Takeaway #1 – “This will solve everything.” Comprehensive plans usually fizzle and fail because of impossible expectations
Takeaway #2 – “We’re not ready to move forward just yet.” Comprehensive plans also fail because of the inability to negotiate, compromise, and be comfortable with slim majority vote.
Takeaway #3 – “I don’t see what you mean.” Comprehensive plans suffer from a lack of visualization; key concepts need clear illustrations.
Bonus Takeaway – “This must solve everything.” No comp plan can do it all. Tradeoffs are inescapable. For the plan to be strategic, and truly effective, it must embrace the trade-offs that make it so.
Consider this scenario: you are the resident of a city that is struggling with the costs and challenges of growth. It seems new development has popped up everywhere . Five years ago, the suburban highway corridor leading out of the downtown was mostly surrounded by greenfields. Today? It’s apartments, mixed-used, and loads of traffic. And speaking of downtown, it was once quiet on the weekends but has gained a proper nightlife with all the new bars and restaurants. There’s more on the way, too, because the old post office has been razed and a four story hotel is being built in its place. Four stories! No one would have imagined any of this in 2018.
It is getting out of hand. Things are changing too much and too fast. And it’s all guided by a set of policies and plans that are at least twenty years old, completely irrelevant, and totally ineffective for all that is happening today. Something has to change. The city has to get a handle on all this and stop the chaos before it’s too late.
What is a resident to do?
To start, you share your concerns with the local planning director. She listens carefully and then informs you, politely, that your ideas are easier said than done.
After all, the city can’t just stop people from developing their property. Not when it’s all in accordance to the plans and policies that exist. Sure, those plans and policies are out of date but that doesn’t make it illegal to grow as the city has been growing. To fix this requires a process. People need to talk, get clear on the issues and goals, forge some agreements on how to move forward, and memorialize it in a planning document. That plan serves as the basis for revising the policies that govern the growth. That plan gives the city a defensible way to manage things in a different way.
Thus, the critical path is clear: work with the city to create a new plan, then create new policy, then use the policy to stop the slow chaos unfolding around you.
Again, easier said than done.
Back to the plan. What kind of plan is it? The city calls it the “Comprehensive Plan.” It is a big, thick document that carefully lays out a set of goals and objectives for how the built environment will evolve. You’ve never read the document (it is 400+ pages) and you feel like you don’t have to. Whatever it says is irrelevant. The thing is over 20 years old.
Time to replace it. Time to fix all this. Time to set the city on a new, better path.
Your next step takes you to the city council. At its next meeting, you share your point of view and are delighted to find that everyone agrees. In fact, the city has already funded the project, selected a consulting firm to assist, and is currently seeking members for its project steering committee.
Serendipity!
They ask you to join. You heartily agree. And thus begins your foray into comprehensive planning, the biggest and most well-known function in the urban planning profession. You want to do your best as a member of the committee. You want to make a difference. You want to get things right.
To help you do so, this article provides three critical examples of what you, your fellow committee members, and the city’s talented staff team should not do. Again, this is about what you should not do. Below are the three most common, most destructive ways in which comprehensive plans fail.
CAUSE #1 FOR FAILURE
Faulty expectations
Ten years ago, I wrote a piece for Planetizen.com <link> that highlighted all the things planning will and won’t do. The insights hold up and I stand by them today. Even so, it was a difficult thing to write and even more difficult to read because we prefer to avoid these realities. So the unvarnished truth bears repeating:
By itself, planning will not make the city better.
By itself, planning will not solve problems.
There is a significant amount of nuance in all this so please bear with me. You can spot caveats in the statements. The phrase “by itself” is very important here. When people build a comprehensive plan, they often feel as if they are building the future. However, there is no actual construction. No literal bricks and sticks and concrete of any kind. Planning helps us create the vision but that is just the first step. Without the remaining steps, the plan won’t yield anything more than a lovely document of ideals that we wish would come true.
Everyone knows this yet we (myself included) can easily forget it. Doing so allows us to build up expectations of what will happen next. Spend 12-36 months writing a plan and you can’t help but think that you’ve reached some tremendous victory point. And yes, in a way, you have. But it’s just the beginning. In order for reality to arrive as you expect, you must proceed quickly to implementation. That means drafting new policies, new processes, and new money spent in places that otherwise will not see it.
The sad fact is that those additional steps do not always follow the comprehensive plan. And so, people will see the comp plan as a failure. They’ll forget that the plan only sets a direction. The actual steps to move along that direction require something else.
To avoid this classic mistake, be sure to set expectations from the onset. Make sure you know what a comprehensive plan is expected to do. Make sure you can see all the elements of successful implementation. Do your best to have a project plan that not only covers the who/what/when/where of creating the plan but also covers the details for implementing it.
CAUSE #2 FOR COMP PLAN FAILURE
Delays caused by Inadequate conflict resolution
“One’s judgment will diminish with prolonged deliberation.“
— Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Working with the community, I wrote an award-winning corridor plans in six months.
Working with the community, I wrote a comprehensive plan in thirteen months.
Both timeframes are blisteringly fast when compared to convention.
Every other plan I have written and/or overseen has taken significantly longer. Most recently, our team in Salem, Oregon developed a fantastic comprehensive plan in about three and a half years. The pandemic is partly to blame but we also had a lot—and I mean a lot—of outreach to build consensus on many new, bold ideas. Also, the final deliverable was not only the plan document but also many of the keystone policies that would create real change. The plan and its policies were adopted at the same time. So the lengthy timeframe was justifiable. It wasn’t necessary (in a parallel universe, the plan could have been with less time) but that’s okay.
It begs the question: how long is too long? There is no clear, absolute rule. A six-month corridor plan was perfect in Columbia, Tennessee, given the circumstances. And the 3+ year comp plan in Salem was a little lengthy but not detrimental. In both cases, the reason why the short and long timeframes work is the result of a single, critical element for success:
MOMENTUM
Most planning efforts start with a burst of excitement and possibility. Everyone’s interested, ready to go. We talk about problems, potential solutions, and look at all sorts of new ideas. Then comes the middle section of the project, where we often see debates get mired down into petty squabbles and old grudges among the usual players. Call it the “saggy middle” because it’s the part where grievances and arguments get hung onto a proverbial clothesline and the whole thing just … sags with the weight.
Momentum is effectively killed in this part of the process. There doesn’t seem to be an easy, absolute way to move on. Then comes the tedium of slow compromise. Then the vanity of wordsmithing. Then the petty nitpicks among various groups who don’t get everything their way. Finally, as compromise waters down the core ideas, the plan sortof shapes itself up to be a broad collection of vague objectives for which the consequences and desired outcomes are not really understood. The only thing we know by that point in the process is that people are done. Tired. Disappointed. Yet content. Sort of.
So the project ends.
It is the lack of decisiveness, and inability to resolve conflict, that causes this critical failure. A solution is desperately needed. However, a solution is not any easier.
To avoid this classic mistake, the team must set ground rules for facilitation. The team must also establish SMART goals that give everyone a basis for negotiation. Finally, there must be sufficient data to help people evaluate ideas and be open to solutions that don’t normally fit their comfort levels.
This must be practiced and repeated at every meeting to get people into the habit. A consultant (ahem) can help.
CAUSE #3 FOR COMP PLAN FAILURE
Lack of visualization
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
— Lewis Carroll
Today’s visualization software allows planners to communicate their ideas in very exciting ways. Yet, too many plans (especially comp plans) fail to deliver an actual, literal vision of what the city will become. It is an intimidating prospect, trying to draw the ideals onto a visual medium. We are often tempted to let people imagine whatever they want by sticking to broad terms like “sustainability” and “urbanism” without ever expressing them through illustration.
Also, the scale of a comp plan will lead us to think we can’t visualize the whole thing in a cohesive way anyhow. Our cities are too big to try to draw them out on 8.5 x 11 paper.
Yet, we must remember that a comp plan is made up of ideas. And those ideas need visualization for clearer understanding. People need to know what we’re talking about. For example, a recent comp plan suggested new, small-scale, walkable, vertical mixed-use hubs for its single-family neighborhoods.
What does that mean? To planners, it’s pretty obvious. But to many more people, “small-scale” is not a familiar concept. “Walkable” could mean sidewalks or mulch paths. And “vertical mixed-use” might suggest Starbucks and condos or it might mean a ten-story office building.
To be blunt, city planning is a unique field that requires art to be effective. There is no vision without visualization. Keep it conceptual. Keep it illustrative. In fact, keep it as simple as you can. Just don’t discount the importance.
BONUS! ONE MORE CAUSE FOR FAILURE
No talk of trade-offs
By itself, planning can’t improve the city. But it can improve our thinking. All it takes is a steady, intelligent conversation about trade-offs. If there is no talk of the trade-offs between different ideas, you’ll never see people deliver their best contributions. Perfectionism will set in. Less-perfect-but-achievable ideas will be tossed aside. Idealistic puritanism will hold sway and no genuine problem-solving, no negotiation, will emerge. There will be winners and losers and resentments all around.
There’s a hard truth that bears mention: a great comprehensive plan will not satisfy every interest. Instead, it will satisfy the underlying goals with the right balance of trade-offs.
To help the community see this more clearly, these projects must ingrain a clear sense of how trade-offs emerge in the built environment. It helps to show the community the most common trade-offs we find in this work. Engage with the public on these things with every meeting you have. Help them get to the next level of thinking, from rigid advocacy to flexible problem-solving.
Parameter 