Este curso ofrece una introducción a la relación entre la movilización de plusvalías y la normativa definida por la zonificación (el conjunto de reglas urbanísticas que establecen los parámetros de uso y ocupación del suelo). Se plantean las oportunidades que ofrece la zonificación para el cumplimiento de dos objetivos centrales que las ciudades buscan: inclusión y sostenibilidad. ¿Pueden las ciudades enfrentar estos desafíos usando la zonificación? ¿Cómo? ¿Tales estrategias movilizan plusvalías? ¿En qué sentido? ¿Con qué impactos? Estos son ejemplos de preguntas que se discuten a lo largo del curso, que utiliza estudios de caso y ejercicios aplicados para tratar las temáticas mencionadas.
Relevancia
La zonificación está presente en prácticamente todos los planes de ordenamiento de las ciudades de Latinoamérica y el Caribe. Es una herramienta transversal, a diferencia de los instrumentos de recuperación de plusvalías, los cuales no siempre están disponibles en las localidades. Por esta razón, la zonificación se considera también como una herramienta más para el manejo del valor del suelo y para el cumplimiento de los objetivos de la planificación. Para los profesionales que participan día a día de la toma de decisiones que afectan el modo en que las ciudades se desarrollan, es importante examinar las consecuencias de la zonificación y comprender las repercusiones de las regulaciones urbanas.
La alcaldesa Sumbul Siddiqui inmigró a los Estados Unidos desde Karachi, Pakistán, a los dos años, junto con sus padres y su hermano gemelo. Creció en una vivienda asequible en Cambridge, Massachusetts, y se educó en escuelas públicas de la ciudad. Se graduó en la Universidad Brown y trabajó como miembro de AmeriCorps en New Profit, una organización sin fines de lucro dedicada a mejorar la movilidad social familiar. Tras graduarse de abogada en la Universidad Northwestern, regresó a Massachusetts y ejerció su profesión en Northeast Legal Aid para las ciudades posindustriales Lawrence, Lynn y Lowell. Fue electa concejala de la ciudad de Cambridge en 2017 y alcaldesa en 2020. Defiende a los residentes más vulnerables de la ciudad y lucha para crear viviendas asequibles, evitar el desplazamiento y promover el acceso equitativo a la educación. Durante la pandemia, aumentó el acceso a Internet para familias de bajos ingresos y ofreció pruebas gratuitas de COVID a todos los residentes de Cambridge. Su agenda incluye la promoción de calles, parques e infraestructura limpios y resistentes al cambio climático, en un intento por lograr que Cambridge sea una comunidad más equitativa y con mayor compromiso civil.
Hace poco, la alcaldesa Siddiqui habló con Anthony Flint para una serie de entrevistas con dirigentes de ciudades que tuvieron una función de particular importancia en los 75 años de historia del Instituto Lincoln. A continuación se presenta una transcripción editada de la entrevista. La versión completa está disponible en el pódcast Land Matters.
Anthony Flint: Cambridge está llamando mucho la atención este último tiempo debido a una nueva política que permite ciertos aumentos de altura y densidad en determinados lugares, si los proyectos son asequibles al 100 por ciento. ¿Nos puede contar sobre esa iniciativa y sobre cómo está evolucionando?
Sumbul Siddiqui: Aprobar la superposición de viviendas asequibles fue muy importante para mí y muchas personas del Concejo. Se propuso crear una zonificación superpuesta en toda la ciudad que admitiera desarrollos de vivienda totalmente asequibles con el fin de competir mejor con los de valor de mercado . . . el objetivo es tener desarrollos multifamiliares y de casas adosadas en zonas donde ahora no se admiten . . . En la ciudad, la brecha entre la gente de altos y bajos ingresos es cada vez mayor, y, además, siempre hablamos de la diversidad como valor y sobre cómo podemos mantenerla. Creo, y no soy la única, que lo esencial es crear opciones adicionales de viviendas asequibles para que más personas se puedan quedar en la ciudad. Hasta ahora, hemos visto a muchos desarrolladores de viviendas asequibles, como nuestra autoridad de la vivienda y otras sociedades de desarrollo comunitario, organizando reuniones comunitarias acerca de propuestas que, en ciertos casos, podrían añadir más de 100 unidades a las que ya iban a construir.
AF: Este tipo de cambios parecen permear hacia arriba a nivel local. Por ejemplo, recuerdo que Minneapolis prohibió la zonificación exclusivamente unifamiliar para que hubiera más viviendas multifamiliares en más lugares, y otras ciudades siguieron su ejemplo. ¿Es posible que otras ciudades adopten la superposición 100 por ciento asequible? ¿Había anticipado que podrían convertirse en modelo para otras ciudades?
SS: Sin dudas, creemos que puede ser un modelo. Sabemos que Somerville, una ciudad vecina, lo está investigando . . . Creo que todo es parte de la misión general de muchas ciudades: procurar ofrecer y crear más opciones de viviendas asequibles. Se trata de viviendas que puedan costear nuestros docentes, custodios, funcionarios públicos, letrados, quienes sean, para que puedan quedarse en la ciudad donde, quizás, crecieron, que debieron dejar y a la cual ahora quieren volver. Queremos que tengan esa oportunidad. Creo que aún hay mucha desigualdad en nuestra ciudad. Al haber crecido en viviendas asequibles en Cambridge . . . puedo afirmar que sin estas, yo no estaría aquí. Se trata de una iniciativa y una política importante, y espero que [sea] un modelo para otras ciudades del país.
AF: Hace ya varios años que Cambridge está en auge, y hubo muchos desarrollos residenciales más lujosos. ¿Nos puede contar sobre otras políticas que logren conservar más esa diversidad económica?
SS: En parte, alcanzamos esta disponibilidad de viviendas asequibles gracias al programa de viviendas inclusivas de la ciudad . . . conforme a estas cláusulas, los desarrollos de 10 unidades o más deben asignar el 20 por ciento de la superficie residencial a inquilinos de ingresos bajos y moderados, o compradores de ingresos moderados y medios. Así que fue una muy buena forma de crear viviendas cuando son tan buscadas en el mercado . . . cuanta más gente traigamos a la ciudad, más insaciable será la demanda de viviendas.
Otra cosa en la que nos queremos centrar es en cómo usamos las propiedades públicas de la ciudad y las ponemos a disposición para desarrollar viviendas . . . Hemos trabajado mucho en opciones de posesión de vivienda para la ciudad, y procuramos tener un programa sólido en el que los residentes puedan inscribirse . . . La conservación también es una parte importante de la política de asequibilidad. Este año, estuvimos trabajando en la asequibilidad de unas 500 unidades en North Cambridge, cerca de los edificios donde yo me crie, e invertimos . . . quizás más de US$ 15 millones, para ayudar a conservar estos edificios a precio de mercado. En esencia, son propiedades que pronto ya no podrán usarse. Es un poco técnico, pero hay muchas herramientas, y aún hay mucho por recorrer.
AF: ¿Cómo evidenció la pandemia las desigualdades y los problemas de justicia racial que parecen estar arraigados, de cierta forma, en los resultados económicos de la ciudad y la región?
SS: La pandemia puso en evidencia muchas diferencias estructurales . . . y vivimos en carne propia el impacto desproporcionado que tuvo la COVID en las comunidades de color. Resaltó problemas antiguos relacionados con la igualdad en la atención médica, y hemos visto que muchas familias de ingresos bajos no llegan a fin de mes. Una gran cantidad de gente perdió el empleo debido a la crisis de salud pública, pero aún debe pagar el alquiler y los servicios, y comprar comida para toda la familia. Muchos de los problemas que vimos durante la pandemia no son ninguna novedad, pero, como dije, ahora estas verdades dolorosas se ven incluso en nuestra ciudad . . . y ya no podemos hacer la vista gorda.
Debemos actuar mucho más rápido. Yo siempre uso el ejemplo de las escuelas que debieron cerrar. Enseguida entregamos computadoras portátiles y brindamos acceso a Internet a los estudiantes. [Antes de la pandemia,] sabíamos que no tenían Internet en casa, que no tenían computadora, pero pensábamos: “Bueno, vamos a analizarlo” . . . Tendríamos que haber hecho todo esto desde antes. Entonces creo que algo bueno de todo esto ha sido que pudimos hallar soluciones rápidamente . . . Podemos hacer que la ciudad sea más accesible y asequible, y de verdad debemos llamar la atención a las injusticias cuando las detectamos.
AF: También se puede decir que la pandemia presentó la oportunidad de tomar medidas relacionadas con la sostenibilidad, al reconfigurar el espacio público. ¿Podría hablar sobre eso, y otras formas en las que intentan reducir las emisiones de carbono y generar resiliencia?
SS: Es una parte del trabajo en la que están pasando muchas cosas, y sin embargo a veces da la sensación de que vamos muy lento, considerando lo que sabemos. Asumimos el compromiso de acelerar la transición a cero emisiones netas de gases de efecto invernadero en todos los edificios de la ciudad. Tenemos una meta de cero emisiones netas para 2050. Hay varios incentivos, regulaciones y diversos grupos de trabajo que investigan cómo obtener la totalidad de la electricidad para el municipio de fuentes renovables, cómo simplificar las labores existentes para ampliar el acceso a financiamiento de eficiencia energética y asistencia técnica.
Estamos revisando la norma de zonificación para asegurarnos de que [los estándares de] diseño sostenible exijan mayores niveles de construcción ecológica y eficiencia energética en obras nuevas y renovaciones importantes. Esta ciudad adora sus árboles, ¿no? Entonces siempre buscamos formas de preservarlos. Tenemos registrada una norma que protege los árboles, y en este mandato vamos a seguir reforzándola. Seguimos instalando estaciones de carga para vehículos eléctricos que son muy visibles en ubicaciones de acceso público. Hay . . . mucho ímpetu por incorporar infraestructura verde en parques urbanos, espacios abiertos y proyectos de reconstrucción de calles. Es un trabajo mancomunado.
AF: El Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo considera a Cambridge su hogar desde 1974, cuando David C. Lincoln, hijo del fundador, eligió como sede un lugar con universidades y organizaciones sin fines de lucro de renombre mundial. ¿Qué puede decir acerca de esta particularidad de Cambridge? Es decir, que tenga instituciones educativas, médicas y sin fines de lucro tan importantes para la comunidad.
SS: Creo que las universidades cumplen una función particularmente importante. Con la pandemia, he observado una colaboración muy importante entre instituciones educativas, organizaciones comunitarias, pequeñas empresas y residentes en labores que abordan las dificultades más urgentes . . . Broad Institute, de Harvard y MIT, en colaboración con el Departamento de Salud Pública de la ciudad de Cambridge, fue el primero del estado en ofrecer pruebas de COVID a residentes, empleados y todas las instituciones para personas mayores de la ciudad. En la actualidad, realizamos pruebas los siete días de la semana. Fue un resultado directo de esta colaboración, y de que estén aquí junto a nosotros. Ambas instituciones colaboraron con el fondo de socorro para catástrofes de la alcaldía . . . estábamos instalando un refugio de emergencia para personas sin hogar y todas las universidades colaboraron con fondos; ofrecieron subsidios de alquiler a sus inquilinos comerciales y gastronómicos; [y] hacen muchos aportes en las escuelas. Entonces, creo que este año, con el advenimiento de la pandemia, la asociación se fortaleció, y han sido fundamentales en el trabajo realizado en la ciudad. Son una gran parte de la comunidad . . . y han estado a la altura de las circunstancias cuando acudí a ellas.
Anthony Flint es miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln y editor colaborador de Land Lines.
Fotografía: Sumbul Siddiqui fue elegido alcalde de Cambridge, Massachusetts, en 2020. Credit: Cortesía de Sumbul Siddiqui.
El Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) se han unido para desarrollar un nuevo programa de máster con un contenido original. Se trata de uno de los pocos programas de posgrado a nivel mundial que reúne sistemáticamente los marcos legales y herramientas que sostienen la planificación urbana, con instrumentos fiscales, ambientales y de participación.
El máster en Políticas de Suelo y Desarrollo Urbano Sostenible es un programa en formato virtual y se compone de tres módulos, cada uno de los cuales aborda una parte importante de la realidad actual de las ciudades: el derecho administrativo urbano, el financiamiento con base en el suelo, el cambio climático y el desarrollo sostenible, y el conflicto urbano y la participación ciudadana.
El programa está dirigido especialmente a estudiantes de posgrado y otros graduados con interés en políticas urbanas desde una perspectiva jurídica, ambiental y de procesos de participación, pero también a funcionarios públicos. Los participantes del máster recibirán el entrenamiento tanto intelectual como técnico para liderar la implementación de medidas que permitan la transformación de las ciudades.
El Instituto Lincoln destinará fondos para becas que cubrirán la matrícula completa del máster de los estudiantes seleccionados.
Climate Mitigation, Development, Dispute Resolution, Environmental Management, Favela, Henry George, Informal Land Markets, Infrastructure, Land Market Regulation, Land Speculation, Land Use, Land Use Planning, Land Value, Land Value Taxation, Land-Based Tax, Local Government, Mediation, Municipal Fiscal Health, Planning, Property Taxation, Public Finance, Public Policy, Regulatory Regimes, Resilience, Urban, Urban Development, Urbanism, Value Capture, Zoning
Land Matters Podcast: Bruce Babbitt on the Climate Crisis
As world leaders and some 20,000 delegates gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 climate summit, they’ll be working toward the goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, through a variety of methods aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. Much of the focus is on renewable energy and decarbonizing the power grid, transportation, and buildings. But Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona and former Interior secretary, says there are two other big sectors that should not be overlooked: land and water.
“It just isn’t really getting the attention it deserves,” says Babbitt in the most recent episode of the Land Matters podcast, noting that land-clearing and the destruction of forests takes away vast carbon sinks and accounts for 20 percent of emissions worldwide, on a par with what transportation produces globally.
Global warming is also having such a big impact on water supplies all around the world, he said, more focus needs to be on near-term solutions to avert a catastrophic crisis in both urban development and agriculture. The Colorado River Basin, where the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs have dropped to historic lows, is a vivid illustration of that challenge.
“The Colorado River becomes sort of the poster child of this, because the river flow is diminishing as a result of the drought and the decrease in runoff efficiency,” he said. “What rain there is doesn’t reach the reservoirs because it evaporates from the soil [because of] the temperature constantly heating up the landscape.”
Holders of water rights established long ago are now facing drastic reductions, both in urban areas and in the agricultural sector, the biggest user of Colorado River water. They must now make due with less water—right now and in the future. The current method of irrigating crops simply cannot go on as usual, Babbitt said. “We haven’t really stared that straight in the eye, and begun to plan and to join a big region-wide discussion,” he said.
Babbitt, for whom the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy is named, served for many years on the board of the Lincoln Institute. The Phoenix-based center is promoting the better coordination of land use planning and the management of water resources. The Lincoln Institute’s work in land, water, and climate is getting special recognition in this 75th anniversary year; the organization started as the Lincoln Foundation in 1946, in Phoenix.
Among its many consequences, the pandemic ushered in a period of experimental, rapid-fire adjustments to public space. Cities were suddenly tweaking zoning rules to allow more outdoor dining, blocking off streets to give pedestrians and bicyclists more space, and figuring out how to respond to dramatic upticks in food and retail pickup and delivery. It has been a pivotal stretch, in short, for managing the curb.
Even before the lockdowns began, the increasing popularity of transportation network companies—from ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft to scooter firms like Bird and Lime—had made curb management a rising priority for many cities. “In today’s urban fabric, few spaces are more contested than the curb,” the American Planning Association declared back in the before-times of 2019.
But the welter of recent experiments, some involving deployment of new technologies, seems even more significant. Consider the case of Aspen, Colorado. Aspen is an unusual municipality, with a downtown business district that is geographically modest, at just 16 square blocks. Nevertheless, it’s extremely busy: the retail and restaurant businesses there rack up a collective $1 billion a year. The inevitable upshot is that demand for curb space—for parking, for deliveries—can outpace supply. And that makes Aspen a useful curb-management lab.
In February 2020, Aspen joined a group of municipalities exploring pilot programs with a start-up called Coord, one of a number of “smart city” tech companies with a curb-management bent. “I’m a data freak,” explains Mitch Osur, Aspen’s director of parking and downtown services. He figured that at the very least, Coord’s platform—which integrates “smart zones” with a payment app used by delivery drivers (and a separate app for enforcement officers)—could give him fresh insight into how the downtown streets are really being used.
The city identified what it believed were its busiest loading zones. Starting in November 2020, using these zones required booking space through Coord’s app, at a cost of $2 an hour. While regular street parking in downtown Aspen can cost $6 an hour, the city (like many others) had never previously charged for loading, but figured it was necessary to get delivery fleets’ attention. In the end there wasn’t much pushback; most drivers appreciated being able to capture a time slot. When one shipping fleet manager questioned the scheme, Osur explained that the shipper could use other loading zones, but the data Aspen was collecting would affect policy decisions about curbs across the downtown area. “If you’re not part of the program, your data won’t count,” he added. Moreover, he was sharing data with participants and soliciting their input. The shipper signed on.
Because the Coord platform tracks actual usage of the smart loading zones, Osur did indeed get plenty of fresh data. Some was expected, some surprising. He figured average “dwell times” were about 30 minutes, and found they were averaging 39 minutes and 13 seconds. The dwell times were longer in the morning and shrank to about 15 minutes after 2 p.m. He was surprised to learn that the busiest days weren’t Monday and Friday, as expected, but Tuesday and Thursday; Wednesday’s loading zone use was half that of peak days. Based on these insights, Aspen is planning to change the rules for some zones, converting them to regular parking at 11 a.m. on some days rather than 6 p.m. (Osur has seen other changes as a result of adopting Coord; drivers have stopped snagging space early and eating lunch in loading zones, a previously routine practice.)
Coord has run similar pilots in Omaha, Nashville, and other cities. But it is just one entity involved in curb-management experiments. Cox Communications, through its Cox2M “internet of things” division, is testing curbside kiosks that can essentially monitor dwell times in loading zones and present a countdown clock warning drivers not to overstay their time on the curb; the technology can alert city enforcement when drivers linger. Las Vegas is running a pilot program with the technology, which can also be used to manage commercial deliveries, a Cox official told Government Technology. Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, DC, have run pilots with another app, curbFlow, designed to coordinate deliveries from multiple services along particularly busy curb stretches.
Technology such as video kiosks and app-based location trackers adds both new options and new complexity to the business of managing curbs. Traditionally, defining curb use has involved signage and paint, which are hard to tweak quickly, notes Anne Goodchild, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, whose Urban Freight Lab has focused on public-private efforts to address evolving delivery logistics and planning.
Perhaps because of the pandemic, cities have been more willing to try new options. Before the pandemic, a curb change would have entailed lengthy public processes. The crisis showed that a more nimble alternative was possible. “We did some things differently,” Goodchild says. “For example, we changed curb allocations literally overnight.”
The pandemic pushed a fast-forward button on both new patterns of street usage and policy responses to those patterns, says Heather Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. During the pandemic, the organization’s Big City Planning Directors Institute shifted from a twice-yearly gathering to a monthly one (held virtually, of course). The pandemic, she points out, “was a reason to try new things.”
Hannon has observed a spike in interest in scenario planning for potential futures among U.S. communities since the pandemic began. She also points out that curb management isn’t merely an issue for downtowns or commercial districts, noting that it tilts into residential neighborhoods as well. The demand for home delivery has soared: food-delivery apps doubled their revenues in a six-month period during 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, and e-commerce in the United States grew 44 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year. These trends will only be complicated by the experiments with robots and drones that policy makers increasingly have to accommodate.
Aspen, meanwhile, has expanded its pilot program, adding new loading zones to the experiment as the number of participating drivers keeps growing. While it is just one experiment in a small city, it overlaps with a singular moment in the way citizens and businesses use technology to interact with planned spaces, opening a window onto how planners and policy makers might think about the future of the curb. “This is totally scalable,” Osur says, referring not to any specific app or technology but to the general idea of cities using new tools to more actively manage the curb. “This is the future.”
Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.
Image: Curb management has become a rising priority in cities including Las Vegas, where Cox Communications is piloting curbside kiosks that monitor dwell times in loading zones. Credit: Courtesy of Cox Communications.
President’s Message
We Need to Get Infrastructure Right. The Stakes Couldn't Be Higher.
The Lincoln Institute is preparing to launch a book about infrastructure, which you’ll find excerpted in the October print issue of Land Lines. It is one of the very few books about infrastructure published in the last decade. It could not come at a better time.
Today, we are on the cusp of historic investments in global infrastructure. The World Bank estimates that we will need more than US$90 trillion in new infrastructure by 2030 to prepare cities for 2 billion new inhabitants, primarily in sprawling metropolises in low-income countries. This total investment exceeds the current annual gross domestic product of all the countries on the planet by around 20 percent. In order to formulate new sustainability strategies and policies for cities in regions where populations are growing rapidly—and in regions where city structures continue to evolve to adjust to innovations in technology and commerce—we need to understand the relationship between urbanization and infrastructure.
The world also faces new challenges associated with the climate crisis, the sharing economy, and the fallout from COVID-19. If we want to protect ourselves from the impacts of the climate crisis, the World Bank suggests we add another US$1 trillion per year to the global investment noted above. If we are to live in a “new normal” shaped by global pandemics, infrastructure design and usage must be modified.
For most people in developed countries, infrastructure is largely invisible, noticed only due to its absence or failure. We are chagrined when the power goes out or the Internet goes down. More distressingly, infrastructure failures can be catastrophic, such as when the Ponte Morandi collapsed into the Polcevera River in Genoa, Italy, in 2018; or when leaking, centuries-old gas pipes destroyed two apartment buildings in East Harlem, New York, in 2014; or when the levees failed and floodwater inundated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
These awful events made headlines because infrastructure is supposed to be safe and reliable—and for a large portion of the world’s population, it usually is. But most people in developing countries live with inadequate roads, unreliable power supplies, and a lack of safe drinking water and basic sanitation. They have a diminished quality of life and reduced life expectancies as a result, and the growth of their local and national economies is constrained.
When it works, infrastructure represents humanity at its best. Designing, developing, and financing infrastructure requires formidable technical expertise. But to get the job done, we also need to exercise our best social and political skills and work together to provide durable public goods that solve seemingly intractable social, economic, and environmental challenges. Colossal dams spanning treacherous canyons are a great example: they demand exceptional engineering acumen and provide decades of flood prevention, crop irrigation, drinking water, and electricity. Planning and financing infrastructure requires us to dispose of short-term thinking and make investments with benefits that will span generations.
Infrastructure also represents humanity at its worst. We are at our worst when we allow opaque decisions about infrastructure to disadvantage or harm those without the economic or political power to influence those decisions—when new thoroughfares are forced through thriving communities of color to reduce drive times for suburban commuters, for example, or when public officials and beltway bandits strike sweetheart deals behind closed doors. Process is as important as, and sometimes more important than, outcomes. Infrastructure planning must include all stakeholders and account for their needs, aspirations, and rights.
The stakes are high with infrastructure. We commit dizzying sums of money for decades to build and manage projects and systems of unimaginable scale and ambition. The very complexity of all aspects of infrastructure demands paramount integrity: conforming assiduously to engineering specifications, adhering to the rule of law, exercising fiscal discipline, and maintaining absolute transparency and accountability. Decisions to build infrastructure using public funds must be grounded in rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Although such methodologies are well developed in theory, in practice they can be abused with political pressure, intentional bias, or selective myopia.
Moreover, public decision processes cannot always be trusted to produce optimal resource allocations. If we can understand the complexity of infrastructure within real-world constraints, we will make better spending decisions. Despite the obvious need for infrastructure, developing countries struggle to pay for long-term investments. While these constraints are real, there are many ways to finance infrastructure, even in the most impoverished places. These methods include land value capture mechanisms, which have been used for millennia and which involve recovering the increased value of land associated with infrastructure improvements. For example, betterment levies were used by the Roman Empire to build roads, bridges, tunnels, and viaducts connecting a vast area from Portugal to Constantinople. Land readjustment, in which parcels of land are pooled and improved with new infrastructure that is paid for through the sale of a small share of the land, has been used hundreds of times on multiple continents to build capital cities like Washington, DC, or rebuild towns and cities in countries ravaged by war.
How effectively infrastructure meets economic and social goals depends critically on the way it is managed and regulated. Both the public and private sectors are active in infrastructure development and service provision. The infrastructure industry has gone through a cycle of domination by the private sector followed by public takeover and public provision, then to privatization, and to the increasingly popular public-private partnerships. Who gets served by infrastructure, and how they are served, is determined by regulatory structures that protect the public interest and require absolute transparency and accountability of vendors and public officials.
We can learn a lot from international experiences related to the management and regulation of infrastructure. Some countries and regions develop and implement infrastructure plans and strategies to achieve specific social and economic objectives. The European Union used infrastructure grants and loans to help integrate new members both politically and economically through two rounds of expansion. Chinese policy makers advanced high-speed rail development strategies that supported the formation of several major city clusters (or megalopolises) to drive the growth of the national economy. In contrast, Japan’s rail policy relied mainly on the private sector to provide vital social services. The lessons from such experiences are important for countries that aspire to not only formulate effective infrastructure plans but also use infrastructure planning to achieve other important goals.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of infrastructure for sustaining human habitation on this planet. Without it, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force . . . And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
At the Lincoln Institute, we have spent more than seven decades addressing social, economic, and environmental challenges using innovative land policies. Among those we have studied and recommended to address global challenges, none is more important than infrastructure. Without the lifeline goods and services delivered by effective and efficient infrastructure, human life would be nastier, more brutish, and shorter. If we can learn from the authors of this book, life will be better and longer for a multitude of people around the world.
George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Image: Interstates 10 and 101 in Los Angeles. Credit: Art Wager via Getty Images.
Land Matters Podcast: Addressing Structural Racism in Urban Planning
City planners are emerging from behind the scenes to help address some of society’s most complex challenges, including building equity and fighting racism. This summer a coalition of planners came together to acknowledge past discrimination in urban development policies and commit to becoming “change agents” to help create more racially equitable communities.
The new approach starts with a better community engagement process, says Eleanor Sharpe, executive director at the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and a coauthor of the newly released Commitment to Change. Sharpe is one of 20 urban planners across the United States who have signed the statement; the group is inviting other planning directors, in cities and towns of all sizes, to sign on.
Sharpe joined Andrea Durbin, director of planning and sustainability for the city of Portland, Oregon, and a fellow signatory, on Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Sharpe and her colleagues have embraced the idea of “moving at the speed of trust,” she says, describing the process as “very slow, very intentional, very careful listening, hearing, learning. . . . We want to amplify the lived experience of the people, and that this is not just solely professional planners who are making determinations.”
Participants attend a public meeting in the Lower North District as part of the Philadelphia 2035 comprehensive planning process. Cities such as Philadelphia are working to involve residents who were once excluded from land use decisions. Photo courtesy of the American Planning Association.
The planners’ initiative is part of a reckoning about structural racism in American society—economic forces, institutions, and interactions that have discrimination baked in. That includes buying a home, for example, because of racial covenants and the practice of redlining, which saw federal lending guidelines deny loans to those in neighborhoods with people of color or immigrants. Such policies denied the wealth that comes with homeownership—an impact felt over generations.
Governments implemented other harmful policies: the bulldozing of Black neighborhoods during the time of urban renewal; plowing freeways through those same neighborhoods, casting shadows and blighting everything nearby; setting zoning to favor the white and wealthy in single-family homes; and designing poor-quality public housing in isolated locations.
The harsh treatment of these communities “wasn’t an afterthought,” said Sharpe. “It was deliberate.”
Although city planners were not directly or solely responsible for each of those decisions, the planning profession has been in some ways complicit in setting the stage for racial segregation, according to the planners’ statement.
“We’ve seen the impacts of past policies across our nation,” says Durbin. “The planning directors that we’re working with are coming together and saying . . . that we need to recognize that, we need to own that, acknowledge it, and make changes.”
Philadelphia planners discuss a downtown redevelopment project in 1950. Today, the city seeks to engage a broader swath of the community in planning decisions. Photo courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.
Joining several other cities, Portland recently banned zoning that allows only single-family houses, opening the way for more affordable multi-family housing in prime neighborhoods. “Our first zoning code was adopted in 1924, and back then, single-family zoning was applied to the 15 highest quality neighborhoods . . . embedding exclusionary practices into our zoning policies from the very beginning,” Durbin says. “These are areas that are near transit and other key amenities, good schools. We needed to provide more [housing] choices for our residents.”
This kind of work can be fraught. Cities that change zoning to encourage more housing development, or take advantage of federal funding to dismantle urban freeways, face the specter of fueling gentrification.
“This is the ultimate conundrum, especially in cities that have challenging areas of poverty and disenfranchisement—the fear [that] any improvement will result in a completely new population moving in, displacing the existing population, some of whom have lived in these areas through all its challenges,” Sharpe says.
The planners acknowledge they are stepping out with more prominence than has generally been the case for the profession, but they say the moment calls for a new approach.
“We just need to flip the script,” says Durbin. “The question is, how do we use our tools, land use planning, zoning tools to advance racial equity, build community wealth, increase economic opportunities for Black, Indigenous, and communities of color? We need to be intentional about who benefits, who’s burdened, and ensure that community benefits and public good are centered in our planning processes, and that we’re planning for those who’ve been most underserved.”
The new initiative emerged from a network of planners from major U.S. cities, who convene each year to exchange ideas, with facilitation by the Lincoln Institute, the American Planning Association, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In this 75th anniversary year—the Lincoln Institute started as the Lincoln Foundation in 1946—the Lincoln Institute is exploring how this program and others have evolved over the years, and how they are being applied now to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.
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