Urban planners are eagerly anticipating the next step in their efforts to take control over the lives of unsuspecting Americans: megaregional planning. Last September, the Department of Transportation published a report on “the implications” of megaregions “for infrastructure and transportation planning.” Now there is a group calling itself America 2050 that thinks we need a “third century vision” for the eleven megaregions it claims are emerging across the nation.
From the America 2050 web site. Click for a larger view.
Jane Jacobs once defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” The Antiplanner would go further and say that, now that urban planners have totally screwed up many metropolitan regions, they want the power to screw up even larger areas of land — in the guise, of course, of fixing the problems that the won’t admit they created at the metropolitan level.
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Planners assume that local governments and property owners cannot possibly cooperate with one another without some sort of supergovernment planning agency forcing them to do so. This is ridiculous. On important things — such as making sure that roads and other infrastructure connect with one another — local agencies and landowners have never had a problem with cooperation. On things that planners think are important but are not — such as regulating lot sizes or directing where transportation dollars go — diversity should be encouraged so that government agencies and developers can find innovative solutions.
The best thing that can be said about megaregional proposals is that there is a lot of blank space on the map that is not in one of the megaregions. Those of us who don’t believe in big government will at least have plenty of room to escape those of you who do.
I’d prefer a regional plan over federal plan any day. At any rate, another level of Bureaucracy is not needed and is redundant!
The root problem is that planners are planning so as to force people to live the way planners think (that’s a compliment) people should live instead of how people truly want to live.
Thanks
JK
Those of us who don’t believe in big government will at least have plenty of room to escape those of you who do.
Only until they get a little further along in their plan of rural cleansing.
thanks
JK
Perhaps in certain regions of the country, adjacent owners have not had a problem connecting their developments, but in the South/Southwest, our development patterns are riddled with areas with only one access point, even into communities with over 1000 homesites or 1 million square feet of commercial/retail space. This problem is especially bad for projects off of highways. So while many of the elements of super-regional planning are warrantless, some basic elements might prove fruitful.
Some issues transcend private property and arbitrarily drawn small jurisdictions. Like water. And hunting.
And agriculture. And waste. And aquifers. And transportation. And, and, and.
DS
Come on, Dan, you know the private market does a fine job of commodifying externalities
And yet somehow before there was government planning, people survived. Crops grew. Water flowed. People disposed of their waste. I would credit technology for today’s higher standards of productivity and cleanliness before crediting government planning.
Of course they survived. And that might be a decent argument save for “forgetting” about the CAA, CWA, NEPA, etc results and all the rest of environmental history, esp in cities.
Certainly regulation leads to cleanliness (kind of a no-brainer, actually).
DS
Mike: “And yet somehow before there was government planning, people survived. Crops grew. Water flowed. People disposed of their waste. I would credit technology for today’s higher standards of productivity and cleanliness before crediting government planning.”
ws: This is one huge blanket statement that disregards historical precedent. Some of the earliest technological advances in infrastructure (that we use today) were under the guise of large, top down planning orders.
Hello, Paris’ revolutionary canal systems weren’t a bunch of neighbors getting together and building and planning a water system, it was a planned from the very tippy-top echelon of governance.
Eugene Belgrand
Some planning aspects need to be top-down, and some should be bottom-up. Not all planning is good, and not all planning is bad. Hopefully it is relatively democratic. Unfortunately, this blog is directed towards the one extreme end rather than discussing the merits of planning and its contemporary role.
I can fully agree that profession of planning is not perfect and is often over stepping. But I also agree that many of its procedural tools have helped cities and municipalities function.
Furthermore, the profession of planning is not going away anytime soon. It might be more meaningful to yell at a blank wall than go on a blog and tell everyone how bad planning is.
PS: You’re right about people disposing of their waste before true planning occurred. Except you forgot to mention the fact that they disposed of it in the river and polluted their water sources which made them sick. Is this rational self-interest or stupidity?
Is this rational self-interest or stupidity?
They didn’t need no plannurz – the market took care of cholera!
DS
Yeah, I figured you guys would run wild with that one. The thing is, it’s just a simple statement. No more than that. Of course there is more to the story. But look how quickly you two snapped to the defense of statist intervention!
What you SHOULD be asking is: What part of the story don’t we know? Surely, there was HUNTING, for example, for centuries without government intervention. Why is hunting regulated today? A true believer statist would say to protect animal populations from extinction, etc. The tragedy of the commons. Fair enough, but who says the problem is the hunters? The problem was the COMMONS. The problem was that it is in everyone’s individual best interest to seize fugitive resources from property owned by everybody and nobody. I could go all Nozick here, but I’ll credit that you’ve already covered this ground.
Do you like animals? Buy private property and fill it with animals. Anyone hunting them then will be committing trespass and/or tort. There was a perfectly cromulent solution, but instead government planners saw an opportunity to extend a control and more importantly to RAISE REVENUE, and so we have auctions for hunting permits and bag limits and so forth, and national land is one swarm of hunters away from being depleted, because it belongs to everybody and nobody. The government solution is a band-aid on a throat gash… but hey, at least it raises revenue for social programs.
Mike:“Why is hunting regulated today”
ws: It seems you’re trying to make the argument that in order to save a species, you should hunt it (because there’s incentive to maintain the species). I’d say this is partly true, but mostly false. The American Bison is a prime example. It was hunted almost to extinction. The numbers of bison are up, but down millions from their former numbers. And places where their numbers are up are in farms where their genes are all messed up (inbred). Hardly a “wild” species. That is not saving a species – that is farming. There is, however, one group of true bison who roam around Yellowstone.
Regulation of hunting fees do not go towards “social programs”.
Mike:“Do you like animals?”
ws: I love animals! My favorite animals are songbirds. Should I cage these migratory birds up in order to save them? I hope they don’t freeze once winter comes!
Your assertions completely disregard the difference between a species and an ecosystem. In order to save ecosystems you must preserve their true ecological functions which includes migration, movement, and interactions with other species in corridors. Penning up a bunch of wild animals on private property is not saving a wild species. In rare instances where one owns very large tracts of land, it may be possible – but this is only present in a few locations.
Mike:“Yeah, I figured you guys would run wild with that one. The thing is, it’s just a simple statement. No more than that. Of course there is more to the story. But look how quickly you two snapped to the defense of statist intervention!”
ws: I never defended statist intervention, in fact my post(s) neither decries such movements nor promotes them. I am fairly moderate regarding government planning – and I agree with the general overtones of this site that it is often too far reaching into individuals’ lives. Let that be known for the record.
With that said, we are all waiting for you to admit that at least some top-down planning has benefited man, and that true organic bottom-up planning cannot account for the many complexities of urbanized society.
Yeah, I figured you guys would run wild with that one.
Yup, you have it all figured out, don’t you. Everything just like you planned. All figured out. Impressive.
Nonetheless, your assertions were incorrect.
Regulation reduces pollution. Sorry. That’s how it is.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it, widdle feary-fears and phrasie-phrases about ‘statist intervention’ notwithstanding. People like their clean air and water.
Gawd. When can we have a new dog-whistle phrase? Can’t K St. come up with something new already? Have all the smart people left the right-leaning K St shops too? Sheesh.
DS
“Jane Jacobs once defined a “region†as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.—
The reason for this is that urban problems take place at multiple scales simultaneously. The instinct is to always try to scale up and create the biggest possible control system, but that means losing features of the smaller scales.
There is another solution though: creating communities at multiple scales that are nested into each other.
Dan: Regulation reduces pollution.
Mike: At what cost, and borne by whom? Government planning CAN do many things. The real question is whether it SHOULD do a given thing.
ws: Whether in your state the particular license fees from a given regulatory scheme go into the general fund or go to a particular appropriation may vary, but in general principle, license fees represent revenue in, while social programs make up the OVERWHELMING bulk of appropriations out, mainly owing to federal matching funds for medicaid, ssi, etc. The generalization holds.
In Arizona, for example, the funds from the tobacco settlement and lottery ticket revenue both go to a social program: public education. The fact that they did not first go to the general fund and thence from the general fund to public education does not change the essential nature of the expropriation.
I would need to see reports/stats that show that license fees etc. for hunting or outdoor recreation actually go towards “social programs”. Until then, it’s an untrue statement. Yes, cigs and gambling going towards schools – it’s a sin tax. Money gets re-appropriated all of the time, but specifically, what does this have to do with hunting/outdoor fees and are those fees actually appropriated to other sources and not directly into the maintenance of federal and public lands?
I’m going to assume 100% of those fees go back into the “system”, but I am not sure. Otherwise your argument might as well be moot.
Despite the fact that Randal implied that Jacobs said it, she didn’t.
She attributed it to someone else*. Jacobs then goes on to describe the problems in vertical and horizontal integration (siloing) of communication and information making scaling up difficult, if not impossible. Bruce Babbitt in his book glosses over this basic, inherent issue but nonetheless attempts to offer solutions (which we don’t see on this site).
DS
* Jacobs, Jane. 1992. The Life and Death of Great American Cities. New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books. (pg 410 is the passage, halfway down)
Mike: At what cost, and borne by whom?
The CAA has returned benefits at 5-7x the cost.
Regulation of pollutants are done because pollution reduction likely won’t be done otherwise, as we see from history and reading the newspaper.
Government planning CAN do many things. The real question is whether it SHOULD do a given thing.
Vague ideological statements don’t really do anything for the discussion.
Should it improve human health? Should it provide clean water? Should it reverse market failures? Should it provide pretty pink ponies to pigtailed girls?
————–
I would need to see reports/stats that show that license fees etc. for hunting or outdoor recreation actually go towards “social programsâ€Â.
They don’t. They almost all go back into the resource to provide resources for hunters and sportspersons.
DS
Dan: The CAA has returned benefits at 5-7x the cost.
Mike: Bologna. (A call that your link provides insufficient information to address, BTW. I could go into a dozen reasons why… the date ranges, correlation not equaling causation, etc.) The returned benefits do not necessarily compensate the cost bearers. If I rob everybody in Portland of $1, then take the ~$500k and buy everyone in the city an ice cream cone from my ice cream store (with the profit going into my pocket), I don’t get to claim that the program provided a benefit at a multiple of the cost. It provided a huge benefit to one entity that was on the receiving end of the expropriation (me) and provided nothing but cost to those expropriated (the citizens of Portland). This is, in essence, what happens with much of government spending.
There is nothing remotely vague about my ideological statements. Quite to the contrary, they are based on the abstractions for which your pragmatic plans are only some of the possible range of concretizations.
I know my certainty is infuriating to you (as if your wild verbal gyrations directed toward me on the matter weren’t signal enough), because statists like you do not believe such certainty is possible unless borne of mystic providence. Since one man’s mysticism is no better than another, according to the statists’ credo, all politics and all philosophy are a simple matter of the application of force: might makes right. To you, my certainty comes from “Objectivism,” a concept you do not understand and thus that you equate with the mystical sources so embraced of the left: religion, environmentalism, fascism, etc.
Where you err is in assuming that mine is an endpoint certainty like the certainty of the bible-thumper that all gays are going to hell or the certainty of the cap-and-trader that the planet will turn into Arrakis within 20 years if we don’t return to a squalid life of poking in the bushes for roots and berries. My certainty is not based on faith. It is a certainty of method: all reality is knowable, and the understanding of all reality is subject to continuing and unending scrutiny. It is a perspective that, if you will pardon my French, allows one to dispense with the bullsh_t. It becomes possible to recognize things for what they really are, and have a realistic notion of what they ought to be, because it is a certainty of method that does not permit me to evade any aspect of reality in favor of an outcome I might personally wish or want. I am forced to deal with what *is.*
That’s why I use terms that send you roiling, like “statist intervention.” You mock that term to try to ad-hominem people like me into ceasing the use of it. You don’t like to see that term used to describe what you do because it sounds too much like what it is. And you know (by your own admission) that you have to conceal your statist intervention in order to bamboozle the public into allowing you to continue with your sandbox games. I know you won’t stop; it’s your meal ticket. You can only overreach so many times, though. Stakeholders can only be regulated as far as they allow themselves to be regulated. The key to triggering their inevitable revolt is to teach them what’s really happening, and I do that with terms you hate but that are accurate, like statist intervention. And I do that with a certainty that you hate because you think it’s as made up as your own.
The megaregion concept is the cure to the bane of planners’ existence — that people who won’t do what the planners want can go outside the planning area. Most of these megaregions are already within one or two states, so there is already an elected body that can handle any needed regulation.
Hint to WS: Don’t believe what the 19 year old Park Service seasonal guide tells you about Yellowstone bison.
Borealis: “Hint to WS: Don’t believe what the 19 year old Park Service seasonal guide tells you about Yellowstone bison.”
ws: Care to elaborate on this point?
The returned benefits do not necessarily compensate the cost bearers.
Ah. So it is OK to externalize costs onto the citizenry in the name of profit, and for corporations to avoid paying for Hg in the food chain, lung disorders, asthma exacerbations, reductions in hospitalization and emergency room visits, premature deaths and lost workdays.
Got it.
What a fine set of morals you have, boy!
You mock that term to try to ad-hominem people
No. You can’t misuse that term, lad:
Ad hominem: your statement is incorrect because you are comically narrow-minded.
NOT ad hominem: your statement is incorrect because you don’t know environmental history, regulatory principles, regulatory outcomes, natural science. And, BTW, you are comically narrow-minded.
So which one did Dan use? Right! NOT ad hom!
HTH to see how the term is purposefully misused.
DS
Hm. /ul worked in preview.
DS
“…diversity should be encouraged so that government agencies and developers can find innovative solutions.”
Come on, Randal. Government agencies only encourage diversity of melanin content. I thought you knew that. Geesh.
Dan:
An ad-hominem attack is any in which the arguer appeals to personal considerations (such as insulting the speaker) rather than to fact or reason (rather than engaging the argument.)
You’ve barely made a post in months that responded to me (or several other commenters) that didn’t contain an insult. You fail to refute any point I (or others) make with any facts or reason, ever, instead throwing out non-sequitur facts that don’t actually rebut, red herrings to misdirect, or just plain insults and the hell with the argument.
But you just keep on doing your thing, man. I assure you, every reader that doesn’t just tune both of us out in disgust is already looking upon you as lacking any and all credibility. They may judge my statements as they will. I will NOT insult them, or anyone else, for doing so.
“We mock what we don’t understand.”
-Austin Millbarge
“The best thing that can be said about megaregional proposals is that there is a lot of blank space on the map that is not in one of the megaregions.” – The Antiplanner
Heck, there’s a lot of blank space in those regions. Having the Front Range range from Albuquerque to Cheyenne seems like something someone on one of the coasts would come up with.
You fail to refute any point I (or others) make with any facts or reason…[yada],
Pffft. Anyone able to scroll up can see how this is comedy. Or a parody character. I’m bored with the yarn ball now, as it does the same d*mn thing every time I bat it.
[ignore]
DS
oops, posted this in the wrong topic above:
Against comprehensive reform  of anything
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/14/reform/
JimKarlock said: The root problem is that planners are planning so as to force people to live the way planners think (that’s a compliment) people should live instead of how people truly want to live.
THWM: Karlock you want things planned a certain way.
You even ran for office in your area & I hate politicians that push bad plans.
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