First published NBR 11 Dec 2008    PDF here

Your recent District or Regional plan will almost certainly include policies requiring new settlements to adjoin existing ones so as to reduce travel distances and make more efficient use of infrastructure.

This is yet another destructive planning conceit, totally unsupported by the data.

The land-use planning profession seldom allows research to modify its “received wisdom”. Over the last five years I have regularly attended international conferences where experts systematically refute claims routinely made in planning documents round the world – such as:

· public transport is more efficient that private transport,

· inner city living has a smaller carbon footprint than suburban living, or

· inner city people have more social interaction than suburbanites.

However, papers refuting the “big picture” claims of urban spatial organization – such as “sustainable urban form” – are less evident. Happily, this gap has been largely filled by Alain Bertaud, for many years Principal Urban Planner in the Urban Development Division of the World Bank.[1]

Land-use planners assume that urban economies would function more efficiently if land were allocated by wise administrators (them) rather than by unruly speculators and greedy developers seeking windfall profits from their trading in the Earth Mother’s land.

Bertaud has studied the spatial structure of many cities around the world, comparing the actual outcomes determined by administrative regulation of land, with allocation by free markets and by the more common mix of regulation and market forces.

In “The Costs of Utopia” his particular target is “Utopian Ideology”, a doctrine imposed by a central or local government that aims to create “a future state of optimum permanent equilibrium”. Such Utopian plans are perfect and their integrity must be protected from ad hoc entrepreneurial activity.

Bertaud contrasts this with free-market cities in which spontaneous order is generated by individuals and firms whose entrepreneurial actions make constant adjustments towards “an ever-changing state of equilibrium which cannot be known in advance.”

The inherent conflict between these two world-views is fought over in our Environment Court every day.

Smart Growth backed up by public transport is our current “Utopian Ideology”. The RMA was intended to enable spontaneous order. The Local Government Act was amended in 2002 to ensure Utopian Ideology prevailed.

Legislative success led to economic failure.

Bertaud’s work demonstrates that utopian ideologies inevitably lead to inefficient spatial structures and make the city’s workers measurably worse off.

He choses three extreme Utopias – Brasilia, Johannesburg and Moscow – to demonstrate these unexpected outcomes. In most cities, development density reduces with increased distance from the CBD. This is true for even modern polycentric cities such as Auckland and Los Angeles. The decline is less dramatic but remains.

However, in Brasilia, Johannesburg and Moscow, the highest densities are found in the outer rings of the city. In Brasilia density peaks 26 km from downtown, Johannesburg peaks 27 km from downtown, and Moscow peaks 20 km from downtown. Even the peri-urban outermost developments have higher densities than the central areas. You could be forgiven for thinking someone had “flipped the slides”.

The weird spatial outcomes of these three cities are remarkably similar even though they have developed under widely differing cultures, climates and economic systems. Clearly, ideology rules.

All three cities have a high “dispersal index” – meaning, “They sprawl”. Their residents have to travel further to work than in market-led cities. Even in mixed-ideology cities like Curitiba, Brazil, low-income households have longer trips to work, even while living at high density, being unable to make the normal trade-offs between trip length and lot size.

In all three “Dystopias” the absence of market prices has prevented the normal recycling of land driven by rising prices of inner city land as the city grows outwards and upwards. Markets encourage recycling.

Stalin’s heavy hand encircled central Moscow with a brown-belt of heavy industries – and they are still there. The key zones of Moscow are the inner Stalin zone, the middle Khrushchev Zone, and the outer Brezhnev zone; until recently all frozen in time, style and place. When land has no value administrators see no point in demolishing obsolete buildings for better use – this just adds to net cost.

Bertaud examines two Semi-Utopian cities – Portland, Oregon, and Curitiba, Brazil. In spite of the rhetoric Portland’s density remains very low – 14 pph compared to Los Angeles at 22 pph and Auckland at 26 pph. Portland’s dispersion index of 1.13 indicates it sprawls more than Los Angeles at 0.98. He wryly observes “Improving the environment is certainly a worthy objective but it becomes an ideology when other factors are ignored including the negative effects on the environment of trying to improve the environment.”

Changing the existing spatial structure of a city is fraught with difficulty, if not downright impossible. Moscow is experiencing massive turbulence as market driven land prices now create pressure to achieve the highest and best use of the land – but at least these forces are slowly increasing the economic efficiency of the whole city.

Given the resilience, or stickiness, of urban form – cities change slowly – experiments like Smart Growth that may shape cities irreversibly is a dangerous game. The diseconomies of Brasilia, Johannesburg and Moscow continue long after their founding ideologies – fascism, racism and communism – have been rejected by their present day regimes.

Urban economists claim that large unified labour markets are the reason large cities exist – whether they are monocentric – like New York– or polycentric – like London and Auckland.

New World cities tend to be polycentric and some planners believe that a proliferation of these multiple centres can become self-sufficient “urban villages” (The Auckland Regional Council’s Policy Change 6 promotes this idea). These new urbanists are convinced that in their “polycentric cities of multiple villages”, people will “live, work and play” in a village, and will walk or cycle to work.

Bertaud simply observes “Nobody has ever observed this behaviour in any large city.”

The reason should be obvious to any but the blind ideologue. Such an arrangement totally undermines the only economic justification for the large city – the economic efficiencies delivered by a large widespread integrated labour market. There are just not enough takeaways, dairies, TABs, coffee shops, gas stations, and massage parlours to employ everyone in the metropolis. Anyone who insists all urban residents should walk to work should be forced to do so. Their jobs in planning departments would be out of reach.

They are more likely to end up telecommuting than walking or cycling.

In another paper “Clearing the Air in Atlanta” Bertaud shows that “Transit and Smart Growth” simply cannot address Atlanta’s air pollution and transport problems.

Atlanta’s density is a remarkably low 7 pph. Yet Atlanta’s Smart Growth planners have visions of increasing this density, over the next twenty years, to a level sufficient to support city wide public transport.

Bertaud’s calculations show this would require reducing Atlanta’s present area of 4,280 km² area to a mere 1,555 k². (see page 7)

Destroying 2/3rds of any city’s real estate stock makes the London Blitz look like a makeover-light.

Surely these few exercises, demonstrate the foolishness of expecting the administrative allocation of land to produce better results than the administrative allocation of, say, capital, food, cars, petrol, electricity, or of any other commodity.

Let’s appreciate the virtues of spontaneous order.

Owen McShane

1200 words