Post-Modernism Cannot Meet the Public Policy Needs of the 21st Century
The Planning profession has responded to and addressed numerous crises throughout its existence. However, the current school of thought guiding our practices will not be able to address the policy issues facing our communities, our nation and our world in the 21st century. Planning will need to change as it has in the past to be a part of the solution.
As a student in the University of Rhode Island’s Community Planning and Area Development program, I took the class Planning Theory with Dr. Marcia Marker Feld. Dr. Marker Feld’s class took us through the various paradigms which have provided the overall school of thought in the planning profession during different eras.
Paradigm is defined by WordMonkey dictionary as “the generally accepted perspective of a particular discipline at a given time.” Paradigms come and go because they initially address a problem or crisis which is going unresolved. After time, challenges arise that cannot be addressed by the paradigm and it is replaced by a new school of thought.
I no longer have my notes from the Planning Theory class nor, sadly, the textbook. However, I remember that urban planning has been characterized by four main paradigms over the past century, and I apologize to Dr. Marker Feld and other historians of the profession if I mangle this historical summary. The inception of the planning profession began in the late nineteenth century with what has been referred to as the “City Beautiful Paradigm”. At the time, the profession was mainly driven by architects and landscape architects whose primary focus was creating functional and attractive urban places. This addressed the crisis of haphazard and unsightly development during a period of rapid growth of American cities due to industrialization.
By the early twentieth century, urban problems shifted to crises caused by overcrowding and abject housing and work conditions. The City Beautiful Paradigm had no answers for these new issues and a new paradigm focused on social and health policies emerged. During this era of the, what I am calling, the “Health and Welfare Paradigm”, the planning profession was dominated by social workers with primary goals of establishing health, housing and workplace codes.
During the Great Depression, the greatest crisis became the need to put people to work. The New Deal relied heavily on public works projects to address the issue. The Health and Welfare Paradigm had no precepts with which to address large public works projects and it was therefore replaced. What emerged is what has come to be referred to as the “Modern Paradigm”. This paradigm relied heavily on engineering standards and modeling. The profession came to be dominated by civil engineers with a primary focus on infrastructure. The opinion of “experts” was sacrosanct during the Modern Paradigm and was rarely questioned.
The failures of Urban Renewal and the negative affects of high profile highway projects brought about a crisis in the Modern Paradigm during the late 1960’s and through the 1970’s. The complete reliance on expert opinion began to be doubted and the need to include other voices from affected populations became more widely accepted. This approach became known as the “Post Modern Paradigm” which continues to guide our profession today.
Since the coming of the Post Modern Paradigm, the opinions of experts and policy analyses have steadily lost sway in formulation of planning and policy decisions. The paradigm has given rise to NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard), BANANAism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) as well as the proliferation of blogs. The paradigm has also created an atmosphere that has allowed the Tea Party movement to wield such clout. It could be argued that we are now seeing the apex of the post-modern paradigm.
This became evident to me a few weeks ago as I listened to Marty Moss-Coane interview a representative of the local Tea Party movement after the recent midterm elections on the show Radio Times on WHYY in Philadelphia. The Tea Party movement representative (whose name I cannot recall) stated that a top priority of the new Congress should be the repeal of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 due to its level of spending and effect on the deficit. Moss-Coane then pointed out that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had projected that the Affordable Care Act would actually reduce projected deficits over time compared to a do-nothing scenario. The Tea Party movement representative said “I don’t believe that.” Although Moss-Coane tried to press the issue, the damage had been done. One person (and one who has no particular credentials in the area of health policy) expressed a feeling backed by no independent analysis – but that feeling was given equal footing to what was a highly detailed analytical projection prepared by the CBO.
No matter how one feels about the Affordable Care Act, we must face the fact that our health care system is in crisis and will bankrupt our economy in the next decades if nothing is done. We face similar challenges in numerous areas of public policy including transportation where we have overbuilt and under-costed our network of highways and bridges and now face an almost insurmountable backlog of deferred maintenance; in education where our schools are not adequately preparing our workforce to compete in a global economy; in our entitlement programs which are on unsustainable financial trajectories; in our economy which does not produce the type of jobs that allow for the middle class lifestyle on which we have come to rely.
These are significant issues. However, our public policy discussion has come to rely almost exclusively on two things: first, highly biased whitepapers by interest groups; and second, people’s “feelings” about the causes and solutions of problems. People feel and therefore assume that there is too much waste, fraud and abuse in public programs; they feel and therefore assume that there is too much welfare spending; they feel and therefore assume that teachers’ unions are the problem in education.
Whether these assumptions are correct or not, they are unproven. By relying on unproven assumptions and biased analyses, we are taking an enormous gamble in our attempt to deal with the current crises. One of the easiest ways to ensure that any policy, public or otherwise, will fail is to base it on incorrect assumptions and distorted “statistics” that do not provide an accurate depiction of the true situation. If we continue to follow this path we will be unable to craft policies that effectively address any of these areas.
A new paradigm is needed that strikes an appropriate balance between policy analysis and the opinions of affected populations. For this to be successful, a set of precepts will need to emerge that guide processes, assumptions and methodologies so that motives guiding a policy analysis will not be questioned and results can be generally accepted. The policy analysis can then act as the framework or set of facts from which to work. Policy discussions and decisions could and should then be made within that framework.
The current paradigm which allows for me to have my facts and you to have yours will not be sufficient to adequately address our current challenges. As it has for over a century, the planning profession should be at the forefront of this change and should foster a discussion on how to restore confidence in and the use of sound and informative public policy analysis.
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Originally posted by jswanek
