CRP 659.04 Special Topics: Comparative Land Use Policy

Fall 2007

Professor: Rolf Pendall

Revised draft, September 14, 2007

Background: The Polycentric Regional City

For well over 100 years, the polycentric city has attracted adherents internationally in land-use planning. Yet American geographers and urbanists still treat polycentricity with a variety of perspectives: Is it another form of sprawl, or is an antidote to sprawl? Galster et al. (2001), for example, treat “centrality” as the “non-sprawled” end of a continuum in which the existence of multiple equal-sized subcenters would be the ultimate expression of sprawl. Calthorpe and Fulton (2001), by contrast, suggest that sub-centering is the best and most realistic way to combat other versions of sprawl: low-density, single-use, car-dependent suburbia.

Clarence Stein and his contemporaries in the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), strongly influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), set the stage for interpretations of sub-centering that are closer to those of Calthorpe and Fulton than those of Galster and his colleagues. The motivating problem for Stein (and even more acutely for Howard), of course, was—at least at first—too much density in the central city, whereas today the key issue in the United States is low-density development.

Stein’s first manifested his vision for a metropolitan network in the “greenbelt” towns, with their range of house types, centrally located schools and other public services and an encircling greenbelt. The greenbelt-town experiment ultimately proved a dead end, but after World War 2 Stein developed solutions that more closely anticipated those advanced by Calthorpe and other contemporary advocates of multiple mixed-use subcenters. In Regional Cities, Stein “reworked the RPAA’s regional concepts into a new framework for living: the Regional City” (Sargent 2005: 16). The motivations for Stein’s regional city—security, revitalization of urban centers, increased access to green space, better transportation—still ring true today.

A REGIONAL CITY [sic] is an ARCHIPELAGO, a group of many islands (or settlements) in a large body of water (or open, unsettled or sparsely settled space). A METROPOLITAN CITY, in contrast, is a continent that is a SOLID BODY – when successful it is afflicted by CANCER: i.e. uncontrolled, limitless, growth. (Stein, The Regional City, 1953)

Sprawl-fighting proposals in the U.S. have not generally embraced polycentricity, partly because of concerns that a larger number of centers will simply extend the urban edge into undeveloped areas. In Europe, by contrast, polycentricity is at the heart of plans to guide future growth. The European Union’s European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) (European Commission 1999) includes two levels of polycentricity. First, at the inter-regional level, the ESDP and supportive EU transportation investment policies envision a multi-national region joined by high-speed rail (the TEN-T network). Second, at the intra-regional level, the ESDP proposes that historic and recent activity centers be identified and strengthened as nodes within metropolitan regions (European Commission 1999, section 3.2).

The proposals by Stein, as well as their more contemporary expressions, all respond to a series of failures in unregulated urban land markets. Market forces alone will not provide sufficient transportation services to accommodate new growth. In areas with an established network of country roads, development will spread quickly but thinly out to the countryside, reducing the vitality of cities while undermining the visual and productive qualities of the countryside. This tendency becomes more pronounced because of often premature and uninformed decisions by individual rural landowners about conversion of their land to suburban uses. A final market failure has to do with ensuring a proper mix of land uses in the areas that are developed and to an extent with ensuring the production of an appropriate range of housing for changing households.

Stein’s proposals responded to these challenges in a variety of ways that may sound quite familiar to us, since some of the core ideas became the postwar suburban U.S. reality. Like many other early- to mid-20^th Century American planners, Stein wanted more separation of noxious uses from residential neighborhoods and more open space within each neighborhood (often arranged as in the Radburn plan of 1929, with linear open spaces separating residential cul-de-sacs). These neighborhoods of about 7000 residents each would be gathered into functionally specialized towns of 25,000 residents, connected with other towns by limited-access roads and highways, and surrounded by half-mile-wide greenbelts to separate them from the surrounding (and predominant) farming, recreational, and air-landing areas. Some employment areas (factories, large commercial centers) would occupy their own towns (Stein, Shopping Centers in Regional Cities, 1951; Stein, The Form of Future Cities, 1945).

City and regional planners throughout the world still work hard to address many of the challenges Stein perceived: to ensure the adequacy of the transportation network, assure a balance between living and working areas, provide adequate open space, and create coherent community identity using design. Several of Stein’s approaches to these problems remain current today.

• Most relevant to this proposal is his insistence on the desirability of the polycentric city, an insight extended from Ebenezer Howard; today, as in the past, the problems of both the single large city center and uncentered low-density development have encouraged planners in Europe and the U.S. to seek a third way in the form of polycentrism.
• Second, Stein’s embrace of an open space system that includes both urban containment and neighborhood/city open and public space is reflected in the most revered practices of urban planning in the world today, from Barcelona to Portland.
• Third, the use of a hierarchy of integrated spaces within polycentric nodes (e.g., neighborhoods as component parts of towns) is echoed by, for example, the New Urbanists (who use blocks, neighborhoods, and districts as components of their centers).

On the other hand, some of Stein’s prescriptions don’t feature in today’s polycentric city planning. For example, compared with mixed-use districts, single-use, specialized neighborhoods and towns create more traffic and result in neighborhoods with huge differences in day-night and weekday-weekend activity. Transportation systems that so privilege the automobile further exacerbate traffic and limit travelers’ choice and accessibility. An upper limit of 25,000 on the population of each town and separation of towns from one another by several miles of green space would result, if implemented (which it never has been), in far more automobile travel and a far larger extension of suburbia into rural areas than has occurred even in our most sprawling regions.

Investigation plan: Comparative Land Use Policy

This new course, Comparative Land Use Policy, is a research seminar in which we will investigate the implementation of polycentricity in three national contexts: the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands. With the generous support of the Clarence Stein Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies, planning practitioner-scholars from polycentric regions in each country will visit Ithaca over the course of the semester.

The overarching research question for the research seminar will be: “How have different market, political, economic, and legal contexts and institutions affected the evolution of polycentric regions?” To ground this question further, students will focus on three sets of mid-level research questions in San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Calif.; Emilia-Romagna, Italy; and the greater Randstad area of the Netherlands:

• Centers: How polycentric are these regions? How mixed are the centers, and how livable are they? What are the varying roles of business, civil society, and government institutions (i.e., deliberate action including but not limited to policy) in creating and reinforcing vibrant, mixed-use centers in a polycentric realm?
• Connections: How well does the regional transportation system connect centers with one another? How well do transportation systems within centers work to promote transit choice? How do the transportation systems facilitate, and how do they impede, polycentric development?
• Conservation: To what extent are centers separated from one another by open space, and how well are their centers provided with urban green and public spaces? Have historic and cultural resources been protected in the face of the property value changes that ensue from polycentric development? What policies have been most and least effective in promoting conservation values?

Each of these sets of mid-level questions includes both description and explanation. In all cases, I begin from presumptions about cause and effect and categories of dependent and independent variables.

• First, regional form (centers, connections, conservation) is an outcome of a variety of forces, some of which are much easier for planners to influence than others. The task for planners is to distinguish those interventions that offer the best combination between ease of implementation and strength of impact: for instance, most people in the U.S. think that raising suburban parking costs would exert powerful impacts on both centers and connections, but few planners consider “full cost parking” as viable an option at this point as, for example, transit-oriented development policies (which might have less impact if both could be implemented).
• Second, regional form influences the policies chosen and not just vice-versa (policies ó urban form) Economists would call this an endogenous relationship and would study the relationship between policy and urban form using methods more complex than ordinary least squares regression analysis. Planners and political scientists might dodge this problem, as we will, by conducting in-depth qualitative research. We will also avoid it by sticking mainly to the
  policies è urban form “moment” of the relationship between the two.
• Therefore, our work will consist of three main activities (there’s that “three” again):
• Describe the variation across our cases in the dependent variable (urban form)
• Describe the variation across our cases in the key independent variable(s) (state and local policies)
• Relate the variation in the dependent variable to that in the independent variables

The first and second phases will probably occur simultaneously, with the third getting under way sometime after the first two are underway.

Course sequence

My goal for the semester is the production of three reports that we can distill into articles for submission to peer-reviewed journals in January 2008. We will also propose a panel presenting all three papers at the joint conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) and the Association of European Schools of Planning in Chicago (AESOP) in July 2008.

To get from here to there, the sequence of the course during fall semester 2007 will follow the general outline of any of these papers: literature review and research questions; description of setting and case-study findings; analysis; implications for planners and conclusions.

Literature review

The seminar will begin by reading key texts: Stein’s writings on the regional city, as well as a series of chapters from Calthorpe and Fulton’s The Regional City. At the end of this segment of the class (through September 14), students will prepare papers that compare and contrast the treatment of centers, connections, and conservation in Stein’s and Calthorpe and Fulton’s work, offering critiques of both sets of ideas. Class sessions in this portion of the seminar will revolve on students’ readings and critiques of the chapters and articles under consideration, with small group work in each session designed to advance the development of literature reviews on the idea of polycentrism.

Case Studies

The seminar will continue with three case-study modules, each on a different case-study area. We will start with the San Francisco Bay Area, move on to Emilia-Romagna, and finish with the Randstad. These three areas have been selected because they are already polycentric regions, having become so by some combination of market forces and public interventions. Visitors will come for presentations and discussions with students on September 19-21, October 24-26, and November 8-10.

Each student will focus for the entire semester on one of the three issues (centers, connections, conservation). During each three-week case-study period, one session will be held as a discussion with the visitor(s) from the region, and the other two sessions will be discussions of readings that the students will find (with assistance from the instructor). Each issue group (three “c’s”) will submit one reading each week, and everyone in class will read these three articles for the following week’s class. The readings can be articles, chapters, sections of plans, reports—pretty much anything that will generate good discussion. These class discussions will allow more consideration of each of the “three c’s” and how they relate to one another.

Analysis, implications, and conclusions

In the last week of the semester a draft of the paper will be discussed. Two weeks later (the last day of final exams), the final paper will be due, including revisions of draft sections where appropriate (lit review, cases, analysis) as well as a section on implications and conclusions. The final paper will also have to edit judiciously to produce a manuscript of about 6000-8000 words plus notes and illustrations.

Peer review

The process of engagement will not end at the end of the semester. We will sharpen our products by submitting our reports to one another for peer review. Though it falls outside the scope of the course and you won’t be evaluated for your participation, I hope you’ll participate in this phase of the process by critiquing one another’s reports between the end of the fall semester and the beginning of the spring.

Assignments and agenda from 9/14 to end of course

From this point (9/14), the course runs on two tracks that should inform one another but are easiest to think of as being separate.

Class-session related activities

• Every week when we don’t have a speaker, we will review articles, chapters, planning documents, maps, policy statements, legislation or anything else that each of the three groups will submit.
• Each of the three groups (centers, corridors, conservation) will provide one submission per week. If a group decides to divide the responsibility for providing submissions on a weekly basis, the assignments of weeks to people should be sent to Rolf and Doug.
• Readings will be announced and, where possible, distributed electronically or in hard-copy form at least one week in advance of the class session.
• At least two and a half days before any class session, each submitter will post one or more discussion questions (which can be in the form of provocative statements instead of questions).

Paper-related activities

• Each of the three “C” groups will start out working together to assemble common “databases” that will allow us to describe each system. This is not just quantitative and geospatial data but also qualitative, mapped, policy, written, etc. Some of this work may overlap groups, especially the conservation and centers group. Together the two groups will create a land-use and land-cover database coupled with a housing and economic activity database and information about agriculture. In the US this means the Census, but also lots of local and regional sources within the Bay Area. In Europe it means (at least in part) the ESPON project of the EU (www.espon.eu), where you can find an inventory (“data navigator”) of all kinds of spatial data (http://datanavigator.espon.eu/). The data aren’t available for download right on this site, but links are provided. Many data sets will cost money, and if this is the case let me know and we’ll see whether we can acquire them. The corridors group will also find data on transportation through ESPON.
• Two “works in progress” papers will be prepared.
• Draft papers due Monday, October 15: Each of the three “C” groups will write a “portrait” of its regional systems in the three regions. Tentatively, these papers will titled “Transportation networks and activity in the Regional Cities,” “Employment and housing patterns in the Regional Cities,” and “Agricultural and open space systems in the Regional Cities.” Each paper should be approximately 3,000-3,500 words and be accompanied by illustrative figures as necessary.
• Draft papers due Friday, November 16: After the assembly of these consistent databases, students will develop explanatory papers (at least one per group, and sometimes more). These explanatory papers will focus on institutions, in one (and only one) of two ways.
• Some papers will explore how institutions explain something about the findings from the “portrait” paper. (For example: What institutions help explain why the open space system like it is?)
• Others will explore how institutions help produce particular outcomes given our uncertainties about the impacts of multicentric development. (For example: Given the open space system, which institutions are responsible for ensuing that low-income households benefit from it across the three regions, and what explains their different success levels?)
• Everyone will still present their draft “explanatory papers” (those due 11/16) in class November 30, having had 2 weeks to read everyone else’s papers.
• Final papers will still be due December 14, revised in response to comments on paper and in class.

Revised schedule, CRP 659.04, Fall 2007

Date	Subject	Due	Grade %
24-Aug	First class session, overview, research framework
31-Aug	Stein and Calthorpe 1
7-Sep	Stein and Calthorpe 2, EURBANET
14-Sep	Synthesis: critique, criteria, and issues for framing regional cases	Literature review	10%
21-Sep	Bay Area 1 / Visit 1: Orman and Landis	Articles for 9/28
25-Sep		Questions for 9/28
28-Sep	Bay Area 2	Articles for 10/1
28-Sep		Questions for 10/1
1-Oct	9:15-11:15: Bay Area 3 NOTE DATE CHANGE!
5-Oct		Articles for 10/12
9-Oct		Questions for 10/12
12-Oct	Emilia-Romagna 1	Articles for 10/19
15-Oct		"System portrait" papers	15%
16-Oct		Questions for 10/19
19-Oct	Emilia-Romagna 2 (To be rescheduled; Pendall conference)
26-Oct	Emilia-Romagna 3 / Visit 2: Del Piano	Articles for 11/2
30-Oct		Questions for 11/2
2-Nov	Randstad 1
9-Nov	Randstad 2 / Visit 3: Lambregts	Articles for 11/16
13-Nov		Questions for 11/16
16-Nov	Randstad 3	Draft paper	15%
23-Nov	No class, Thanksgiving vacation
30-Nov	Presentation of drafts		10%
14-Dec	(No class)	Final papers due	30%

Notes on “articles” and “questions”: One article must be submitted for each of the three "C" groups, and at least one (preferably two) questions on each article should be submitted by 5:00 PM three days before the class session on that reading. Earlier is better.

Final 20% is a participation grade based on timely submission of articles and discussion questions.

This schedule is subject to change by the instructor. It is not a contract binding on the instructor.

Grading and evaluation

All the assignments for this course will be group products in some way. Although this doesn’t complicate evaluation of work, it does make grading difficult since I will not know how much each person contributed. To create more transparency, I am asking that each assignment be accompanied by a statement describing who was responsible for what and a suggestion about whether differential credit for the work should be assigned to different members of the group. All group members should sign each statement. Differential contributions will be recognized in the ordering of authors on the final submitted paper.

Academic Integrity

Each student in this course is expected to abide by the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Typically this means primarily that the work you turn in is your own work. Here, it means that work submitted collectively by your group will be properly credited. Remember to cite sources properly. When you quote a source verbatim, put quotes around it and find a page number. In addition, academic integrity in this course means that everyone will share (often scarce) reference materials.

Accommodations for students with disabilities

In compliance with the Cornell University policy and equal access laws, I am available to discuss appropriate academic accommodations that may be required for students with disabilities. Requests for academic accommodations are to be made during the first three weeks of the semester, except for unusual circumstances, so arrangements can be made

Required Readings

Part 1: Literature Review, August 24-September 14

There is one required text that has been ordered and should be available at the Campus Store, Calthorpe and Fulton’s Regional City.

To supplement this, several other important texts on polycentricity in Europe have been placed on two-hour course reserve in the Fine Arts Library.

Complementary texts by Clarence Stein can be found in the Clarence Stein Collection at the Cornell University archives. More information on how to access these will be forthcoming soon.

Readings for Part 2 to be distributed.