Abstract
Too frequently plans have failed to consider fragmented political and market environments and implementation issues in general, thus raising the question of how planners can become more effective. In Today’s Comprehensive Plan, John Zeanah draws on his experience directing the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan—the city’s first comprehensive plan in forty years to advocate for a new model, an adaptive comprehensive plan, one that is based on implementation, citizen involvement, flexibility, and recalibration. In contrast to much of the earlier literature on comprehensive plans, Zeanah concentrates on how to prepare and implement a plan for established communities rather than for new communities or for growing areas on a city’s edge. Between the Introduction and the Conclusion, the book is divided into two parts: “The Comprehensive Plan in Context” (Chapters 1–4), for example, implementation issues in the past and “An Adaptive Approach” (Chapters 5–8), for example, citizen engagement, interdepartmental coordination.
The history of American comprehensive plans, in the main, highlights unfulfilled grandiose ambitions. Many cities adopt zoning without a comprehensive plan—and zoning regulations become the implicit comprehensive plan. Three models were developed during the 1960s and 1970s in response to social and political turmoil to better unite professional expertise and real-life implementation. Henry Fagin’s “policies plan” proposed local central planning agencies where specialists in land use, social programs, and economic development could work together. Constance Perin’s “preamble plan” transformed the comprehensive plan into a preamble to the city’s land development regulations. Paul Davidoff’s “plural planning” (based on his work in advocacy planning) proposed creating multiple and competing plans.
Zeanah recommends a number of ways for making comprehensive plans more adaptive. First, comprehensive plans need to maintain their focus on physical development while supporting broader community goals (equity, environmental sustainability) to achieve the right balance between focus and breadth. Second, successful implementation requires “aligning the actions of various public, private, and civic players with the plan’s visions and strategies.” (p. 57) For example, transportation improvement might require coordination between a city public work department, a regional transit authority, and a state highway department.
The experience in Memphis mirrors similar experiences in other cities wanting to develop an effective comprehensive plan in a bureaucratically fragmented city. The planner must become a facilitator of partnerships between public, private, and non-profit bodies. When Austin, Texas developed its “priority programs” (focusing on issues such as housing affordability), it relied on a formal cross-department structure with each priority program having its own dedicated working group of representatives from multiple departments. Zeanah’s Memphis planning team chose organizations they wanted involved in the plan, with assets they could offer, and whose efforts could augment common goals without requiring any entity to abandon it autonomy.
Effective planning requires the understanding of varying economic sub-markets in a city and determining where interventions might make a difference. In areas with strong market demand, planning can adopt a regulative stance to mitigate the negative effects of development. On the other hand, in areas with declining markets, planners can try to address the underlying causes of decline (including poverty) through economic development and better schools.
Zeanah identifies eight steps to prepare this new type of adaptive comprehensive plan: (1) engage and align stakeholders including residents; (2) connect the plan to implementation through policies, regulations, and partnerships; (3) define a clear and memorable vision; (4) develop a unifying strategy for change; (5) differentiate subareas by degree of change; (6) establish the plan’s elements and goals, which, in Memphis’s case meant reinvesting in neighborhoods, promoting public transportation options, and improving access to jobs; (7) translate goals to implementation via operational objectives that name the city agencies responsible for implementation; and (8) provide regular plan updates.
Memphis’s vision “Memphis Will Build Up, Not Out” implies that the city will stop suburban sprawl but it is unclear how the plan could influence development in suburban localities outside the city’s boundaries. Also, it is uncertain how Memphis will become a city of “strong anchors and connections.” Zeanah does not indicate how Memphis learned from anchor strategies elsewhere (e.g., the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia) nor does he indicate what anchors Memphis will use in communities without universities or hospitals (“eds” and “meds”). Finally, Memphis’ neighborhood classification system that assigned communities to five growth categories—preserve, stabilize, nurture, grow, and transform—is overly vague and ambiguous and does not tell us anything about the conditions in these community types. Should a declining, high poverty neighborhood be stabilized, nurtured, or transformed?
Zeanah asserts that “communities” should be “co-creators” and “co-managers” of the plan, but what do these nebulous terms mean in practice. How can “communities” (especially fragmented ones) be held accountable for a plan in the same way that a planning director or a mayor can? Zeanah’s discussion of best practices for community involvement emerging out of Memphis 3.0 is somewhat superficial. The city funded non-profits to spread awareness of the plan and hosted more than 400 public meetings; hands-on workshops were held in each of the city’s fourteen planning districts (with at least three workshops per district) leading to the preparation of an anchor map and future land use map. It is unclear, however, whether the district workshops focused on neighborhood-based or on city-wide concerns—residents would be more likely to be motivated at the finer geographical scale—and finally, to what extent design charettes were utilized.
The immediate post-adoption period (the first six to twelve weeks) is the most critical phase in determining the success of a comprehensive plan. According to Zeanah, the mayor or city manager should align the budget and project priorities with the plan and build momentum for the plan through early wins. This might mean giving priority to targeted revitalization areas or to small capital projects that provide visible evidence of the city’s interest. Memphis’s “Accelerate Memphis” program focused initial investments on a limited number of anchor areas identified as implementation priorities in the comprehensive plan.
“Reflection” and “update” are the tools for keeping comprehensive plans alive. How does the plan intensify or improve things (e.g., transit use), make patterns obsolete (e.g., like autocentric land uses), bring back earlier patterns (e.g., walkable neighborhoods) and (possibly) push neighborhood dynamics to an unwanted extreme (e.g. gentrification induced displacement)?
In the Conclusion, Zeanah summarizes the implications of adaptive planning – the shift from technical expert to systems facilitator, from comprehensive control to strategic influence, from periodic planning to continuous process. Disappointingly, he provides little information on implementation of Memphis 3.0 (e.g., post-adoption citizen engagement, outcomes from the anchor strategy, how the plan was linked to efforts to lower the city’s high crime rate, how the plan was used to market the city). Memphis 3.0 was adopted December 3, 2019. A book about a plan published six years ago should have provided more insights on the outcomes of the plan as well and on the “story” of its implementation.
Zeanah does make a persuasive case for an implementation focus and makes a modest contribution to the planning implementation literature. Because of this, the book may be useful as a supplemental text for a planning theory class. However, because of its sketchiness concerning Memphis 3.0 and its implementation, it would be of limited utility for comprehensive planning/zoning/land use courses. Overall, as a guide for adaptive planning, this book represents a useful first step. It is hoped it will lead to other case studies of adaptive plans evaluated over say a five- or a ten-year time period.