Yes, I am hung up on word choice.

Urban Planning: NYC zoning mapUrban Design: sketch of a streetscape“Does the modern profession called urban planning have anything to do with making good places anymore?” Kunstler asks. “Planners are now chiefly preoccupied with administrative procedure: issuing permits, filling out forms and shuffling papers—in short, bureaucracy… All the true design questions such as how wide should Elm Street be? and what sort of buildings should be on it? were long ago solved by civil engineers and their brethren and written into the municipal zoning codes” (113).

Kunstler’s attack on the planning field at the beginning of chapter 7 is muddled because he does not differentiate between the related but not identical fields of urban planning and urban design. He blames urban planners for issues that, frankly, are urban design and, possibly, landscape design and architecture problems.

When Kunstler laments that planners are preoccupied with bureaucracy, he seems to ignore that the professional field of urban planning is concerned, almost exclusively, with land use patterns and zoning districts. In order to avoid Robert Moses figures from sculpting the urban landscape however they please, most municipal governments require public hearings, permits for exceptions to zoning requirements, and numerous other time-consuming procedures. Yes, Kunstler is probably right that much of it is a waste of time, however, he ignores that a city with no planning is just as bad, often worse, than a highly planned city. Take, for example, Houston, TX., one of the only US cities with no zoning laws. Try to find a coherent downtown in that city. It is next to impossible. In Houston, you can build an oil refinery next to a school next to a factory next to a private house next to a skyscraper.

Furthermore, “all the true design questions,” as he puts it, are not the primary concern of urban planners. Streetscape design is the realm of Urban designers. Though planners may write street widths and other requirements into municipal zones, urban designers are ultimately responsible for the layout of the street. Urban designers decide many of the key issues that Kunstler cites as important to creating a “good place:” where benches are located and whether they are movable or bolted down; tree placement and which species are planted; whether street parking, which calms traffic by narrowing the space for moving cars, is included in the final design; the look and scale of street lamps; among other things. Many of these are not specified in zoning ordinances and the success or failure of the streetscape should be attributed to urban designers, not planners.

Moreover, I understand that Kunstler is actually attacking bad design and bad planning, not the fields themselves, but the way that he phrases his critique doesn’t leave room to acknowledge all that planners and designers are doing right.