SHRAPNEL URBAN PLANNING
Suite 18
336 Churchill Avenue
Subiaco
Western Australia 6008ABN 37 139 283 692
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Some Muddled Thinking?Urban planning can be a creative activity (for example, designing a development), or a regulatory activity. The rationale for planning as a regulatory activity is based on the fact that land development has external effects (externalities) and its regulation and control by a government authority are therefore in the public interest - but what actually is the 'public interest'? This term is used frequently in urban planning, the underlying assumption being that everyone knows exactly what it is. However, I'm not sure this is the case. Jeremy Bentham suggested in his utilitarian philosophy that the public interest lay in the principle of 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number'. This is superficially an attractive idea, but conscientiously implementing it would require a social equation that would be impossible to reliably compute. And even if you could compute such an equation, then implement the result, could it ever be fair in practice? How would minority groups fare under such a system? What about the happiness of eccentric individuals? It is possible to identify certain universal values we can be certain would benefit everybody. The realisation of such values should therefore, automatically, be in the public interest. Examples are 'fresh air', 'no disease', 'no crime', 'safe roads', etc. But even here there is great difficulty in practice. Take the obvious example of 'fresh air'. Every sane human values fresh air, indeed air with some degree of freshness is essential to life itself. Yet we, as a society, willingly trade off some of this value - sometimes large amounts of it - for other things we value and enjoy, such as electricity, factory-produced goods, and driving motor cars. All other such 'motherhood' values are in fact subject to similar trade-offs. So, in the case of fresh air, the 'public interest' is actually best served by ensuring that there is always an 'optimum' amount of fresh air, when balanced in relation to all other relevant values and factors. But at the individual level, surely just about everyone would disagree about what the 'optimum' amount of fresh air actually was. Would agreement be possible, even in theory? I suggest not. It therefore appears that even a simple proposition such as 'fresh air is in the public interest' has the potential to be disagreed with by almost everybody, in practice, at the individual level, for one reason or another. For these reasons, the public interest obviously cannot be regarded as a precise entity, nor even a fully formed state of affairs. If such a thing as the public interest actually does exist, there is no doubt it is in a constant state of flux and evolution. Might it always have to remain just a matter of opinion? If so, who's opinion? If mere opinion was the yardstick, there would be a distinct danger of over-regulation by zealous bureaucrats, who did not have to fully justify their decisions - other than simply to provide their opinion. But we live in the real world, where the public interest is, at least as a vague concept, always in some tension with individual will and action. This applies particularly in the field of urban planning. So I think we need a workable definition or principle that can exist and operate validly within the ill-defined conceptual morass merely only hinted at in the paragraphs above. My working definition of the public interest in the urban planning sense therefore is (until I improve upon it): "maintenance and enhancement of the conditions necessary for an urban system to function adequately as a context for modern civilised urban society." The adequacy conditions may potentially be satisfied by numerous possible states of the system, and even experts will certainly disagree about what is the best possible state. But seeking the 'best' possible state may not necessarily be in the public interest, if it involves (for example) a particular government's political ideology. In my opinion all a government should mainly do is monitor the actual state of the system and act to ensure that it remains adequate. It may also act to improve it where the proposed action would clearly be beneficial, but would clearly require government action in order for it to occur. For example, if the beneficial social and economic interaction of two urban areas is hampered by a river separating them, the government could certainly justify building a bridge. If a town centre in multiple private ownerships was dysfunctional (e.g. poor traffic circulation, no decent pedestrian facilities or central public space) then a government could justify taking a pro-active role in facilitating improvement - particularly to the public domain. Private action to improve individual properties often flows from this type of public action. It is intentional that my definition of the public interest is lacking in high aspiration. While I value aspiration in individuals, I have a deep suspicion of the notion of 'public' aspiration. In autocratic societies, 'public aspiration' may find genuine expression in grand schemes, but more often than not these are just expressions of an egocentric leader. In my terms the concept of the public interest only makes sense in the context of a more-or-less free society, where it is accepted that people should be able to do pretty much what they want unless they do harm. Proper management of the public interest in this context requires an acknowledgement that outcomes will often be imperfect as an economically and politically free society of individuals forges an actual result out of multitudes of diverse aspirations, aims and objectives. But in order for this democratic process to work and evolve properly, there needs to be a sound basic context - an adequate urban system. Maintenance and (where appropriate) enhancement of this is, in my opinion, what the public interest is all about. Accordingly, in my opinion all government planners should keep their focus on the public interest in these terms. Their focus should be on ensuring adequacy and function, and not on pet projects of their own that may be interesting to them as individuals, but be of marginal or no value to the public interest (i.e. in the term as defined here). Regulatory planners should simply ask these questions in relation to any development proposal crossing their desk:
Needless to say, these questions are often pre-empted by regulatory plans drawn up in advance of any development proposal. But even in the context of such plans, the questions should still be asked in relation to specific developments, prior to a planning authority approving or refusing them. In a more-or-less 'free' society, I would strongly suggest that the onus of 'proof' that a particular development would detract from the public interest, and should therefore be refused, or have onerous conditions placed upon it, should rest heavily upon the regulator. If a regulator cannot clearly decide and convincingly demonstrate and/ or explain why a particular development should not be approved in public interest terms, then I believe the development should certainly be approved. 23 July 2002; 25 July 2002; 22 October 2002
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