Upon first reading “A Region at Risk”, I really got a sense of how slippery city planning can be. Where one thing goes right, another goes wrong. And often the solving of one problem causes another one –such as how the formation of the first plan necessitated the creation of the second  (Yaro, Hiss 2). It seemed the members of the RPA were continuously facing new problems, and were consistently addressing them. Whether they were population density, to the rise of suburbia. And of course, in their own words, the RPA’s intentions were purely noble. They sought to “improve the quality of life” (6) for all of the city’s inhabitants, and even provided a nifty graph to show how by focusing on “economy, equity and environment” would allow them to do so. While reading the article, it’s almost impossible to detect that the author’s are pushing a certain narrative, or that they might have an ulterior motive.

Reading “Planning and the Narrative of Threat” helped me put the first reading into perspective. In this chapter, Professor Larson details the planning and strategizing that go behind plan proposals. Robert Moses, for example, is notorious for hand picking sources and fabricating statistics in order to make his ideas more palatable to those in power (Larson 60). Other proposals, such as the ones put forth by Jane Jacobs, seek to gain favor by creating a do-or-die dichotomy, or a “narrative of threat”, as Professor Larson puts it. The narrative of threat is a rhetorical device used across the board, and in urban planning in particular. In Professor Larson’s words, urban planners often construct a world in which “the city is under siege and its very ability to survive has been rendered uncertain by some combination of malevolent forces…” ( 61). This “politics of fear” isn’t very hard for me to wrap my head around, as it is something that is so prevalent in political discord, especially now with the Presidential elections right around the corner. In the RPA’s third plan, they warn of impending doom for the city if it fails to abide by the framework they lay out in their plan. And although they back it up with facts and figures, I feel as though they may have inflated the problem a fair bit to lend importance to their proposals. 

Initially, I found myself agreeing with a lot of points put up by the authors of “A Region at Risk”. One for example, is the idea that “the economies, societies and environments of all the communities in the Tri-State Metropolitan region are intertwined, transcending arbitrary political divisions.” (Yaro, Hiss 6) It makes sense to me to zoom out when looking at issues facing urban areas, because in areas as congested and connected as cities, it doesn’t make sense to look at problems as though they are existing in a vacuum.

However, almost as important as the ideas are the people who propose them, and what they stand to gain from the implementation of these ideas. In this case, the RPA was comprised of an “elite group of globally oriented…industry leaders.” And the ideas they suggested “prioritized their needs, from lowering regulatory barriers and upgrading workforce skills to retaining and attracting highly skilled professional talent…” (Larson 67). I can forgive them for thinking of their own benefit in building their plans, mainly because it’s not unexpected or surprising.

 

 

 

Additional Sources: http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2013-08-12/regional-plan-association-civic-planning-model-new-york