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Editorial column from the Cincinnati Post 12/10/02:
The Death of Urban Planning
Guest column by Robert E. Manley
The funeral is now being arranged for urban planning in Cincinnati -- the first city in the country to have a comprehensive master plan (1925) and the birthplace of city and regional planning as applied in the U.S.
The events leading up to the memorial service have been in the works for some time. What occurred during the past week -- the resignation of City Planning Director Elizabeth Blume, proposed cutbacks in the planning department's budget and recommendations to abolish the department altogether -- are the last rites for a corpse that has been dead for years.
The recommendation to abolish the planning department came from the City's Economic Development Task Force, chaired by George A. Schaefer, Jr., the chief executive officer of Fifth Third Bank, and City Manager Valerie Lemmie. Members are business people familiar with real estate development.
John Cranley, chairman of the finance committee of City Council, criticizes the Planning Commission for creating "too many grandiose development plans that sit on shelves" and says that planning "raises false hopes.''
In fact, it has been the economic development branch that has given false hope through silly grandiose plans.
Projects that have been promoted by the Economic Development Department have been ill-conceived because they did not have a good planning context into which they could be effectively placed.
Some examples:
• Placement of Fort Washington Way parallel to Third Street, providing what Ladislas Segoe called a great wall between the Central Business District and the river.
Although he was the principal planning consultant when the 1948 Master Plan was written, Segoe argued vigorously that the distribution function between the two major expressways (I-71 and I-75) should be in the area of Liberty Street, north of the Central Business District. His assertion was that it was wrong to separate the business district of a river city from its river.
He was overruled by economic development interests when the department stores threatened that they would leave town unless the distributor would be put between the river and the Central Business District. They won that issue and overrode long-range planning, then left town anyway.
• Tearing down the West End (now known as Queensgate) and reconfiguring the street patterns so as to merge six or eight city blocks into super blocks. Each super block was to be the home of a new multi-story factory. Fifty years later, no multi-story factory has been built because multi-story factories were not being built by manufacturers at the time the economic development department came up with this scheme.
• Locating the combined football and baseball stadium on the riverfront. The stadium, which is expected to be imploded sometime this month, had not even been paid for by the time the decision was made to replace it.
As to Lemmie, she comes to Cincinnati by way of Dayton where that city's planning department was merged under economic development and effectively prevented from functioning as a planning department.
The lesson from Dayton and Cincinnati is clear: planning, for all practical purposes, is ignored in favor of the glitz and glitter of short-term development projects.
The Ohio Planning Conference (the American Planning Association-affiliated chapter of citizen and professional planners in the state) ought to sponsor a public funeral for planning in Cincinnati, where the old issue of interaction between sound regional planning and economically successful development projects could be explored from every angle.
It should be in the nature of public debate with the advocates of planning and the critics of planning getting equal access to the platform.
Similarly, there should be a thorough debate of short-term development projects without planning versus short-term planning projects placed in a framework of a good, comprehensive regional plan.
Following these debates, Cincinnati needs to proceed with abolishing its Department of Economic Development and create a real planning department that does long-range planning and provides guidance to independent real estate developers. It is the only way the city will avoid repeating the same errors over and over again.
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Robert Manley is a partner in a downtown Cincinnati law firm.
The Death of Urban Planning
Guest column by Robert E. Manley
The funeral is now being arranged for urban planning in Cincinnati -- the first city in the country to have a comprehensive master plan (1925) and the birthplace of city and regional planning as applied in the U.S.
The events leading up to the memorial service have been in the works for some time. What occurred during the past week -- the resignation of City Planning Director Elizabeth Blume, proposed cutbacks in the planning department's budget and recommendations to abolish the department altogether -- are the last rites for a corpse that has been dead for years.
The recommendation to abolish the planning department came from the City's Economic Development Task Force, chaired by George A. Schaefer, Jr., the chief executive officer of Fifth Third Bank, and City Manager Valerie Lemmie. Members are business people familiar with real estate development.
John Cranley, chairman of the finance committee of City Council, criticizes the Planning Commission for creating "too many grandiose development plans that sit on shelves" and says that planning "raises false hopes.''
In fact, it has been the economic development branch that has given false hope through silly grandiose plans.
Projects that have been promoted by the Economic Development Department have been ill-conceived because they did not have a good planning context into which they could be effectively placed.
Some examples:
• Placement of Fort Washington Way parallel to Third Street, providing what Ladislas Segoe called a great wall between the Central Business District and the river.
Although he was the principal planning consultant when the 1948 Master Plan was written, Segoe argued vigorously that the distribution function between the two major expressways (I-71 and I-75) should be in the area of Liberty Street, north of the Central Business District. His assertion was that it was wrong to separate the business district of a river city from its river.
He was overruled by economic development interests when the department stores threatened that they would leave town unless the distributor would be put between the river and the Central Business District. They won that issue and overrode long-range planning, then left town anyway.
• Tearing down the West End (now known as Queensgate) and reconfiguring the street patterns so as to merge six or eight city blocks into super blocks. Each super block was to be the home of a new multi-story factory. Fifty years later, no multi-story factory has been built because multi-story factories were not being built by manufacturers at the time the economic development department came up with this scheme.
• Locating the combined football and baseball stadium on the riverfront. The stadium, which is expected to be imploded sometime this month, had not even been paid for by the time the decision was made to replace it.
As to Lemmie, she comes to Cincinnati by way of Dayton where that city's planning department was merged under economic development and effectively prevented from functioning as a planning department.
The lesson from Dayton and Cincinnati is clear: planning, for all practical purposes, is ignored in favor of the glitz and glitter of short-term development projects.
The Ohio Planning Conference (the American Planning Association-affiliated chapter of citizen and professional planners in the state) ought to sponsor a public funeral for planning in Cincinnati, where the old issue of interaction between sound regional planning and economically successful development projects could be explored from every angle.
It should be in the nature of public debate with the advocates of planning and the critics of planning getting equal access to the platform.
Similarly, there should be a thorough debate of short-term development projects without planning versus short-term planning projects placed in a framework of a good, comprehensive regional plan.
Following these debates, Cincinnati needs to proceed with abolishing its Department of Economic Development and create a real planning department that does long-range planning and provides guidance to independent real estate developers. It is the only way the city will avoid repeating the same errors over and over again.
=====
Robert Manley is a partner in a downtown Cincinnati law firm.