RESEARCH General Government

CITY DEVELOPMENT
Comprehensive planning should yield to variety of plans, scholar says

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

7/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois urban and regional planning professor Lew Hopkins says that if there’s a sacred cow in his profession it’s the comprehensive plan.

"There’s a convention in planning that professes that what it means to plan a city is to do one plan, for a long period of time – say 20 years – and assume that when you’re done with the plan, the correct thing to do is to make the city look like the plan. And if everybody agrees, it will happen."

In fact, says Hopkins, whose book "Urban Development: The Logic of Making Plans" is being issued this month by Island Press, this ideal has been so successfully promoted by planners that citizens have come to view the comprehensive plan as the do-all, end-all tool for urban planning as well.

In the other ring, he said, are the academics – people like himself, who have a hand in training future planning professionals. "Among academic planners, one version is to reject the notion that plans are important at all," Hopkins said. From their perspective, the planner’s most critical contribution to the planning process is to act as a negotiator, sorting things out one thing at a time.

Hopkins maintains that the reality of how cities actually map their future lies somewhere in between. And instead of relying solely on a single, comprehensive plan, most cities function and grow through the development of lots of plans. Those plans are drafted by any number of subsets of local government – from sanitary districts to commissions focused on transportation and land use.
Hence, Hopkins said, "the conclusion is that we should make lots of plans. This is the way it’s always been. It’s normal. Real plans are big and little, support private and public decisions, and affect decisions through information, not directly through authority."

The UI professor opens his new book with a case study in which the boundaries of two Central Illinois communities – Champaign and Mahomet – are gradually expanding in ways that will likely bring them even closer together in the future. To forge a plan best suited for the coexistence of residential, industrial, agricultural and developers’ interests along this corridor, the two communities and the county jointly hired a planning consultant to work with all of the players.

"The Mahomet Corridor Plan is in many ways typical of everyday practice," Hopkins writes. "It makes sense in terms of the explanations developed in this book about why and how plans are made. It is not typical, however of conventional ideas about plans."

Another unconventional case study in the book focuses on plans developed by Hopkins’ students for the city of Taylorville, Ill. The result was a non-fixed diagram, rather than the customary land-use map with multicolored grids denoting current and future land use. The diagram included several dotted lines designating multiple options for future development, which depended on several variables yet to be determined by the community, as well as decisions by state and county governments.