Authors:
Hartman, Chester
Source:
Journal of the American Planning Association. Spring94, Vol. 60 Issue 2, p158. 2p.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*Urban planning
NAICS/Industry Codes:
237210 Land Subdivision
925120 Administration of Urban Planning and Community and Rural Development
People:
Davidoff, Paul, 1930-1984
Abstract:
Comments on the article `Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,’ by Paul Davidoff. Optimism and positive tone of Davidoff’s message; Importance of plans and planning; Effects of open advocacy planning on immigration and race; Projects of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC).
Full Text Word Count:
1199
ISSN:
0194-4363
Accession Number:
9411153412
Publisher Logo:
ON POVERTY AND RACISM, WE HAVE HAD LITTLE TO SAY
Section:
LONGER VIEW
It is fruitful to go back to “the classics” and assess their historical importance and current relevance. Planning is in a constant state of flux. To get our bearings on the current state of the profession, it is important from time to time to re-read and re-interpret major books and articles, from a variety of viewpoints: left and right, activist and academic.
Several things struck me as I reread “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” First, I was impressed by the optimism and positive tone and message of the Da-vidoff article, particularly about issues of race and the Civil Rights movement. That was Paul. That was the 1960s. Now I, for one, am terribly pessimistic-about race, about poverty, about cities, about our country. I wonder if Paul, the quintessential optimist, were he still alive, would be so optimistic some 30 years later.
Second, I’m struck by the importance assigned to plans and planning. In my own life and work I do not sense that plans and planning, at least in the broad sense, are very significant in determining how the critical urban and rural issues are being dealt with in the 1990s. The central themes of Davidoff’s article are how to make better plans (“make no few plans” would be his variation on the Burnham dictum), how to function more creatively, effectively and responsibly as a planner, and how to better structure the planning function within local government. Such questions strike me as having little to do with the realities of current struggles around racism and poverty: How, if at all, we can grapple with the massive problems of crime, the so-called “underclass” phenomenon, housing affordability, joblessness and underemployment, homelessness, drugs, awful schools, widening disparities in income and wealth-the whole depressing litany of what’s wrong in America. Davidoff ended his article by saying that “[a]s a profession charged with making urban life more beautiful, exciting, and creative, and more just [emphasis added], we have had little to say.” Paul was proposing a way to change that; but today I would write the same thing without his hopeful coda. That assertion, I know, is dispiriting, but so is the state of our present society.
A third observation concerns openness. Davidoff strongly believed in opening up the political process, overtly espousing competition among plans. But again I am pessimistic, wondering whether now that will work, whether in fact being so explicit about tensions exacerbates or relieves them. As an example, let me cite the well-known Gautreaux experiment in Chicago, where a reasonably successful degree of spatial de-concentration and racial integration has been achieved by using Section 8 certificates to allow residents of Chicago’s ghettoized public housing projects and those on the Housing Authority’s waiting lists to find apartments in outlying suburban areas-aided by highly competent private (but federally funded) counseling and assistance. The program’s degree of success is subject to some debate; careful studies from Northwestern University show various employment, educational and social improvements for both children and adults, although not of staggering proportions, and over a 16-year period only 4,500 families have been helped. The program, as some of you doubtless know, will be expanded to six other cities under a 1990 Housing Act provision–“Moving to Opportunity.” But almost anyone familiar with the Chicago effort will acknowledge that to the degree the program has avoided resistance, its somewhat surreptitious style has been the key. It has been referred to humorously as a “stealth program.” Could we expect similarly positive results were the explicit integration motives more open, planned for, and posited? It’s hardly likely.
Turning to another key issue in America today-immigration and race–I again ponder whether open advocacy planning will help or harm. As we move rapidly toward a multiracial society, from a Black-White model of race and racism to one that encompasses the newly prominent Latino and Asian populations, documented and undocumented, arriving by border crossing or birth canal, how can the competing claims of different racial groups be resolved? We are all familiar with the efforts of employers, politicans and others to play groups off against one another. But there are also inherent conflicts in a society such as ours, with a racial hierarchy and rapidly changing racial composition. Voting representation, for one: that can be largely a zero-sum game, as recent redistricting experience in New York and other cities has shown, in which districts can be drawn to increase the likelihood of one racial group or another determining the outcome of representation. Another troubling problem is the competition for services, which in an era of fiscal austerity can be severe and internecine; we are seeing that in California and elsewhere. A lot of distortion and manipulation goes on about who is taking jobs from whom, but it’s hard to deny the evidence that the employer preference for newer immigrants-for all sorts of good and bad reasons-disadvantages African-Americans. Again, will explicit advocacy planning on behalf of competing racial groups make things better or worse?
My recent work has been advocacy planning of a sort, although much more focused than what is described in the Davidoff approach. My organization, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), works seriously to build connections in a variety of ways between researchers and activists dealing with the intersection of race and poverty; we want to stimulate better and more relevant social science research and to have activists use research results more consciously. PRRAC also assists advocacy projects of all types–litigation, community organizing, legislative work, public education-by funding research that directly supports an advocacy agenda. We have funded nearly 70 projects so far, such as:
- Documenting how homeless kids in Chicago are not getting the adequate education the federal McKin-ney Act requires. This research was the basis for a lawsuit against the Chicago Board of Education and the State of Illinois.
- Preparing a statistically reliable study showing that children living in subsidized housing have markedly lower rates of iron deficiency than children living in private housing do-because in subsidized housing families pay 30% of income for rent, while those in private housing pay anywhere up to 70% of income; thus the former have far more money for food. Such a study will be used effectively by advocacy groups lobbying Congress for higher housing appropriations.
- Documenting the various issues around free public education for the children of undocumented immigrants, in preparation for a likely upcoming challenge to the Supreme Court’s earlier Plyler decision that upholds that guarantee.
- Documenting how low-income tenants facing eviction in New York City fare far better when represented by counsel; this research supports a legislative, administrative and litigation effort to establish a right to counsel in such circumstances.
Many of these issues have potentially broad impacts, and others (like the example of the Chicago school children) are replicable in other cities. I like to think that such work keeps alive Paul Davidoff’s concept of advocacy planning.
Journal of the American PlanningAssociation, Vol. 60, No. 2, Spring 1994. (C)Arneri-can Planning Association, Chicago, IL.
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By Chester Hartman
Chester Hartman is Executive Director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, DC.
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