In “ A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area” authors Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss discuss the founding of the Regional Plan Association (“RPA”). New York City was growing very fast and there needed to be a way to accommodate everyone. Lewis Mumford thought that instead of promoting growth, efforts should be made to “restrain development and deconcentrate the urban core” (Yaro, Hiss 1)—in other words, stop the growth of the city. However, Thomas Adams, the first planning director of the RPA argued that instead of stopping the growth, it should be accommodated by planning for the future growth of the city.. The goal of the RPA was to plan for the future of the Metropolitan area. Adams turned out to be correct, as evidenced by unsuccessful recent efforts to limit migration and economic development in places like Moscow or Beijing.

Professor Scott Larson in his book Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, notes that one of the ways that the regional planners like Robert Moses promoted his plans is by persuading business leaders and politicians that the city could only be sustained by using his plans. Robert Moses saw himself as a great planner. However, he used “planning…as an exercise in the mechanics of persuasion” (Larson 59). The constant persuasion is called “the narrative of threat,” or planners’ tendency to say their projects are essential to the future and promote fears that the city will fall apart if they don’t follow their projects or if the projects are not built. Lots of the early planners, like Robert Moses, only did planning for part of their job, but more of their job was spent persuading business leaders and politicians that their plans were the best possible plans. I think that while planning was important, if city planners such as Robert Moses and others could have focused more on a wide variety of opinions and taken them into consideration, he could edit his planning and make an even greater city. In addition, instead of spending so much time trying to persuade that his plan was so good, if more of the city planners saw their plans in the large planning of the city, they would be more likely to agree with him and not need persuading.

Jane Jacobs, however, argued that Moses’s version of city planning was destroying the city. “Ultimately, Jacobs was able to counter the Moses narrative with her assertion that it was Moses and other modernist planners meddling with the natural rhythms and designs of neighborhoods who were rendering cities unliveable” (Larson 61). Jane Jacobs’ viewpoint promoted sustainable cities because she wanted everyone to live together in the city. “The third regional plan…at its heart…is a ‘transit plan’ that is regional in scope, making it consistent with Moses, with much in it about city planning and community design that is derived directly from Jacobs” (Larson 70). This is a key point because of the importance of both Moses and Jacobs to the development of New York City.

Scott Campbell from the university of Michigan has postulated the same key factors of equity, environment, and economy, but he sees the intersection as “sustainable development” as compared to Yaro and Hiss’s “quality of life”. Campbell coins the term “planner’s struggle” for the conflicts that he sees amongst the 3 corners of the triangle.  He sees his formulation as the key to bring social equality into the equation. “Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice” (Journal of the American Planning Association).

 

Additional Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdcamp/Ecoeco/Greencities.html