Plans for Urban Development: Why and How?

Making most development decisions one by one—with the focus on process, without benefit of something called a plan—is to forget why the field exists. —Allan B. Jacobs (2000), "Notes on Planning Practice and Education"

To the northwest of Champaign, Illinois, Interstate 74 leads to the small town of Mahomet ten miles away. The city of Champaign, the village of Mahomet, Champaign County, and private landowners recognize opportunities for urban development in this corridor. Each knows that the results of the decisions it makes will depend on what others do and when. A private landowner wants to develop a parcel as low-density residential halfway between Champaign and Mahomet now, but this would preclude a future interstate highway interchange and the industrial and commercial uses that could be associated with it. If Mahomet zones for industrial along its end of the corridor and Champaign zones for residential, the results may not be what either intended. If developers can bargain to annex either to Champaign or to Mahomet, the municipalities will have less leverage than if they agreed to annexation boundaries so that a developer can bargain with only one municipality.

All these actors were making plans and trying to learn about each other's plans. The city of Champaign, the village of Mahomet, and the county jointly hired a planning consultant (Chicago Associates Architects and Planners) to work with the three governments, the current residents of the corridor, and some developers in the area. The focus of this plan was on general patterns of expected land use, potential for major infrastructure such as a new interstate interchange, and agreement on which areas would be annexed eventually to which municipality. Is such joint planning in these circumstances, by these parties, for these aspects of urban development typical or surprising? Should it have been done differently?

The purpose of this book is to present a coherent set of explanations that make sense of the planning we observe and justifications for prescriptions about when and how to make plans. Under what circumstances should plans be made, by whom, and about what aspects of urban development? How should such plans be made? These fundamental questions are answered implicitly every day in the practice of planning.

Why was the Mahomet Corridor Plan made by these participants in this situation? Three public jurisdictions formed a voluntary group to make a plan that was useful to them jointly. Resistance to and costs of forming such groups can be overcome if one of the members is significantly larger than the others and able to cover a large share of the costs of the joint activity. The city of Champaign played this "leader" role. This leader-follower behavior is one explanation that makes sense of when such groups are likely to form. The members of the group agreed on a joint planning effort, but each still had distinct interests and goals and each retained authority over its own decisions. They could share professional planning services because much of what each wanted to know was based on the same information, and each benefited from this information without decreasing its value to the others.

Why did this plan address just the Mahomet Corridor as its geographic scope? The plan addressed one chunk of potential urban development, a corridor along an interstate highway connecting two communities that were gradually growing together. Rather than addressing all of any one jurisdiction, all of the growth areas of the three jurisdictions, or all of one function such as transportation or water supply, it addressed one geographic area in which several interdependent decisions were about to be made that would have strategic consequences for later decisions. Plans are likely to be made and likely to be worth making when the first of a set of interdependent decisions is about to be made, especially if these are major decisions, such as an interchange location, and will be hard to reverse later. In this case the key interdependent decisions were all in the Mahomet Corridor and were especially important to these three actors. This scope for this plan makes sense not only because it encompasses these interdependent decisions, but also because each of these actors had already made and was continuing to make other plans of other scopes for other sets of interdependent decisions involving other key actors.

How was the Mahomet Corridor Plan developed? Planners considered land capabilities for agriculture and urban development, feasibility of transportation and sewer infrastructure, current residential patterns, financial implications for the various communities, available regulatory authority, scenarios of infrastructure expansion, and questions of timing and sequence of development. Advisory groups of professionals and citizens participated. Formal decisions, based on the corridor plan, were made by the respective governments. Much of the effort focused on the eventual pattern of land use and on achieving a boundary agreement about which areas should be annexed into which municipality.

None of this is surprising. People have limited attention and they focus on aspects immediately pertinent to the decisions at hand. Processes for accomplishing tasks rely on established routines. The plan presents arguments sufficient for decision makers with authority to make choices and for their constituencies to consent to these choices. Most plans for urban development focus on regulations and on investments in infrastructure and buildings. The annexation agreement was perhaps the most available and immediate action that could be taken now in light of the future actions that had been considered. Strategically, it determined who would have regulatory jurisdiction and who would provide infrastructure. To yield benefits, plans should help make decisions about such current actions that are interdependent with other actions, which may be taken elsewhere, in the future, and by others.

Ideas About Plans

The Mahomet Corridor Plan is in many ways typical of everyday practice. It makes sense in terms of the explanations developed in this book about why and how plans are made. It is not typical, however, of conventional ideas about plans. The planning literature either describes ideal plans and processes that seldom happen and seldom affect decisions, or uses the infeasibility of these ideal plans and processes to argue that plans are never useful in real urban development situations. Citizens tend to think of plans as all-controlling, comprehensive solutions or all-controlling disruptions of individual decision...