Beware of the Wrong Client
How Well Do You Know Your Client Group?
While planners need to expand their knowledge of belief systems, and avoid the trap of utopianism, they still need to work within the context of a larger group or organization. Planners have little or no independent authority to make decisions – they are not the boss. They work for chief executives, committees, councils, colleagues, and so on. Usually planners have more than one client. Moreover, the client group will have a wide variety of beliefs and attitudes about cities and planning. This does not mean planners have no political power – far from it.
Planners actually exercise political influence in their role as trusted advisors to others. The role of “advisor” is not the privilege of city planners alone. Many other professions occupy the same key positions as advisers in fields of finance, construction, infrastructure, social welfare, health, education, economics, security, and so on. For many planners, including myself, this is a desirable state of affairs. But it is also complex and, at times, fraught with conflicts.
These photographs portray three projects which were all implemented due only to the persistent commitment and leadership of the client:. The top two pictures show the children’s waterfront splash pad and playground in Kenosha (1987) donated by Donna Wolf Steigerwaldt, CEO of Jockey International; the lower left picture shows the model of the Park East Freeway corridor created under the leadership of Mayor John O. Norquist (2003); the lower right image shows the original model of O’Donnell Park, created under the leadership of County Executive William F. O’Donnell (1987). All of these projects included many discussions and changes made due to the goals of “good” clients balanced with key planning goals of the professional planners.
When a planning project starts someone brings up the question “what’s the goal”? They may call the “goal” something else like a “mission”, “objective”, “big picture”, “general intent” or just an answer to the question “why are we doing this”? This type of discussion can last a few minutes or even several weeks as the planner, or planning team, tries to configure a good answer.
Who calls the shots? When a new project begins, who sets the mission? Most importantly, planners must be sure that their personal professional goals (their own interpretation of their professional mission) stays congruent with those of other individuals and groups who have influence and authority. If correspondence between the planner’s goals and those of other key decision makers is lacking, then planners face difficult choices: seek another job; reduce their commitment to their current job; go along with decisions they consider inappropriate (or even unethical); or try to mitigate the conflict. Most planners have experienced all of these circumstances over the course of their career.
When a client group’s mission statement does not fit well with the public interest then planners face a dilemma. Planners need to find a way to mitigate actions that seem pointed toward a wrong or misguided mission. How serious is the apparent conflict? Can planners change the higher-level mission statement of the organization? Should they just ignore the dilemma? Within the context of a conflict, can planners reinterpret parts of the mission statement in ways that favor the public interest? Conversely should they rethink their view of the public interest in ways that bring it closer to the organization’s mission statement?
If There Is No “Best” Approach, Then What Do You Do?
Once planners have a reasonable understanding of their client group and goals, they still must advocate for good decisions. Advocating for good planning decisions requires enormous skill and knowledge.
As a planner what are you advocating? Not sure? Don’t know exactly? It depends? Prior to the 1960s and during the modernist era in architecture there seems to have been a general attitude that there was a single best way to plan. Perhaps this was not just the idea of a perfect city or a utopian city, but nonetheless the idea that there was a singular direction which should be pursued.
During the 1960s and the civil rights movement the idea that there was a singular best approach evaporated completely. This moment was the beginning of so-called “advocacy” planning in which it became evident that planners represented different sets of individuals or communities for whom they acted as “advocates” in much the same way that attorneys were advocates for their clients. “Advocacy” planning soon took on the issues of social justice – an issue which remains today as a legitimate, often underemphasized part of the planning profession.
One of the initial journal articles that formed the theoretical basis for advocacy planning was entitled “A Choice Theory of Planning” (1962) by Paul Davidoff and Thomas Reiner. This article shifted the paradigm for planners. No longer was there such a thing as the “one best way”. After this moment, many planners recognized that they could not create utopian or perfect plans, but they could still “do their best”.
The new paradigm made it clear that there was no such thing as “the best”. If the “perfect” was the enemy of the “good”, then the “best” was the enemy of “the choice”. There is always a choice of directions, and planners had to identify a preferred choice and advocate for that direction. Such advocacy planning soon became a commonplace part of the planning profession. The more important lesson – and the point of this essay – is that planners always face a range of community choices. While client groups embrace a broad array of positions, within those options there are still a limited set of alternatives for planners. We cannot avoid making a choice among planning options – we advocate whether we like it or not.
For decades, in most cities, planners were always assumed to be advocates for city government (the mayor and/or the city council). With advocacy planning, there were more choices and the plans, like communities and neighborhoods, could be competitive. Robert Moses’ plans for freeways in the New York City region were clearly in competition with those of local neighborhood planners in lower Manhattan. Specific groups – especially minority groups, women, people of color, and others – were not the beneficiaries of new planning concepts. In fact planning projects such as urban renewal and freeway expansions clearly harmed such groups.
The debate over social justice, and “bad” plans, goes back even further to the formation of a professional planning discipline in the early 1900s and the work of the so-called “muckrakers” and journalists at that time who pointed out “bad” plans. In the 1960s the first wave of “advocacy” planners represented areas occupied by neighborhoods that were poor, black, and disfavored by those in power for whatever reason. While unfair outcomes have long been recognized it is only recently (more than half a century later) that planning programs and resources have begun to plan for more effective mitigation of such “bad” plans.
In every city there are always two or more political sides to the issues. It did not take long for a sense of disenfranchisement, that inspired advocacy for poor communities, to be felt by communities that were wealthy, already entitled, mostly white, and exclusive. Goals advocated by residents (and planners) in these wealthier, more privileged places often became synonymous with the saying “NIMBY” meaning “not-in-my-backyard”. Planners began to ask, “for whom were we advocating?”
Who Votes On Plans?
Today planners have a responsibility to future communities – to people who have not yet been born; to people who will move into a city, years from now; to people from the past who helped shape the community. Past, present, and future communities all deserve a clear voice. A few years ago at a conference on community participation a question was asked regarding who, as planners, we should represent in large public meetings. My answer, which I still believe, is that as planners “we represent everyone who is not in the room”.
Planners must find a way to give all parties that clear voice. This becomes especially difficult when community engagement procedures emphasize those with an immediate “special” interest” who represent their interests aggressively and often with great political skill. All of the other parties, who are not present, must be represented by planners who must speak for those absent from the decision-making process (online or in-person). If we advocate for our community then which community is that? The one today or the one in twenty years, or the one we remember from history.
Advocacy of local missions can vary significantly. The far left image, a plan for the center of Hales Corners, was created for a private civic group that chose not advocate for their ideas at the City Council and the project ended (1990). Second from left is the plan for significant riverfront homes clearly in the neighborhood’s backyard, that was implemented successfully with only minor neighborhood representation (1992) The two images on the far right advertised electrons in the late 1960s for neighborhood representatives in Baltimore’s Model Cities investments but positive outcomes were far from successful (1968).
Predicaments regarding advocacy often lead to the question “are you planning for the wrong client?” Put another way “is the organization paying for your work seeking plans that serve the public interest?” Many planners have experienced working for agencies whose missions may not be in the public interest, or at least not “completely” in the public interest. Sometimes it is seen as a means to a short-term goal like getting a new project initiated. Here are some examples in which planners may be advocating for the wrong client (all of these examples represent actual circumstance in which I have participated):
Your client requires you to select a development options that clearly has racist implications which do not serve the public interest.
Your client requires you to advocate for a private sector investment which, if located elsewhere, would better serve the larger public interest.
Your client requires you to emphasize increasing the property tax base, but the public interest would be better served by balancing increase in tax base with increases in affordable housing.
Your client requires you to focus on the design quality of a public place, but the full public interest would lead to focus on reducing design costs and shifting resources to other public needs.
Your client requires you to provide a visibly “innovative” concept when the public interest leads to a more traditional solution.
Your client requires you to curtail part of a comprehensive planning process due to budget limits, but the plan requires additional work to fulfill the public interest.
Your client wants you to engage another consultant with a national reputation and much higher costs instead of hiring local firms that may yield better outcomes.
Reading through the ethical guides advocated by the planning professionals can often help planners avoid these dilemmas through education, better mediation and similar communication techniques.
How Do Planners Address Mission/Client Conflicts?
To approach internal planning conflicts that derive from an organization’s mission, planners have to evaluate the mission in depth. A recent dissertation by one of my colleagues, Kristian Vaughn, undertook and in-depth analysis of sixty years of housing policies in Milwaukee entitled Milwaukee's Housing Fracture: Studying Housing Submarket Disinvestment with City Information Modeling (CIM) in Milwaukee's Inner Core Housing Submarkets, 1910-1970. All of the policies noted in his study offered missions aimed at social change. Many of these missions failed due “ignorance, incompetence, or malice.” One need only look at the professional planning record of urban renewal, redlining, and freeway construction to see many of the mission failures in practice. Moreover, many of these failures occurred throughout the United States as well as other nations that adopted “American” policies (also based on ignorance, incompetence, or malice).
In the Park East freeway project (upper left) conflicts between City and County government were ironed out slowly and not always to the benefit of the mission (2003). The upper right image, “Honest Ed’s” highlighted store in Toronto (1970s) seems to have avoided conflict with local rules government aesthetic issues. The kiosk in the Piazza San Marcos (1976) comports with tourist regulations at the time, but conflicts with the rules set by the Doges in earlier centuries prohibiting commercial use of a religious plaza. The Chicago townhomes set atop parking structure (1970s) emphasizes, but does not resolve, the never-ending conflict of parking and street-friendly design.
Did planners fail to reject or revise the various missions they were asked to achieve? The short answer is “yes”. In some cases planners were the inventors and proponents of ill-fated missions. In other cases planners simply had to follow missions or policies as they spread from city to city. Again, these failures were usually due to ignorance, incompetence, malice or some combination of negative forces.
My professional journey began in the 1960s. Since then planners have participated in numerous policy debates and conflicts. Much of this turmoil has been public, hoping to change misguided missions through external political pressure. When, however, external opposition to misguided missions does not work, then internal – behind-the-scenes – opposition and conflict mitigation may work partially.
Advocating change from inside an organization can be extraordinarily challenging and often fails. In the end, there is no single best approach to fixing bad missions in urban policy – redirecting missions requires experience, a wide range of communication skills, and an effective team of people (both formal groups and informal networks) who can make it happen.
A well-crafted mission statement – especially with regard to a specific project or organizational task – can help avoid unnecessary or unproductive arguments by finding a concrete and practical consensus. A concrete mission statement, using everyday language, will be more useful as a project unfolds. This may be politically difficult, but it is much more effective.
Finding A Way Through The Maze
Cities, and all the places within them – neighborhoods, districts, and corridors -- compete with each other. While mission statements should lead the discussion of obvious conflicts, such statement should avoid oversimplification of issues. Put another way, mission statements should not “dumb-down” ideas because they are hard to explain. Rather a mission statement should lead to better explication of issues. Mission statements should not over-promise solutions but can indicate future attempts to find difficult solutions, along with the recognition of the risks involved. In my practice we often identify a need for mission statements to lead to “feasible visions” as opposed to “palliative delusions”.
We often see plans in which all the goals, as developed in response to a mission statement, appear to be achieved easily. Conversely, in some plans the goals are so excessive that none can be achieved easily. Both extremes are counterproductive. The mission statement should lead to a range of goals, from those that can be achieved easily (to instill local confidence and satisfaction in doing a plan) to goals that are extremely difficult to achieve (to set an agenda which, when clients decide to stretch their ability, can be achieved above and beyond local expectations). My mentor for my dissertation in Cornell’s urban planning doctoral program (Barclay Jones), was reputed to say, “you can deal with problems you can solve or problems that are important.” Mission statements should lead to both.
The “maze” represents my favorite metaphor for the challenge of solving planning problems. Mazes can be fun, appealing, and lead to positive experiences as well as deeply unsatisfying outcomes. This maze in Williamsburg (1980) shows how the components of a maze need not be unappealing, that the process of proceeding through the maze requires mindfulness, but it is also unyielding. It may be faster to begin at the end, but the walls are often impenetrable.
So where is the planner in all of this? Do planners, in their best moments, point out the foolishness of creating the public square in the flood zone, the shopping street without business, the city with no means of survival, the comprehensive plan that is not comprehensible, the complete street with no activity? How have some planners gone beyond the misfortune of being called the Village Idiot and actually become a recognized source of good ideas? Was it Jane Jacobs or Robert Moses? Was Jane Addams or Daniel Burnham or Frederick Law Olmsted?
There is a view that suggests that extremes in planning can help us learn. Unfortunately, learning from mistakes often occurs at the expense of a population forced to live in an inhospitable, if not deadly conditions. Consider the creation of environmental super fund sites – they did not appear by magic but came about through local procedures for planning and development. Planned urban renewal destroyed neighborhoods. Planned urban freeways harmed many communities. All of these errors were planned. Planners must avoid making bad cities. I think the answer lies in words like conservatism, incrementalism, balance, and the avoidance of extremes.
Unlike real mazes, like the one in the photograph, the mazes faced by planners have many more dead ends, some have no solution, usually the walls change constantly, and the barriers consist of regulations, procedures, and political decisions, none of which are certain.
Topic Summary
How Well Do You Know Your Client Group?
If There Is No “Best” Approach, Then What Do You Do?
Who Votes On Plans?
How Do Planners Address Mission/Client Conflicts?
Finding A Way Through The Maze