Nicholas A. Phelps - The Urban Planning Imagination

The implications of ICTs for the built form are all the harder to predict and plan for because rates of take-up and penetration of successive technologies providing for physical and virtual mobility have accelerated. It took sixty-eight years for half of the US population to make use of telephones, seventeen years for them to have a car and just seven years – the time it might take to prepare a local plan – to be using the internet (Kellerman, 2012: 77). The same contradictions between the enormous fixity of infrastructures that provide for mobility remain with the widespread deployment of ICTs. The danger is that ‘the infrastructure of mobility, and the production and function of built forms could become the taken for granted bits, jettisoned from consciousness’ and from judicious planning, in contrast to a ‘digitally constructed, rationally planned set of activities’ produced and consumed by innumerable individuals (Buliung, 2011: 1377).

The increasingly vicarious character of the contemporary urban experience promises unthinking imitation in some mixes of the urban planning imagination, and that is a concern for all it would entail about the production of good or better places.

The urban planning imagination is found among actors with different appreciations of, and attachments to, time and place. This presents a challenge and an opportunity, given the vast international reserve of urban planning imagination that might be tapped.

It appeared to Cherry (1996: 226) that ‘the difficulty for town planning today is that intellectually it has ground to a halt. Its qualities of imagination for things that might be, and the internal energy to achieve these things, are squeezed out of a system where other matters get in the way’ (Cherry, 1996: 226). Proliferation of plans may simply reflect the further bureaucratization of statutory urban planning and the individualization of politics in a second modernity (Beck et al., 2003), with different citizen, club and state actors talking past one another. Yet the urban planning imagination continues to flourish in a proliferation of non-traditional plans, in projects and in collaborations among citizens, clubs and states, and it will not be contained institutionally or professionally in the way it was in the twentieth century. All of this provides grounds for optimism surrounding the future of urban planning. The mixed character of urban planning has been apparent over the millennia, but if it is to be more than the lowest common denominator in the present age, then it is vital that it mobilizes sensibilities that seek awareness, complexity and variety in the shaping of places.

1 1 Indeed, the problem for our discussion of urban planning in the present age is that it must take place in a context in which at least one prominent historian believes that no well-established and valuable general propositions currently exist at the world-historical scale (Tilly, 1984).

2 2 Business cycles reflect fluctuations in aggregate demand over the medium term while long-wave or Kondratieff cycles reflect long-term movements in commodity prices over a period of fifty years or so.

3 3 BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) are systems created in 1990s in the UK and the US, initially to certify the sustainability of buildings.

4 4 https://merics.org/en/analysis/mapping-belt-and-road-initiative-where-we-stand.

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