in western central Washington. It was a completely planned town down to the last sidewalk and the last street name before construction began. Originally, this planning allowed the city to grow inwards along organized lines with separate areas designated for business, industrial and residential areas. On the advice of J.C. Nichols, the developer of the renowned Country Club Plaza district of Kansas City and honorary member of the American City Planning Institute, consultants then representing the highest state of the planning art were chosen. The team of George Kessler and Hare & Hare planned Longview in 1923 for a city of 75,000 residents. This number expressed the boom time optimism of Long and his associates.

The Long-Bell Lumber Company purchased the majority of the valley flat land between the Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers. To speed site acquisition and minimize sellers holding out for higher prices, the company’s agents carried bags of gold with them to close purchases at once. Initial planning work was undertaken by the company’s engineering staff which sent 100 surveyors into the field and produced a highly detailed contour map in their headquarters. The skilled solution of the drainage needs of the low lying site resulted in the town’s design signature, Lake Sacajawea. The center point of the plan was "Montecello," the site of the convention in 1852 which founded Washington as a separate territory.

Longview was the preeminent company new town of several planned and developed in the state. A Portland newspaper of the time said editorially of Longview: "The hand and vision of the skilled city planner are magical." Although he originated it for business reasons, Robert Long was infatuated with the town and the social importance he imputed to it. So much so that, like some other idealist industrialists before him since at least the time of Robert Owen in Scotland , he persisted in the project at significant financial sacrifice.

The Dupont chemical company of Delaware originated Dupont, Washington. The company located in the area because in 1906 no part of the country was experiencing more rapid growth. The factory site (for the manufacture of explosives) was located adjacent to a deep water port on Puget Sound and somewhat isolated from its surroundings for safety reasons. In order to provide nearby housing for its workers, the company built a model community that included a clubhouse for men, a private club for company officials, a dentist office, a general store, boarding houses and bungalow style cottages located on a grid street pattern at the edged of a "great forest". The original development has been carefully preserved and purposely separated by a greenbelt from the large new development of Intel, the computer chip manufacturer, and the adjacent new town with its planned residential areas. There is no record of who is responsible for the original Dupont plan, but Peter Calthorpe has had the most influence on the current one. The Northwest Landing community is dominated by land designated for sensitive areas, open space and recreation. Approximately 28 percent of the community land is reserved for residential uses and a similar amount for business.

THE STANDARD ACTS

During the Harding administration, an advisory committee headed by Herbert Hoover, the aggressive Secretary of Commerce in an otherwise despoiled government, drafted the model zoning enabling act. The final version was issued in 1924. Only in a footnote was it advised that zoning be worked out as part of a city plan. The focus continued to be on overall zoning unsupported by a general plan.

The Standard City Planning Enabling Act did not appear until 1927. It suggested transitioning from the old zoning commissions to planning commissions and recommended that any master plans under preparation include a zoning plan (element). Thus the Act confused zoning – a precise administrative device -- with an instrument which most planners thought of as a graphic statement of community goals, not as an exact blueprint for urban development. Even if some favored genuine metropolitan government, they might have thought it unwise to imply that regional planning was the first step toward such government. The suspicion with which this kind of government is generally regarded even today indicates that 73 years ago any group seriously furthering regional planning was perhaps well advised not to complicate the issue.

The 1928 Act now seems confused, contradictory, tentative, and cautious. However, its footnotes were a treatise on city planning. The result was a reaction that continued well into the 1930s with the revision of many state laws and local ordinances that provided for the exercise of planning.

When the economic crash of 1929 and the following Great Depression wiped away urban self-sufficiency, the lines of assistance and communications that had been stretched between cities and the federal government in the 1920s became the framework for the structure of government activities that was built in the 1930s. Economic collapse pulled cities and the federal government into a new alliance, one in which Washington became the dominant partner. During the 1930s urban problems became national problems.

After becoming president in 1928 Herbert Hoover appointed a "Committee on Recent Economic Changes". Its report What About the Year 2000? pointed to the need to balance the economic machine. That this need was not met was abundantly clear when the economy crashed in1929 and was followed by the Great Depression that wiped away urban self-sufficiency, the lines of assistance and communications that had been stretched between cities and the federal government in the 1920s.

Economic collapse created a new climate for national planning and pulled cities and the federal government into a new alliance, one in which Washington became the dominant partner with the states being essentially sidelined. During the 1930s urban problems became national problems. National planning appeared to be imperative as the nation drifted toward economic disintegration.

THE NEW DEAL

President Franklin Roosevelt gave new meaning to the term, plan. The need to economize severely limited activities of departments deemed to be non-essential. Planning boards, under-financed even during the 1920s, shrank to skeletons in the early years of the Great Depression. In 1933, 57 percent of the nation’s 739 city planning boards received no appropriations. Some benefits were achieved however, by consolidating departments who functions overlapped. The Hoover administration was unable to break the downward spiral of the economy. During these dark years it was difficult for planners to sustain their faith.

Meanwhile, zoning had come under attack, and the Supreme Court ruled in its favor (1927) in the famous Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Company case. Cities then concentrated on ways to improve zoning ordinances. But planners were caught up in pressures to solve personal economic problems by zoning "variances" and spot zoning.

The regional movement achieved limited success in the consolidation of comprehensive planning for metropolitan areas. The New York Regional Plan for New York and surrounding counties, dated 1931 was initiated by Charles Norton and directed by Thomas Adams. It was published in eight volumes of statistical data and survey material, and two volumes of proposals. Unfortunately it celebrated the car as the best means of transportation and under-emphasized possibilities for controlled growth and gave highways precedence over mass transit. Schemes to combine city and county governments of Cleveland, St. Louis, and Seattle were defeated.

FEDERAL PLANNING EFFORTS

Important New Deal personalities such as Rexford Tugwell, Harry Hopkins, Francis Perkins, Robert F. Wagner, and Harold Ickes had backgrounds in urban reform, and they helped shape federal programs into the framework of a national urban policy during the thirties. In late1935 President Roosevelt approved the Greenbelt program under the direction of Tugwell, who later founded a planning school. The program federally sponsored planned communities. Many thought it would result in the infiltration of prime suburban land with undesirable (meaning lower class) people who in turn would deflate real estate values and ruin the suburban dream. His vision was for as many as 3,000 planned communities throughout the country. Tugwell set out to build a total of 25 model "greenbelt towns." Three were actually constructed - one outside Washington, D.C., one outside Milwaukee, and one outside Cincinnati. Each was to be self-contained on the outskirts of metro areas, surrounded by farms and open land, built with federal funds, and leased to coops of locals. This was an attempt to relieve slum congestion by providing low-cost housing near jobs, by combining the advantages of city and country. Later, when Congress abolished the program, the Eisenhower administration sold the towns and the greenbelts were subdivided. Other novel housing opportunities on smaller scales were completed for coal miners and factory workers.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is a legacy from this era and represents the government’s experimentation in regional reconstruction. The initial concept was to develop a series of flood control projects for each tributary of the Mississippi River, beginning in the north with the Missouri and ending in the south with the Red River in Texas. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed several Authorities: Atlantic Seaboard; Great Lakes and Ohio Valley; Tennessee and Cumberland rivers; Missouri River and the Red River of the North; Arkansas, Red, and Rio Grande rivers; Colorado River and rivers flowing into the Pacific in California; and the Columbia River Basin. The TVA planners learned that urban growth is the result of such a vast interplay of forces that physical planning must be regarded as only one of the tools for shaping the destiny of an area.

The first regional commission was formed in the Pacific Northwest in 1934 by the planning boards of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The second was in New England. River problems were the immediate concern. The more the national planning board encouraged regional commissions to express their own ideas about long-range planning, the more it incurred the enmity of the Corps of Engineers, whose proprietary attitude toward navigable waters seemed to be challenged. (Eventually the Corps won it is said, causing Congress to abolish the National Resources Planning Board, the parent of such ideas as the TVA, during the distractions of World War II.)

These early attempts at regional planning were something of a cross between conservation and development of natural resources and economic promotion with a good measure of public works added. As this type of planning required analytic studies of data, it demanded a far more detailed knowledge of economics, industrial operations, resources management, and welfare programs that most city planners possessed. At the national conference on land utilization called by the secretary of agriculture in November 1931, two committees were created, a National Land Use Planning Committee and a National Advisory and Legislative Committee on Land Use. Planners had difficulty relating to the agricultural interests and the agricultural groups overlooked planners. It was clear that planners needed to develop new alliances and broaden their scope of interests and knowledge.

Before 1935, first class cities (first class cities are cities with at least 20,000 people) in Washington State could engage in planning and zoning under Article XI, Section 11 of the state constitution. This section provided that "any county, town or township may make and enforce within its limits, all such local police, sanitary and other regulations as are not in conflict with general laws".

By the end of the 1930s, the experiences of the depression period and the rising prominence of cities in national affairs prompted new initiative on the local and metro levels. Planning commissions revived surveys and projects postponed by the Great Depression. Valuable data on land use was collected an mapped in large cities in conjunction with the Census of 1940. The larger cities addressed the growing pressures from automobile and truck traffic by planning or constructing highways, often with the aid of federal funds. On the eve of WWII, over 1,100 local planning boards existed, double the peak number of the 1920s, and some had begun to think more seriously about regional planning. A few metropolitan districts were created for special functions.

In the early 1930’s in Washington State the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed feasibility studies supporting damming of the Columbia River for electrical power, flood control and agricultural irrigation. A site was selected at Grand Coulee in the arid scrub lands of the States’ East Side. Original construction of then dam began in 1933 and was completed in 1942. The massive concrete structure is the largest of the eleven dams now on the Columbia River. In addition to flood protection, Grand Coulee provides clean, economical power and with its complementary system of irrigation canals, construction under the aegis of the Bureau of Reclamation, it has transformed agricultural practices and production throughout the Columbia River Basin.

Made from 12 million cubic yards of concrete, Grand Coulee Dam is the largest concrete structure in the United States and the third largest hydroelectric facility in the world. Sharing the river with 10 other U.S. dams, Grand Coulee is the first dam encountered on the Columbia after the river enters the U.S from Canada. Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir created by the dam, contains 9 million acre-feet of water and stretches over 150 miles back to the border.

Grand Coulee Dam fills three primary roles. First, with its 24 generators providing up to 6.5 million kilowatts of power, it is a major provider of electrical power to the Northwest. Secondly, water pumped from behind the dam provides irrigation for over half a million acres of the Columbia basin from Coulee City in the north to Pasco, Washington in the south. Finally, by strictly regulating the Columbia's highly variable flow rate, the dam provides much needed flood control to the river basin. After the war an emphasis was put back on irrigation. Construction was resumed on the pumping plant in 1946. The Tennessee Valley and Columbia Basin were transformed by the cheap power. The faith in these accomplishments has, however, been more recently challenged by concerns about environmental effects. The negative effects of the Columbia dams on aggregate salmon populations has not yet been conclusively proved as compared with other possible causes. A byproduct of the era of dam construction was the origination of cost benefit analysis to evaluate and publicize the advantages of multi-purpose river projects.

It is significant that at this time the federal government sponsored the first national study of urban life. In 1937 the National Resources Committee published Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy. Although the study did not propose anything new, the fact that the Federal government funded it suggested a new era for urban America. That era arrived with WWII when the focus of American urban life was redirected to the war. For example, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) which had been created in the 1930s to develop long-range plans for conserving the nation’s land, water, and forests—largely rural areas—was redirected to problems of the cities. Action for Cities: A Guide for Community Planning was a manual prepared by the board to familiarize planners and elected officials with progressive procedures in the physical and socio-economic aspects of urban redevelopment. It was the genesis of an explicit, national urban policy. However, its concern with social control of urban land use frightened fiscal conservatives and private real estate interests whose allies in Congress managed to eliminate the NRPB in 1943.

In the same year the American Society of Planning Officials (ASPO) was created with Walter Blucher as executive director and Alfred Bettman as president. Its purpose was to increase communication among professional planners and bring officials (commissioners and managers) more actively into the planning movement, and serve as a clearinghouse of information about planning. It attempted to breathe new life into planning commissions "inflicted with incipient rigor mortis", which proved a formidable task.

Catherine Bauer authored Modern Housing and noted that there had been a failure to unite for political action for good housing by liberal intellectuals, trade unions, social workers, consumer organizations and church groups. She toured the country for seven weeks in 1935 and with other notables such as Sir Raymond Unwin, Henry Wright and Coleman Woodbury crafted an outline of a low-rent housing program for the United States. By 1936 Bauer with others had begun a national housing movement. Real estate agents, developers, heads of construction leagues and savings and loan associations generally opposed the measure, because of the federal subsidy, and contending that local problems should be solved locally, in spite of the impoverished state of many local governments. However a Housing Act was passed the next year which established a US Housing Authority (which in later years evolved into a component of HUD).

Although the US was still concentrating on rural concerns even though it had become urban, Ladislas Segoe declared cities to be the neglected child of the national family. In his Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy he advocated a permanent national planning board to support state and regional planning. Charles Eliot II, a Harvard landscape architecture professor, an advocate of national planning, and at this time (1935) administrative head for the National Resources [Planning] Board noted approvingly that the board was composed of a widely respected pragmatic economist; an eminent professor of public administration; and a "purposing, proposing" representative of physical planning - the one-time associate of Burnham and the uncle of the President of the United States Frederic Delano, the board’s chairman.

Planners still had difficulty relating to economic planning. Russell Van Nest Black’s views were typical of planners when he doubted if social and economic planning were a part of the physical planning process. He believed that all three would be almost too much for a single body of planners. T. Jack Kent held this view also in his The Urban General Plan. Kent went on to found the first department of city and regional planning in California at Berkeley. Supporting the opposite opinion was Charles Eliot II, later landscape architecture professor at Harvard, and in the 1930s Secretary of the NRBP.

When the economy began to recover in 1939, seven cities were selected for demonstrating a workable procedure for programming public works: Winchester, Nashville, Kalamazoo, Dallas, Fargo, Sacramento and Spokane. The result was the CIP (Capital Improvement Program). Planning agencies were expected to provide the leadership and evaluate proposals and assign priorities.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair inspired many with its vision of things to come. The American Institute of Planners commissioned the film "The City", written by Lewis Mumford and Per Lorentz with music by Aaron Copeland. Norman Bel Geddes’ "Futurama" with its concept of a motor city appealed to the imagination of Americans at the same time that Poland was invaded and the Czechoslovakian pavilion had to be closed due to the invasion of the homeland by the Nazis. WWII had begun. At the same time San Francisco held its Worlds Fair on Treasure Island, raised from S. F. Bay and which was intended to become a base for commercial aviation across the Pacific.

POST WORLD WAR II

Since the end of WWII in 1945, urban problems have become national problems, and it is no longer feasible to expect municipalities and private interests to solve social and environmental problems. Only the federal government has the regulatory powers and innovative resources to direct a national urban strategy.

The "centrifugal" dynamics of urban sprawl, created in the 1950s, had become the predominating force of population movement. The preponderant views of this, already well represented before World War II, appears most articulately expressed in the optimistic democratic populist ideas of architecture and urban patterning where those of the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In writing and speech, Wright created a vision of "rurban" blending of city and country, all effortlessly accessible by what we came to term freeways.

FHA mortgage insurance and liberal VA loans helped pull aspiring middle-class families toward the suburbs and to the thousands of new real estate developments. Highway construction opened up previously unoccupied land. The huge increase in automobiles pressed the existing roads beyond their capacity and cities looked to the Federal government for assistance. So the Congress authorized a 37,000 mile national highway network in 1947. President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which created a 42,500 mile network officially justified to streamline national defense, followed. The first segment was constructed between Houston and Galveston, as a means of transporting troops from inland to the Gulf. Like the railroads and trolley lines of the 19^th century, this hastened outward spread of urban population, this time in the form of amorphous sprawl.

The Housing Act of 1949 sought to advance building low income housing as authorized by the Act of 1937. Doing so had been stymied by the requirement new public housing could only be built on the basis of one new unit built for one slum dwelling demolished. The 1954 Act held out very attractive inducements to the builder community to participate. Eventually, with increasingly generous "exception" clauses added to the law, renewal projects lost much of their connection to their purpose of housing the ill-housed. The Housing Act of 1954 also was very significant for the propagation of urban planning. Section 701, written by planner William Wheaton, provided for matching grants to cities to prepare comprehensive plans. Cities were much attracted to this program because a comprehensive plan became a requirement for receiving Federal financial assistance for other developmental activities, such as urban renewal. In this way comprehensive planning became a widespread practice throughout the United States and led to a rapidly expanding demand for qualified planners.

This further stimulated the number of professional educational programs in urban planning, although the program at the University of Washington had existed as early as 1940. It arose out of the interest created in the potential of regional planning in the Columbia Basin by the hydroelectric and farmland irrigation projects. In fact, the educational fare at the University was originally called a Master of Science in Regional Planning and was offered by the engineering college.

In 1960 President John F. Kennedy directed much attention to urban problems with his New Frontier. His attempt to create a cabinet department of urban affairs failed when southern Congressmen balked at his intention to nominate a distinguished black housing expert, Robert C. Weaver as Secretary. Creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was delayed until 1966 when Weaver did in fact become its first Secretary.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society took direct aim at poverty. Beginning in 1964 much social legislation was passed during his administration including the Economic Opportunity Act, the Job Corps, Head Start, VISTA, a domestic Peace Corps, and an expanded food stamp program. For planners, directly important legislation was the Model Cities program. The very important concept of "maximum feasible participation" was introduced in the Economic Opportunity Act during this era and continued in subsequent Federal legislation. Much of Johnson’s well-intended programs were hobbled by the Viet Nam conflict that drew resources away from social programs.

The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 brought about a substantial shift of power from the federal government and citizen participation in urban affairs to local officials. The Housing Act of 1968, passed before Nixon entered office, resulted in historically the highest volumes of new housing in the early 1970s, much to the dissatisfaction of President Nixon. The 1968 Act made such a large volume possible because of innovative programs of mortgage subsidy. The Act also authorized an experimental program of housing technological innovation that was cut short by the phasing out of the programs by the Nixon administration. New housing legislation in 1974 (the Housing and Community Development Act), after Nixon had been driven from office, provided for Community Development Block Grants under which cities such as Seattle made very localized awards for improvements upon the basis of competitive neighborhood submittals. Section 8 of the Act, a program of subsidy for lower income tenants in private housing largely replaced the interest subsidy programs as provided in the 1968 act.

Budgets for Great Society agencies were slashed and the Model Cities program was phased out. Nixon was particularly caustic that he wanted to end Model Cities under which social and physical assistance were programmatically combined. This was the specific Johnson response to the civil unrest and riots and property destruction in many cities commencing in Los Angeles in 1966. Nixon also impounded funds from federal housing projects and in their place, proposed a New Federalism. The key to the shift of policy-making to state and local levels was revenue sharing. Local governments received federal funds directly rather than through federal agencies. Down through the years, this Republican preference for distribution of federal funds for urban activities with fewer restrictions, and the Democrats’ stronger emphasis upon conformity to program purposes, has been a continuing characteristic of partisan politics. The Republican shift was embodied in the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act in 1972. Nixon’s goal of reinforcing local autonomy reflected new metropolitan facts of life. The Nixon Administration also pressured localities to extend planning to be offices or departments of "planning and development," emphasizing local government organizational encouragement and assistance of business developmental activities and to reduce interest in comprehensive planning.

A RESURGENCE OF REGIONAL PLANNING

It is of incidental interest that around this time the pioneer of regional planning in Milwaukee, Gordon Whitnall (mentioned earlier), was retained as a consultant in Washington. His work resulted in the Planning Enabling Act (1959) - Part III, below. This was a distinct improvement over the 1935 "cities" law and a vehicle for furthering modern planning in the state. It contained a provision inter-county collaboration in "regional planning," although Washington remained largely impervious to its potentialities. It also failed to attain two-tier county planning where the county planning coordinated city plans and provided a general framework within which local plans operate, although this was a principle with which Whitnall was identified.

Daniel J. Evans became Governor in 1963 and served three terms. He and key supporters kindled an enthusiasm for state land planning which had not been present, at least not since Governor Arthur Langley, in 1946, dismantled the State Planning Board of New Deal days. Twenty years after Langley, the Legislature transformed and expanded the powers of the Local Planning Section, which had been established within the Department of Commerce and Economic Development chiefly to supervise the federal grants of Sec. 701 Local Planning Assistance, to become the Planning and Community Affairs Agency. After downgradings from independent agency status in the Governor’s office by later state administrations, planning activities now are based mainly within the Department of Commerce, Trade, and Economic Development (CTED), or in the Department of Ecology (DOE). Additionally, there are the three regional Growth Management Hearings Boards. Introduction of administrative hearings adjudication by King County in 1969 had already demonstrated the advantages of such an arrangement. (See above.)

It was federal activities that moved things along. A resurgence of regional planning in the 1950s and 1960s was underwritten by federal grants for the acquisition of open space. These were through the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation (BOR) sponsored by Winthrop Rockefeller, and administered by HUD and its predecessor. These grants enabled councils of government (COGs) to exert considerable authority in several metropolitan areas that already had a regional process in place. This included such West Coast agencies as the Puget Sound Council of Governments (then known as Puget Sound Governmental Conference), the Southern California Council of Governments (SCAG) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). Regional transportation studies, federally funded through state highway departments or divisions, were set up in these three metropolitan areas and others: These were the Puget Sound Regional Transportation Study (PSRTS), the Los Angeles Regional Transportation Study (LARTS) and the Bay Area Transportation Study (BATS), which were heavily funded to design a transportation system for multi-county regions. All of these studies utilized simulation models, as much as computer capabilities then allowed, for small area forecasting. Always a minor key in Congressional transportation appropriations, regional new rail systems and the upgrading of the few already existing, became a regular program giving indispensable financial encouragement to local transit planning and development. Like other federal programs, local political enthusiasm could be strengthened by the thought that ‘As long as the feds are paying for it, let’s do it."

From the viewpoint of long-run comprehensive planning, the value of state/federal transportation assistance, because of its emphasis, has been problematical. The support of transportation studies at a metropolitan scale was recognition of increased congestion in big cities. However, the programmatic emphasis, at first overwhelmingly upon street and highway mobility, continued to be preponderantly car and truck oriented, although transit and rail did get some financial recognition as noted above. Surely, if there had been strong recognition in federal/state funding of the indissoluble linkage of transportation and land use, present transportation and population and activity distribution would be more appropriate.

Recognition within the Evans administration of the need for a unified approach to future land use planning, led to formation in 1971 of the Washington State Land Planning Commission to advise the legislature on possible solutions for future growth in the state guided by an effective planning process. Ronald L. McConnell, a professional planner, was appointed executive director. The 19 members represented a broad spectrum of interests and experience. They were directed to perform six tasks. (1) Study all state planning enabling legislation; (2) Study other state laws concerning planning and land development; (3) Study laws and proposed legislation of other states and the Federal Government in the area of land use control; (4) Study land use proposals of other organizations, specifically the American Laws Institute; (5) Consider the development of an eventual statewide land use data bank or alternative and develop a pilot project; and (6) Prepare its findings and recommendations to be considered by the 1973 session of the legislature.

The Commission proposed a Washington Land Use Act of two parts. The first would have established a State Land Planning Agency and the second, a State Land Information Service. In its study of local government control having primary responsibility for land use planning, the concept of a hearing examiner was proposed. It has been already noted that, earlier in Governor Evans tenure, the State Planning and Community Affairs Agency had been created in the Governor’s office. This was intended to expand the state’s capabilities to assist localities, and the new proposal was a reasoned extension of these activities. The chief reference for formulating proposals for new legislation came from the American Law Institute’s Model Land Development Code, and in consultation with Fred Bosselman, its principal draftsman. At the same time, Senator Jackson’s National Land Use Policy and Planning Assistance Act was being considered in Congress and the Commission work was judged to have no conflicts with the proposed federal legislation. Neither effort was passed.

In Washington State, the first local jurisdiction to adopt the hearing examiner system was King County in 1969. It was modeled after the counties of Anne Arundel and Montgomery in Maryland. The Hearing Examiner is a quasi-judicial office within local government and is independent of other government departments or agencies. An Examiner is charged with holding hearings on land use actions that have been authorized by the legislative authority and issuing a recommendation or decision. The decision may be appealed to the legislative body or the Court of Appeals. This system was intended to professionalize decisions, expedite them, and reduce political determinations.

The major all-time state action in planning within Washington was the passage of the Growth Management Act in 1990 and 1991. Prospects that this law and its chief operational instrument, the Growth Management Hearings Boards, will endure, have improved with the passing of its first decade and its survival of most attempted legislative countermoves. For a full discussion of this act and its provisions see Part III below.

In order to consolidate and simplify planning legislation, the Washington State legislature established a Land Use Study Commission in 1995. In December 1998, the Commission chaired by T. Ryan Durkan, issued its final report. The major thrust was directed to integrating the Shoreline Management Act with the Growth Management Act. Over three years the commission struggled to develop a consolidated land use code but realized that the statewide consensus necessary for its adoption and implementation did not exist. However, the Commission did not conclude that a quest for one must come to an end. The Consolidated Land Use Code proposed by the Commission would have created a new title in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) and move existing provisions of several statutes into that title. These included the Growth Management Act, State Environmental Policy Act, Shoreline Management Act, Environmental Hearings Office, Planning Enabling Statutes, Regional Transportation Planning Act, Subdivision and Platting Statute, Impact Fees, Project Review and the Land Use Petition Act. It was understood that the GMA would serve as the integrating framework. (Also, please see Part III for further discussion.)

THE RECENT QUARTER CENTURY

In writing this report, time and space limited more detailed reporting to the earlier, more formative, period. The time since about 1975 has received much less attention. The subsequent history has not been without some importance, although there have been fewer precise events officially and formally transforming planning work in the nation at large since that time. There have, however, been changes in the mood and tenor of planning practice. All through the Cold War it was often more effective to justify federal actions on the basis of Cold War explanations. e.g., building interstate freeways to expedite military movements, or the creation of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to plan evacuation and protection of the population against foreign attack. Other specific disaster relief and prevention actions by FEMA could then be more easily and systematically undertaken once the Cold War purposes were enunciated.

In Washington State, on the other hand, there have been new state efforts demonstrated chiefly in the Growth Management Act In the most prosperous local areas of the state, the electronics communications boom ushered in waves of high profile capital spending. Much of this latter, as is explained in Part IV, has come about outside the systematic sanctioning system of capital improvement planning, however.

The brief tenure of President Gerald Ford and the single term of President Jimmy Carter did not result in especially noteworthy changes in urban/environmental activities. (The passage during the Ford administration of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 has already been noted; implementation of NEPA and ESA had commenced.).

Several innovative urbanistic/environmental features of the Carter administration centered on energy conservation: Although later swept away on a feel-good and rightful entitlement note in the 1980s, Carter responded to the second boycott by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1978 with strong energy measures. These concerned alternative energy sources and energy conservation. Motor fuels consumption was lowered by requiring cars to be built to attain better mileage, application of fees on new vehicles not meeting these standards, the 55 MPH highway speed limit, and an emphasis on transit. (A secondary benefit not entirely appreciated at the time was the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions and therefore global warming; and by reducing the amounts of driving, lowering somewhat ozone destroying gases also reaching the upper atmosphere.) Emphasis upon savings in space heating and cooling through structural design and siting has persisted and been incorporated in the Uniform Building Code.

Carter also had fashioned an urban agenda report in anticipation of the coming election which he lost to Reagan. This was not particularly important report except that it was a first, and the last until an urban Presidential position paper released at the end of the Clinton administration (and quite obviously timed as an item to feature in the Gore presidential candidacy). Two other reports late in Carter’s term could have been important preparatory steps which the country needed to take: One was a slim report which estimated that 1 million acres of agricultural land was disappearing into urban development each year. The second was a major, though rather rushed, study entitled The Global 2000 Report to the President. Volume 3 is entitled "The Government’s Global Model." The important information and inferences of Global 2000 soon was swept from the country’s attention, along with the dismaying number about farmland loss, with the election of President Reagan.

Reagan had campaigned on reducing the federal government in national life. We might put it this way. Kennedy’s famous admonition to the younger generation in his inaugural address in 1960 had been "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." This was now exchanged for the old time adage of economists: Look out for your own best interests and the market will produce the best possible social result. At the same time the minimalist view of government justifies attaching much importance to national defense. So while reducing expenditures, for housing, for example, which brought back a problem of permanent homelessness, military appropriations grew hugely and rapidly. So much so that the federal annual deficit and accumulated debt rose to peak levels. Thus there was not a reduction of government spending, just reduction of some government spending. When the economy climbed out of the recession that had been caused by the oil crisis in the last year of the Carter term, some skeptics of Reagan’s actual commitment to small government and expenditure called the new situation "military Keynesianism." They meant that the federal Treasury was spending the country out of recession by going into debt as the famed British economist of the 1930s, J.M. Keynes, had advised President Roosevelt to do. It was "military" rather than for civil works as Keynes had talked about. Actual military expeditions gave credence to these appropriations in the next 12 years: Granada, Panama, Lebanon, Somalia, and the Gulf War. Military regimes or insurgencies were supported in Chile, Central America, Angola, and Congo.

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union soon broke up, thoughts of a so-called "peace dividend" did not extend to new or increased programs for domestic improvement, the way the term had been used when foreign relations had taken a peaceful turn in the early Kennedy years. Instead, military expenditures remained high and stressed very costly new weapons development. And direct public benefits were envisioned as taking the form of tax cuts. Inner cities continued to stagnate with very high unemployment, deteriorating educational facilities, decaying infrastructure, and social malaise. In April 1992, in the South Central district of Los Angeles a police incident smoldering for weeks then resulted in widespread rioting, arson fires, and other property destruction. President Bush visited the area with an entourage of officials a few weeks after but there were no notable new actions.

The record of the Clinton administration demonstrates no particular emphasis upon new or refurbished urban programs. Three explanations: The first two years were squandered on what appears politically poor initial program choices and inert Democratic leadership in Congress. Then the Democrats were out of power in Congress for the succeeding six years and the Republican control was very hostile. Third, Clinton, as a "New Democrat," was allying himself with a more Republican position (to what extent for political success or conviction, we do not know) of emphasizing business responsibility and dynamics. In the latter part of his term there was a competition, to say and mean it more than Republicans, that Democrats wanted to reduce the federal government and the debt. On the other hand, there was a more progressive tendency in opposing Republican proposed tax cuts running against more equitable personal income patterns and environmental laxities. The Clinton administration consistently took seriously sustaining and enforcing the national environmental laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and Indian, National Parks, and Forest Service appropriations and programs. Notably, in his last year in office Clinton was active in exercising Presidential power not requiring Congressional approval, setting aside large areas of public lands free from exploitation as "National Monuments."

SUMMATION AND LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

Long-lasting Political Shaping Arguments)

(1) Beginning in the New Deal in the 1930s, there has been a continuing contest over national policy between "states rights" and federal power. This showed up in contentions over new laws, administrative styles, and election campaigns. Democrats preferring federal financial aid to have performance requirements attached and Republicans wanting grantee units of government to have a freer hand to conduct their own spending regimes for federal funds received without many specific rules.

(2) The other side of this coin of national policy was about federal attitudes toward business. Democrats more affirmative about public programs such as public housing, public power, or public recreation, and even public education. Democrats favoring public provision of these and other services, arguing that this extended benefits to the less financially able. On the other hand, the Republican position has favored mainly private action, except for "essential" services - military, local police and fire and criminal justice, streets and highways, on the grounds that privately provided services are more efficient. Clinton, as said above, mixed up the issues, in some respects positioning himself nearer to the Republicans in and advocating a more limited government role.

Actually, Carter began restricting government involvement in business, a concomitant of less insinuation of government into society, by deregulation of airlines, then a heavily supervised industry. Carter was advised by Fred Kahn, an academic economist who envisioned increased competition as removing much of the need for regulation. The Reagan administration then carried deregulation to other areas. Clinton’s attitude was not so much advocacy of new deregulation, as expressing that he would not spend effort on re-regulation but pursue the fruits of reduced government expenditure which accompanies less regulation instead. Therefore, it is not clearly out of frustration with Republican political strength that Clinton did not institute much new programming positively affecting the practice of planning, but partly at least an announced restrictive attitude toward important aspects of government. This Republican position very closely resembles that of "standard" (as they sometimes describe themselves) academic economists.

About Guys Who Don’t Get It. The economists are generally very little interested in the descriptive facts of urbanization and environment which are the everyday experiences of planners. In fact they know very little of the planner’s perspective, a fact which planners are probably too unclear about. Economists may insist that regulations are unnecessary - for example, zoning to determine land use. In this and many areas they will say let the market do it. (For example, Wm. Fishel, The Economics of Zoning Laws; A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls, 1985 .) This attitude has in been pervasive enough to regard the increased differential between those at the top in living standards or other egregious conditions of cities and environment. Too bad, but arguably not grounds for tampering with the market system. So far, the displacement of regulation in the electric power industry, or in dealing with air pollution emission where markets have been established to sell unused "pollution rights" to producers in other localities, appear to be abstractions too removed from the social intentions of regulation. At the end of 2000, there is much consternation in states on the west coast over electric power supply. The governor of California has asserted that much of the problem