Stuff You Should Know - How Urban Planning Works

Episode Date: March 23, 2010

In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, philosophies and practices of urban planning. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, that would And then it'll be like, whoa, look at this new studio. It's gonna be like the kitchen of the future. Yeah. Yeah. But from the fifties. Right. So, Chuck. Yes, Josh. Do you know what May 23rd, 2007 was?

It was a big day. My wedding anniversary? No, that was not my wedding anniversary. Go ahead. That was a weird thing to say if it wasn't true. Well, it was close. Oh, okay. Chuck. Yes. May 23rd, 2007 represented the day that more humans, in modern times,

lived in cities than did rural areas. I believe it. A couple of, so that didn't blow your mind? No, I believe it. So, a couple of researchers, one from NC State and another from our dear University of Georgia, did some demographic numbers, crunched them, and came up with 3,303,992,253 people in cities. And on that day, there were 3,303,866,404 rural people.

Do you know what percentage that breaks down to? Is it like 50 point something? It was 50 point something. Okay. Because they were projected that since you brought it up, past stats, in 1800, only slightly more than 2 million, I'm sorry, 2% of the world's population lived in the cities. By 1900, that was 45%, and they predicted by 2010 it would be like 51%. You know why the shift?

Why? Industrial revolution. Boom. Yeah, we went from an agrarian society to one where you could make the cheese in the city, and so everybody moved to the city, right? I thought it was Thai food. I think that was a happy benefit, a byproduct of it, yeah. So people started moving to cities.

More and more, by 1910, there were scores of cities around the United States that boasted a million or more people, right? Yeah, they were kind of crappy though. They were, and one of the reasons why is because they were just kind of thrown together, right? Somebody wanted to open a business. Well, you bought the land, built the business, and probably lived upstairs from it, right? Yeah.

There was sprawl, cramped conditions, tenement housing, poor water quality. Can I read the quote? Yeah. From Henry Blake Fuller's novel with the procession in the 1900s. They were describing Chicago, and the protagonist, Trusdale Marshall, said, Chicago is a hideous monster, so pitifully grotesque, gruesome, appalling. Yeah. Not a pretty picture.

No, and anybody who's familiar with Chicago now would be like, what? That's not Chicago. Yeah, Chicago was the bomb, yo. Yeah, step off. That's exactly what someone would say. The reason why somebody would say that today is because there was a guy named Daniel Hudson Burnham, right? Love this dude.

He was a Chicago architect, and Mr. Burnham came up with this thing called the City Beautiful Program, right? Yeah, and I agree with it. 100% form, build the form, and function will follow. Right. So Mr. Burnham's vision was to create municipal art, like fountains, statuary, green space, parks, sidewalks, and if you beautify the city, crime, other social ills would kind of fall off, at the very least because of the new found civic pride, right?

People want to keep it clean. You see some kids spray painting a beautiful fountain. You're probably going to open his skull with your walking cane, right? Yeah, and he unveiled this at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. That was one of the best ever. Yeah, in Chicago, and he started applying those principles between 1902 and 1905 in D.C., Cleveland, Ohio, Manila, oddly, in San Francisco. Well, hey, the Filipinos need some help, too.

Yeah, that's true. You know, and the whole thing really kind of came together for him since he was a Chicago architect in 1906 when he and another guy named Edward Bennett created the plan of Chicago, the kitchen of the future, right? Yeah, and that's basically the first example of, well, not true because urban planning goes all the way back to Rome, but the first example of a comprehensive plan for an American city, growth plan for an American city. Right, and actually the Romans didn't necessarily have a comprehensive plan.

They had really good architects who Burnham based his ideas on. They had a lot of municipal art, a lot of great municipal gathering spaces. They had the aqueducts, carry water, they had sewers, public houses that were placed in areas where everybody could enjoy them, right? And that is one of the tenets of urban planning that we'll get to is not to exclude any peoples because of geographic location or socioeconomic conditions. Right, so Burnham basically throws down the gauntlet and says, I have created urban planning. Right, good for him, good for all of us.

And it kind of took off. In addition to the Romans, which he borrowed heavily from, he also leaned a lot on the Parisians. You ever been to Paris? I have, it's a gorgeous city. Awesome, awesome city. Apparently back during the 17th century, during the reign of Louis XIV, there was a lot of really good planning going on, or at least public architecture being raised in areas that weren't really settled, but these court architects had the foresight to be like,

well, people are kind of spreading out over here. They're probably going to need this land eventually. So we're going to put some parks over here and just attract them. And sure enough, that's where people started to settle. So that concept and then the concept of equality for citizens, as far as the urban planners concerned, or really they kind of formed the foundation of Burnham's principles, right? Yes.

Should we just simply state the goal of urban planning? Let's do it. I'm actually going to read it because it's just so succinctly put here. It is to guide the development of a city or town so that it furthers the welfare of its current and future residents by creating convenient, equitable, helpful, efficient and attractive environments. That says it all. But you would be a pretty shoddy urban planner if you built a fountain somewhere and went, ta-da.

It's the bark of the future. It's a lot more than that, right? Sure. So there's basically three main things that an urban planner takes into account when creating a plan for an existing city. There's also planned communities, also called new towns or new cities. Right. Right.

Did you know Columbia, Maryland was one of those? I not until I read this. Built from the ground up. It was one of the United States first planned communities. Yeah, which is different than a suburb. Right. Right. This was a town, and they said, we want a city.

Right. Build it for us. And they did. In 1962. Yeah, and it's grown since then. Same with rest in Virginia. And the government often gets into the act. Los Alamos.

Sure. Oak Ridge. Both of those are planned towns. For a very important reason. Yeah, the Manhattan Project. Yeah. I am the bringer of death, destroyer of worlds. I am become death, I think.

Whatever. Good old Philip Oppenheimer. And wait for the evening. Yes, it is Robert. So the three things that they take into account, urban planners taking into account are the physical environment, right? Yeah, that means obviously where it is, what the climate's like. You got to, you know, if you're building in Seattle, you got to take into

account the misty rain that falls. Sure. And also, if you, especially if you're planning a town from the ground up, and especially if it was the early 20th century, you were likely to take advantage of a river, specifically a fall line where the river runs out of the mountains and into the sediment of the delta, right, toward the ocean. Yeah, coastal plains of course, very popular. Yeah.

So, and also Chuck speaking of rivers and water. People love to settle by water for trade, for drinking water. It's really important. Right. As water scarcity continues by, I think 2025, an estimated quarter of the world's population are going to be without access to clean drinking water. Yeah. I predict that a lot more people are going to show up in areas where there is

water, whether it's already established or they're going to found new areas toward the headwaters or the fall lines. Makes sense. Right. And our migration patterns are going to shift radically within the next like 15, 20 years. Yeah, I would say so. Watch for it buddy.

That means other areas will be deserted too. Yeah. That's going to be weird. It is going to be weird and it's going to be a big challenge for urban planners who also take into account the social environment. Right. That is groups that cities residents belong to, neighborhoods, workplaces, and policies. You've seen Slumdog Millionaire, right?

I have. Great movie. So, in Mumbai, I think 50% of the residents live in the slums. Those are pretty serious slums too. Right. And in Africa, you've mentioned the same deal with water and Nairobi and Lagos, more than 60% of households aren't connected to water. Right.

So, that's not very good urban planning. So, if Lagos, Nigeria said, hey, we want an urban plan, we want a master plan for our city, probably one of the first things that this urban planner would come up with was a way to get water equitably throughout the town. Right. Right? Yes. And then there's also the economic environment.

And really important. Yeah, basically you want to take into account existing businesses, but also figure out a way to attract new businesses and let the economic engine thrive, right? Yeah, the future part of it is one of the key components of urban planning. And one of the reasons it's criticized is some critics will say that they take too much, the future into account too much, and they don't concentrate enough on what we need right now. Right. But we'll get to a little more of that later.

We will. Let's keep on with the master plan, shall we? Okay. Well, what's a master plan, Josh? Well, it's not as ominous or sinister as it sounds. Right. Basically, it is exactly what it sounds like, take away the ominous sinister part. It's the master plan for this community.

How the transportation sector figures in or will figure it. Sure. How land use will be factored in in the future. Right. Right, airports, water, sewage. Right, parks, neighborhoods, housing. Again, economic development. Basically, you have to take all these components, people living in the city,

people working in the city. Right. How they're getting from home to work. Right. What they're seeing along their route. Yeah. And then how they're sustaining themselves, food, water, that kind of thing. Yeah.

And creating a plan for the future. Right. And the urban planning doesn't stop, though, at this like pie in the sky. Ooh, we should just do this. This would be great. It has to be feasible. It has to be workable. They got to show how much it costs and how it's going to be carried out, too.

They can't just present some nebulous, awesome goal that can never be reached. Have you ever seen a master plan? No, have you? They are ridiculously detailed. Really? Yeah, often they'll have, it'll look kind of like a big blueprint schematic. It's like hundreds of pages, right? Right, but the way that I've seen it done is each page is like a transparency, but they're huge.

And then so you'll have like the physical, the geography of the area, the city. Then the next is the infrastructure. Right. The next page that overlays it until you have like this thick. Oh, it literally builds it. And you look over it and you can see the whole master plan, but it's sector by sector, bit by bit. That's pretty cool.

It's really interesting. It's like a flip book. Right. You also need public support for this. Yeah, that's one of the keys. You have to get the public on your side or you're dead in the water because as everyone knows, if the public is against you, the politicians are going to start listening and they're not going to go against the public too much either.

They will some, but if the public is really, really against something, then the politicians have to put the brakes on. Back when I was a cub reporter for a weekly down in Henry County, there's this group called Neighbors Opposed to Parker Road Development. And out of that, they called the acronym Nope. Yeah. And they were just like this grassroots group of neighbors that became like this political powerhouse that were fighting this development.

I was going to take over a really beautiful field in their area. And for years and years and years, they fought. They showed up to city council meetings, county zoning meetings, everything they could show up to. They'd show up in these yellow shirts and they created this really loud voice. And it was really admirable. And ultimately they, there was a compromise was struck. So it wasn't like this, this terrible tract housing that the county had plenty of already.

It was nicer housing with fewer lots per acre. Right. And then I think like 60% of this land was dedicated in perpetuity to a green space like a park. Yeah. So they really, they really did a lot. Yeah. We got the Belt Line here in Atlanta, which is a project which has a lot of green space that's tied to a light rail line all over the city, which is awesome.

And I love this idea until I heard that I was going to be like 85 years old by the time it was finished. Yeah, it's going to take a while. Yeah. And that's actually, since I brought it there, that's another one of the criticisms is that it's very time intensive to do many of these plans. And the fact that these processes take too long, current residents are like, well, why don't I like give up my tax money for something that's going to be around in 40 years?

Right. That's part of it. And also, if you're in a kind of a new urban area, this thing's going to evolve and change and go well beyond the plan before it can be implemented. Yeah. So time is definitely of the essence, right? Absolutely. And you said that, you know, politicians often will not go along.

That's not necessarily true in my experience. Well, it depends, I guess. Politicians go along with the developer's dollars. Yeah. And they actually do have legal authority to flex their muscles here. There's this thing called eminent domain. Yeah. I think we talked about that in the squatting episode.

Okay. I thought you meant we already talked about it in this podcast. No, no, of course not. I was zoning out or something. But speaking of zoning. Oh, yeah. Nice job. Zoning laws have a lot to do with it too.

And that's where the, well, the planners have to be aware of all these zoning laws, which is, you know, whether or not an area is zoned for like business or for mixed use or for family only housing, but that's where the politicians can flex their muscles as well. Right. Get zoning laws changed. And they can get the cops out there and be like, tear down or we'll club you. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

So Chuck, not everybody's all hip on the urban planning thing, right? Right. Especially the early 20th century version, Burnham's original vision. Right. There was a lady by the name of Jane Jacobs who wrote a book in 1961 called the death and life of great American cities. She's awesome. Yeah.

I researched her a little bit. She passed away not too long ago and the Rockefeller Foundation actually created something called the Jane Jacobs Medal and that recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution to thinking about urban design. She was radical at the time, dude, early 60s. You can tell. Yeah, big time. And what she came up with, Chuck, was basically five main points.

Right. And the first is that a city is an ecosystem. And like you said, this was radical. Nobody looked at a city like this before. They're all drunk. Right. They're smoking and drinking at work all day. They didn't think about that kind of thing.

Right. So Jane Jacobs was the one who was sober and stopped and paid attention. Oh, yeah. Okay. So if a city is an ecosystem, that means it's constantly evolving and moving and thriving. And if you look at it and each aspect of it as a system that's interconnected with the rest of the system to make up this organism or ecosystem, and suddenly you have a concept of what the city actually looks like, not what you want it to look like.

Right. You also have to take into account the community, right? Well, yeah. And she was a big critic of a lot of urban planners that many times weren't even from that city, would be hired and brought in and not put their feet to the pavement and talk to the local residents. And she thought that was obviously a big key was called bottom-up planning. Right.

And that was radical at the time, too, as was mixed-use development. That was, she was kind of the first champion of mixed-use development. Right, which we're really starting to see today. Even now, it's not really taken off at least, I can't say for other towns necessarily, but in Atlanta. Oh, yeah, man. It's everywhere. Yeah.

Live, work, play. Right. But it's, but nobody's necessarily subscribing to it, you know? There's a lot of them are sitting empty at this point. They definitely are. But I do think that in the future, that's pretty much what we're going to have to have. Yeah. And her mixed-use wasn't only the modern thing that we see where there's like,

there's an apartment upstairs from a, from a chapeau shop. It was, she thought buildings should vary in age and condition as well. So like, don't just go in and bulldoze everything and build everything up new. Yeah. She wanted different ages, conditions and rental properties, ownership properties. Nice. That's what she means. She also thought all of it should be packed together, which is definitely counter-intuitive,

especially for the time. Everybody thought the closer you put people together, the more crime and other social ills are going to break out, right? Her point was, no, you put people together in this, this mixed-use area and you're going to have city life 24-7. It's not just, you know, when five o'clock comes, the place is deserted. There's always going to be people around. Things are always going to be open.

And, and she called for higher density. Lastly, she also said that a lot of emphasis should be placed on local economies. Yeah. This is what I'm the big fan of. She was definitely not in favor of going and tearing down the old mom and pop shops to put in a large corporation because it's quote, unquote, more stable. She thought the stability of the small business and small entrepreneurs was, was the way to go. Right.

And by God bless her for it. You could do that by revitalizing downtown or having certain districts be very niche, like the hammock district in the Max Scorpio episode of The Simpsons. Right. Right. Or the garment district. The garment district, Hell's Kitchen. The meat-packing district.

Right, exactly. New York has a lot of districts. And what she was saying is, so you have a district over here in Manhattan that specializes in garments, and then you have a district over here in Brooklyn that specializes in meat. Somebody in the garment district is going to go, I need some meat and goes over to Brooklyn and vice versa. Yeah, sure. Right.

And it all works. Yeah. So it's cross-pollination of towns or different parts of town to get people out and about. Yeah, yeah. Rather than over to the Old Navy slash Target slash Bed Bath and Beyond. Bruh. It's so ubiquitous here in Atlanta. Have you seen that postcard?

No. It says Atlanta, like no place else. But then Atlanta, the font is kind of big. And then the background within each letter is like a Target, an Old Navy, a Bed Bath and Beyond logo. It is very ironic. And some Army. Yeah.

The light just changed in here because the sun. That is really weird. We're not used to windows. I'm tripping. And so her ideas were revolutionary and they, in the early 60s, built on kind of the modern foundation of what urban planners many times do today, you know, although she was criticized for fostering gentrification. Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah. There's a real problem with it, especially in areas that have extensive suburbs. People, white people come out of the suburbs into the old town by cheap property and do it enough in droves that they drive out the lower classes who have to go out to these slightly outer suburbs or the inner suburbs. And then they push white people out of there further out and it becomes this vicious cycle where white flight takes place. Exactly.

Through gentrification. It's not good. That's not good. She counted that though. Gosh, I wish she had the quote with me. I can't remember what it was. It was shut up. Yeah, shut it.

Yeah, that was it, I think. Now, it was something about mixed communities and mixed races and everyone kind of living together. Yeah. So she wasn't for driving out, you know, the poor people or anything like that. Well, no, I mean, who is? Jerks? Rich people?

Sure. I guess so. Chuck, we finally arrived at my favorite part. The future. Right, right. Yeah, about what, 14 years after Jane Jacobs wrote her book, Nessa got a few people together. They did in 1975 to plan the city in the sky. They've been, we've been planning space development, urban planning.

I guess that would be, would that be urban? Lunar urban. Lunar planning for a long, long time. Yeah. What they came up with was a city that's a wheel, right? It's journey says the wheel in the sky keeps on turning. No. And this wheel would actually spin.

It would rotate on an axis. It would turn. Yes. All right. The wheel in the sky would keep on turning. I'll give you that. Thank you. And through this, it would actually create gravity and allow for movement of air.

Right. So people could do anything that they wanted to on earth as long as, you know, there was an old Navy in this wheel city. Yeah. And they could also breathe and not float. Right. And I think also everybody was issued an orange bell bottom jumpsuit too. As far as the 1975 guys came up with.

I don't think you've been working on that one. Just now. Okay. Yeah. That's good. And Mars too. They're talking about colonizing Mars, obviously. Yeah.

We were talking about terrace seating, remember? Yeah. So maybe one day we will live on the moon and on Mars. And that's where some serious urban planning's got to go on. Chuck, I wanted to talk to you about something real quick. What's up? One of the things that, one of the trends that we're seeing, especially with mixed use development, is a focus on the city center going upward rather

than outward. Right. You and I live in one of the most sprawling cities in the country. And I would say one of the least well planned cities. Yeah. Our transportation's awful. You know what they're proposing right now? What?

We have traffic problems. So they're proposing on making each side, northbound and southbound, a 75-85, 11 lanes a piece. Well, I thought they did studies that said that if you just build more lanes, it'll just be more cars. They're doing it anyway. That's just stupid. Right?

We have a plus sign rapid transit system that has like 11 stops on it. Right? It's terrible. And we have terrible, terrible sprawl. So commutes are awful. People throttle one another during traffic. Well, Atlanta grew really fast and we weren't prepared. I mean, I grew up here.

I remember the 1970s. Atlanta was, I don't know, a quaint Southern city. And then, you know, the population boomed so fast and there was zero foresight. And Atlanta city government is notoriously rotten and corrupt. So this is what we've got now. It was a big mess. Do you know how big Metro Atlanta is? It didn't, like close to 5 million people or something?

No, no, no. Not population, like size. Oh, no. 6,000 square miles. I don't even know what that means. Technically speaking, Metro Atlanta encompasses 6,000 square miles in 110 smaller municipalities. Geez. Isn't that nuts?

That's a sprawl. That is a sprawl. 6,000 square miles. Yeah. I don't understand that. That's nothing compared to LA, though. No, that's pretty sprawling as well. I remember Phoenix, I think, is the most sprawling city in the country.

Yeah. Well, those desert, you know, they can just go as far as they want. Right. I remember leaving town in LA was so frustrating because you would get in your car to, like, go out of town for the weekend, and you would drive, dude, for like an hour and a half without a break in everything. Right. It was still just stuff and people everywhere.

Yeah. And then eventually you would get to a point where, you know, there would be, like, land space and exits that didn't have much going on. Right. But it just seems like it was all connected as a big, huge mess. They called the Southland. Well, again, I predict larger population densities or higher population densities in cities that have access to clean water.

Yeah. New York had it right. They were forced to grow up instead of out, obviously. Well, they did both. Well, that's true. Connecticut, New Jersey, you're just part of New York. Right. Although people are going to ride in and say, no, we're not. My friend Robert, actually, he's a fan of the show.

He's a urban planner or was in LA. And when I saw him in LA and said, hey, man, what are you doing out here? He said, oh, I'm an urban planner. And I'm like, nice work. Screw up. Yeah. He's a Boston. I don't think he still does that.

Gotcha. Hello, Robert. Hey, Robert. And hello, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Why not? So that's it for urban planning, right? You have anything else, Jerry? You got anything?

Jerry's good. Jerry's good. If you want to learn more about urban planning, including all the bullet points, Chuck and I so faithfully read in this podcast, you can type that into the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for a listener mail. Yeah, Josh, I'm going to call this from Andrew and Cleveland. And it's about his brother. And I like brother stuff because I have a brother.

I want to thank the two of you for letting me spend a few hours with my brother recently. My older brother lives in New Orleans with his wife and a younger sister who lives with our, and I have a younger sister who lives with our father in New York. I live in Cleveland about an hour from our mother. You got that? Yeah. Okay. A few months ago, my brother serves in the army, got a call that he was being brought

for a tour of Iraq. So he's, he was leaving. It had been several years since we had visited him. So my sister and I cooked up a plan to drive across the country to pay him a surprise visit. The plan was for my sister to fly into Cleveland. He would get in my truck and we would drive the whole way to New Orleans. With about a day to spend with my brother before he left. Disaster struck with the weather.

My sister's plane was delayed because of snow in the east. And it was delayed 12 hours and really limited our options. What it came down to was I would have to pick up my sister from the airport at three and drive the entire 14 hours by myself because my sister's too young to drive. And hopefully get to my brother's house before he leaves at eight a.m. So driving through the night is no fun, Josh. No. He's concerned about getting their period, but then a miracle.

My sister's iPod had, I believe, every episode of Stuff You Should Know on It. And I've never even heard of you guys before this. Curious, I turned on the podcast and my brain was immediately filled with interest and laughter. The science humor and discussions drove the fatigue from me. And I listened to you guys non-stop while my sister slept. I think he has this confused for Radio Lab. I think so too. I was actually surprised when I arrived in New Orleans because it felt like time just flew by.

Upon arriving, we surprised my brother. We were able to spend just a couple of hours with him over breakfast with he and his wife. It was a joyous but tearful day. And my brother told me he could not have wished for a happier thing to happen. That's awesome. Very cool. So thank you guys very much for the podcast. It gave me two hours with my brother that I otherwise would have missed.

And I am now an avid fan of your show. I listen every week and I'm reminded of breakfast with my brother and it makes me smile. Sweet. From Andrew and Cleveland. That's really awesome. Yeah. Well, we've already gotten road trip stories from the Cannonball Run episode, right? Yeah.

Okay. So if you have a tear jerking story about your sibling or family member and remember, family is what you make it. Sure. Sure. Send it in an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks?

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