Advanced Brainstorm Carrefour (ABC): The Science of the City Naples, March 2016 Presentation by Peter Batey

1. Peter Batey
Emeritus Professor of Town and Regional
Planning,
University of Liverpool
1909
2009
Civic Design The world’s first university planning school
The City of Planning:
studying how plans are made

2. Structure of presentation
• What made us interested in how planners made
plans?
• The history of planning methods
• The role of the social scientist in planning
• Example 1: the Middlesbrough Survey and Plan of
the 1940s
• Example 2: the handling of inter-relationships in
planning and the strategic choice approach
• Conclusions

3. Regional science methods in planning
• Forty years ago, Michael Breheny and I initiated a series of (19)
workshop meetings around the theme of regional science methods
in planning
• Prompted by a new form of development plan, the structure plan
• Practitioners were keen to learn more about how they might go
about preparing these new plans, and to exchange best practice
• Breheny and I had good links with practice and took a practical
approach
• Systematic methods – quantitative and qualitative - that could be
applied at various stages in making a strategic land use plan and
keeping it up to date
• Concerned with the ‘how’ of plan-making, rather than the content
of plans

4. The history of planning methods
• The experience of running the workshops, which later
extended to the Netherlands and Germany made us
both curious about how planners in the past had gone
about preparing plans
• We discovered that this was a gap in planning history,
despite its central importance to what planning is
about
• There are benefits from planners learning from past
experience for several reasons
• We decided to organize a history of planning
methodology workshop, focusing again on methods in
practice

5. Some questions
• How did planners set about making plans?
• What process did they follow and to what
extent was there a common approach?
• What methods did they use in collecting,
analyzing and using data?
• What role was there for social scientists in the
planning process?

6. Subjects and sources 1
• Development of planning methods in Britain
and North America since the early 1900s
• Periods when there was intensive activity in
the development of new methods, e.g. 1940s,
1960s
• Rationality in planning
• The role of surveys in plan-making
• The role of particular local authorities as
sources of innovation in planning methods

7. Subjects and sources 2
• Grey literature on how plans are made
• Practitioners don’t tend to write papers or
publish
• Reviews of plans in the professional magazines
• Drawing upon contributions from a number of
key practitioners, by then retired, in the form of
memoir presentations, leading to valuable
dialogue between senior practitioners and those
whose involvement in planning was more recent

8. More recent work
• Since the early 1980s, a literature on the
history of plan-making has developed steadily
• A good example is the book by Boyce and
Williams (2015) on urban travel demand
forecasting;
• In the last year or so, I have taken the
opportunity to re-kindle my interests in the
history of planning methods

9. The role of the social scientist in plan-making 1
• The social survey: origins, purposes, scope and
methodology, Pittsburgh, New York, London,
York.
• The scientific city – George Ford (1913)
• In the UK, the so-called ‘daring experiments’ of
wartime and the immediate post-war period:
plan-making based on applied social science
research; geographers and sociologists are added
to the planning team.
• Example: the Middlesbrough Survey and Plan
(1946)

10. The scientific city
• Pittsburgh social survey of 1907 inspired many
American city planners to embark upon
systematic data collection exercises.
• This trend reinforced by scientific management
movement – Taylorism- from 1911 onwards
• Early planners wanted to impress their civic
leaders – a scientific diagnosis of a city’s
problems, helped give the new field of planning
some status
• The ‘city scientific’ promoted as a counterbalance
to the ‘city beautiful’, but oversold

11. The role of the social scientist in plan-making 1
• The social survey: origins, purposes, scope and
methodology, Pittsburgh, New York, London,
York.
• The scientific city – George Ford (1913)
• In the UK, the so-called ‘daring experiments’ of
wartime and the immediate post-war period:
plan-making based on applied social science
research; geographers and sociologists are added
to the planning team.
• Example: the Middlesbrough Survey and Plan
(1946)

12. Example 1: Middlesbrough, North-East
England, mid-1940s

13. The Middlesbrough Survey and Plan 1946
• The Middlesbrough Survey and Plan was the most
comprehensive attempt in the UK to bring the skills of
social scientists to the plan-making process.
• Led by the architect-planner Max Lock, a long-time disciple of
Patrick Geddes, the plan pioneered the use of surveys,
neighbourhood classification methods and catchment area
analysis. It included a public attitude survey covering 1 in 23
of the population.
• Lock considered that the planner could no longer work as a
narrow technical practitioner, but needed to collaborate with
other disciplines, particularly the ‘science of sociology.’

14. The Middlesbrough Survey and Plan 1946
• Lock believed passionately that plan-making should involve
dialogue with ordinary people who were the client for the
plan. Citizens’ panels were formed to gauge public opinion on
redevelopment proposals.
• Jaqueline Tyrwhitt mobilised a team of APRR workers,
including the sociologist, Ruth Glass and the urban
geographer, Arthur Smailes to work on the plan.
• Synthesised survey findings transferred on to map overlays,
enabling them to be studied , enabling them to be studied in
combination (a method first used in the US?)
• This approach was useful in formulating plan itself, providing
an evidence trail with which to support plan proposals.

15. The Middlesbrough Plan
• Ruth Glass was one of the first planners to use
census enumeration districts as the basis for
planning neighbourhoods.
• Her work focused on neighbourhoods in
Middlesbrough and their housing stock and
identified which areas would need most
urgent attention.

17. Present population density

18. Eventual population density

19. Max Lock and the Middlesbrough Plan
• “Planning is chiefly a matter of urban diplomacy…..My
colleagues and I came to Middlesbrough and met and
consulted thousands of citizens. From all sources a
wealth of valuable information was placed at our
disposal, sifted down and presented in the form of
maps, diagrams, tables and detailed reports.
• A plan or policy for every aspect of town life.
• First by survey and diagnosis which, once begun,
becomes a continuous process.
• Secondly, by imaginative action…….
• Thirdly, by good publicity…….”

20. Max Lock and the Middlesbrough Plan
• “Thinking people have come to appreciate
that town planning is a combination of exact
science and intuitive art; that its method is
based on equal ingredients both in accurate
measurement and of human understanding.

21. The role of the social scientist in plan-making 2
• The Schuster Report (1950) in the UK and the opening-up
of planning education to social scientists: the planning
team, in practice a division of functions with social
scientists employed for their research skills.
• The failure to maintain momentum in the 1950s: why?
• English structure planning in the 1970s: an eclectic mix of
planning techniques with some important shortcomings.
• Learning from practice: the role of ex-post evaluation in
urban regeneration; advantages and limitations of a
standard approach to evaluation; evidence-based planning:
the latter-day planning survey? The What Works centre
movement.

22. Example 2: The handling of inter-
relationships in planning
‘Planners have become prisoners of the discovery
that in the city everything affects everything else’
Lowdon Wingo (1964)

23. The handling of inter-relationships in
planning
• Became fashionable in 1960s: urban
development models, systems approach, etc
• Had much earlier antecedents in Patrick
Geddes’ thinking machines and the notion of
‘folk-work –place’ and inter-relationships
between these elements
• Interesting example of the ‘strategic choice
approach’ to inter-related decisions

24. The strategic choice approach 1
• Institute of Operational Research (IOR) formed
in 1963 by British operational researchers
keen to apply their expertise to public policy
• Study of local government in Coventry, leading
to publication of key text: Local Government
and Strategic Choice, by Friend and Jessop,
1969
• Soft OR techniques used to improve local
government decision-making

25. The strategic choice approach 2
Two techniques found widespread application
among planners:
• AIDA, the analysis of inter-connected decision
areas, a flexible,, intuitive and systematic tool
that could be used in generating and comparing
alternative strategies (a priority for planners at
the time)
• Analyzing and managing uncertainty in planning
based on threefold classification of uncertainty
(UE, UV and UR)

26. The strategic choice approach 3
• Strategic choice approach differed from most
strategic planning at the time in that it focused on
the ‘here and now’ rather than attempting to
anticipate a future world
• Took a practical approach to decisions planners
would have to make
• Practical applications demonstrated its worth,
Planning Under Pressure textbook has 15 case
studies from around the world, but not the US!

27. The strategic choice approach 4
• The missing link with academia: although
there was collaboration with academics over
50 years the strategic choice approach is very
much a creature of practice: practitioners
learning from other practitioners
• Applied research projects
• One of the most influential methodological
developments since the 1960s and one of the
best documented!

28. Conclusions
• Throughout the last hundred years, planners
have sought to bring science to the way they
make plans for the city
• Fashion, and quest for respectability, have
sometimes led to a more scientific approach
to plan-making
• Studying how they did this is an important but
so far neglected topic in planning history. It
benefits from a practice-oriented approach