Recently, economist and entrepreneurship expert Carl Schramm announced a discovery in the pages of Forbes.com: "the practice of city planning has escaped reality." Planners don't see the big picture. They don't understand economic growth. They've unleashed upon us scourges like live-work lofts, fire stations, and bloated pensions.

Planning thus joins a small, list of obscure fields that could benefit from self-analysis and reform. To my reckoning, that list includes finance, medicine, government, journalism, technology, religion, and everything else short of Pet Sounds. 

You need only take a few glances at major American cities and suburbs to know that there have been lousy plans and, by extension, lousy planners for a very long time. Most every cul-de-sac and downtown surface parking lot indicates as much. Schramm's criticism, as that of an entrepreneurial evangelist looking create business-friendly, is undeniably valuable.  

How critical is Schramm? Quite. In "It's Time for Business to Adapt [sic] a New Model," he accuses planners of being self-serving and of writing many general plans good only to line the wallets of planning firms and architects. In reading a handful of cities' plans – which cities? we'll get to that in a minute – he and his graduate business students at Syracuse University concluded that planners are blind to the forces of demographics and macroeconomics. 

Schramm writes:

measures of city health that are clearly more faddish than practical. None set a goal of full employment or even mentioned unemployment.  Poverty was a missing word.  What discussion existed regarding economics was confined to making a specific kind of neighborhood, often called an arts district, to provide propinquity for the city's "creative" population.  If a link to the economy is mentioned it usually is a passing reference to new and small businesses that would grow up if, again, the physical environment was engineered in a specific way. 

In short, writes Schramm, planners who believe that their job is merely to create a functioning built environment are shirking their duties as captains of economic development and reduction of poverty. They "have no idea of how the complexities of dynamic economies actually are sparked to life." He also accuses planners of ignoring demographic projections; he writes, "none of the plans ever spoke of what the city's population might be at the end of the planning period!" Schramm would replace all of those arts districts with facilities for "scale production…(which) is the only path to growth and urban futures that hold the potential to restore communities" – as if American cities will be saved by Chrysler and U.S. Steel.

Planners' Hidden Agenda

As debatable as Schramm's conception of the 21st century economy may be, many of his concerns are so obvious as to be implicit in the work of many contemporary planners.

When, for instance, New Urbanists speak of vibrancy and street life, they're not assuming that everyone is strolling around because they're unemployed. When developers build dense mixed-use developments, they do so in the hope that thriving businesses will fill those ground floors (and that the residents above will have more disposable income because they're spending less on cars). When progressive planners talk of making cities "better," they do so with the conviction that improvements in quality of life lead to economic prosperity -- and vice-versa.

Plenty of contemporary plans address exactly the concerns that Schramm raises. Take Santa Monica's relatively new, much-admired general plan, for instance: it's chock-full of rhetoric about stoking the local economy and supporting local businesses. Same for San Jose's new Envision 2040 plan. But those are just two examples from two cities. Planners certainly aren't enlightened enough to pursue that line of thinking on a really large scale, are they?

As it turns out, they are. 

California's Senate Bill 375, for instance, requires cities to do exactly what Schramm and his students advise. A huge component of SB 375 is based on demographic projections, with the goal of reducing per-capita greenhouse gas emissions according to targets for the years 2030 and 2050. It addresses the relationship between the location of jobs and that of housing – a key factor in cultivating a healthy workforce. The models that the Air Resources Board and the state's "Big Four" metropolitan planning organizations are using to meet these targets incorporate piles of data to this effect. Under SB 375, every metropolitan planning organization (MPO) must publish and abide by a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) and every city in those planning areas has to address the SCSs in their plans.

Granted, SB 375 isn't expressly intended to promote business -- it has far more important goals -- but it most certainly takes the state's economic climate into account. 

Anyone worried about demography might also check out California's Regional Housing Needs Assessment program, designed to ensure that every city in the state absorbs its fair share of new low- and moderate-income housing. (Whether cities follow these rules usually depends on politics, with conservatives often opposing growth.) Most sensible cities not only plan housing accordingly; they also plan for amenities and services. So if a city expects a population increase in a certain neighborhood, it might also add a fire station or a park. Schramm, however, sees fire stations as symbols of cronyism and waste: "every plan discusses the importance of new buildings for fire station," he writes, disapprovingly.

Maybe the problem on the local level is that planners are fixated on the arts, to the detriment of other economic activities. 

 In many places, these industries probably play a smaller role in today's urban economies than boosters like Richard Florida and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett would like to admit. Then again, the arts is often shorthand for a much larger, and vibrant, creative industries, ranging from entertainment, to video games, to interior design -- but not, alas, to "scale production." But the reason that the arts have become an avatar for a new wave of urban planning is that urban forms that are good for the arts and artists may also be good for all sorts of other industries and residents. What's good for Banksey may be good for America. 

Schramm also lambasts these plans for not calculating the costs of cities' pensions, claiming "not one of the plans discussed…the unfunded costs of pensions for retired and current public servants." Why not tell planners to cure cancer too? 

While pension obligations gravely threaten some cities, I'm not sure why they are planners' problems or how planners would solve them. Conflicting obligations within a city -- between, say, building a nicer city and paying long-term debts -- need to be worked out at the level of city government. Then again, Schramm isn't a big fan of any sort of government. If planners have their way, "government…(will have) control over all aspects of the built environment." He doesn't mean that in a good way. 

Shining Exemplars

How did Schramm and his students reach these conclusions? Is the state of planning as bleak as they imply? Of course it is – if you base your conclusions on Syracuse, Stockton, and…wait for it…Detroit.

(Schramm does not name these cities in his Forbes piece, but he was candid enough to reveal them to me via email.)

Anyone who knows anything about contemporary American urbanism already know what I'm going to say. Judging the planning profession according to some of America's most famously destitute (and bankrupt) cities is like judging lending by Countrywide, finance by Lehman Brothers, international banking by the Libor scandal, and entrepreneurship by the shuttered frozen yoghurt shop down the block. Schramm's students might as well have thrown in Atlantis too. 

If Schramm had presented his Forbes piece explicitly as a study of cities that have run aground, and his Forbes editors had titled it as something like "Bad Planning and Urban Downfall," then he might have ended up with a compelling, nuanced commentary about the common traits that poorly planned cities share. The graduate course at Syracuse that gave rise to his article is called "Fast Cities / Failed Cities," so Schramm can clearly distinguish between good and bad. His students, though, seem to have taken a cursory, one-week look at a complex, generational issue and then rendered a sweeping decision that vilifies an entire field.

Regarding Detroit in particular, Schramm presents a curious argument. He writes that Detroit's general plan is a failure because "Detroit remains hopeful that someday 2.3 million people will live there once again." First of all, a lousy land use plan is the least of Detroit's worries. Secondly, even if Detroit's general plan does refer to a target population of 2 million, that just means that the document disagrees with literally every single member of the greater planning field. That's probably to be expected from a city that elected a criminal as its mayor.

Fortunately for Schramm, if he thinks that planners should figure out how to plan for a smaller Detroit, then he should delighted.  That's exactly what planners are doing. (Whether they can pull off such a monumental task, and generate the political will and financial resources to implement it, is another story.)

Job Creators

I have no doubt that Schramm would give great advice to an entrepreneur, such as the mom and pop who are setting up a small business, whether on a Main Street, in a mini-mall, or in a co-working space in a converted flour mill. He would likely fight like crazy to help that business succeed. He seems like that type of guy.

I'm also willing to wager that the first thing he would tell clients is to be true to their vision no matter what impediments lie in the way. 

Schramm surely knows that no entrepreneur, anywhere, creates his or her own competitive landscapes -- nor their literal landscape. To imply that any plan or planning decision could undermine ingenuity, hard work, and guts is an insult to the spirit of entrepreneurship. The best entrepreneurs know how to read existing conditions, adapt to changing circumstances, and anticipate what lies ahead. The availability of one kind of office space or another should not dissuade them.

Of course, Schramm is right that to say that planning and business are interconnected. But it's a two-way street. Schramm overlooks the very real role that business plays in creating plans (and, often, in circumventing them). I can't imagine a city in which the business community does not have its fingerprints all over the general plan. Many chambers of commerce have lobbyists dedicated to planning and development. So, if a plan isn't business-friendly, whose fault is it?

These days, it takes a real lack of imagination to disregard the ways that a pleasant urban environment can stoke economic development. But if business groups are as skeptical as Schramm is, then there's a raft of literature  -- dating back at least to Jane Jacobs' The Economy of Cities – that suggests that cities built on the principles of smart growth will be friendlier to business.  Density creates more interactions, makes labor and customers more accessible, and can make people infinitely happier and more energized. It's not a coincidence that some of the densest cities in the world are also some of the most prosperous cities in the world.

Even so. Whether you're in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or San Francisco -- or not to mention San Bernardino, Riverside or Stockton -- no one ever said that business was easy. And neither is planning.