Category Archives: Regional planning

For my final essay during this Junk Science Week, I decided to focus on New Urbanism and Crime. If you’ve already read the article on this subject that appeared in Reason magazine two years ago, this will be redundant. But the story is so revealing of planners’ methods that it bears repeating.

In 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape that purported to show how certain urban designs can make neighborhoods safer from crime. Yet it was just junk science. In fact, to call it junk science might be too kind.

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Everyone knows that the suburbs made us fat. How do we know this? Because some junk scientists at some pro-planning advocacy groups put out a press release that claimed they had proven that suburbanites were fatter than city dwellers.

In fact, their research proved no such thing. But they did not hesitate to argue that their “proof” showed that America needs “to to invest in making America’s neighborhoods appealing and safe places to walk and bicycle,” which — to planners’ way of thinking — means rebuilding suburbs at higher densities.

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This is Junk Science Week at the Antiplanner. Each day, I will present an example of how planners rely on junk science to justify some of their more inane ideas. Today, I will focus on New Urbanism and the sense of community.

First, it is worthwhile asking why planners seem to believe in so much junk science. In previous posts, I’ve presented reasons why planning can’t work: the systems planners want to plan are simply too complicated for anyone to deal with. Because there is no real scientific support for planning, planners instead turn to junk science.

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Government planning fails because planners face the wrong incentives. Instead of being rewarded for doing good things for their communities, they are rewarded mainly for pleasing other planners. This incestuous system is a recipe for failure.

In a previous post, I listed seven reasons why government planning — that is, long-range, comprehensive planning that often regulates other people’s property — cannot work. I’ve discussed four reasons in detail, and now it is time to address reason number 5: the Incentive Problem.

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