The evolution of neighborhood planning since the early 20th century

The Global Carbon Project, Japan

For over a century, urban planners and visionaries have developed planned neighborhoods as
remedies for problems caused by unregulated urbanization. Today, neighborhood planning has
broadened its traditional focus on place-making and quality of life to incorporate many key ideas
that are grouped under the rubric of sustainable development. Developing sustainable
neighborhoods can be regarded as an important step towards solving some of the major global
environmental change issues. This is because the neighborhood level is large enough to investigate
and influence various socioeconomic and environmental forces that shape cities, yet small enough to
coordinate bottom-up initiatives and implement plans.

five major planning movements: Garden City, Neighborhood Unit, Modernism, Neo-traditionalism
and Eco-urbanism

While Eco-urbanism as the most recent movement intends to contribute to solving problems
associated with global environmental change, historical problems such as social equity have not yet
been completely addressed. Several reasons for this gap between theory and practice of
neighborhood planning have been mentioned in the reviewed literature. A recurrent criticism is the
overreliance of planners on physical and technological determinism. Despite differences between
neighborhood planning movements in terms of their origins, all movements have sought to
revolutionize the status quo through physical design and focus on modifications in urban form. All
have failed to acknowledge that the process of change is not easy to control. Planners and
policymakers should be aware of the limits of physical and technological solutions to social problems
and avoid subordinating social factors to physical and technological ones. The fact that Eco-urbanism
uses the sustainability concept as a guiding framework provides an opportunity to avoid being
caught up in the fallacy of physical and technological determinism.

At its core, the concept of sustainability requires a paradigm shift from physical determinism to
sustainability-based pluralism. Pluralism means not only proper consideration of the various
dimensions of sustainability, but also providing a platform for various stakeholders to participate in
the planning and decision-making process. To be in accordance with the sustainability concept,
neighborhood planning should move away from being prescriptive, take into account the context-
specificities of different locations, and acknowledge that different social, economic, environmental
and technological factors are mutually reinforcing and should not be pursued in isolation.

The influence of market forces was found to be another major reason for limited success of planning
movements. Obtaining institutional support for plan implementation could be a strategy to address
this issue. New Urbanism has garnered such support through HOPE VI and HOZ programs and its
success story can be emulated by other neighborhood planning movements. It is hoped that
planners and researchers will find further solutions for reducing the influence of market forces.

Conclusion

Neighborhood planning is recognized as essential for achieving sustainable development. As Table 2

indicates, over time the scope of the guiding principles of the movements has broadened to include
more sustainability criteria. Eco-urbanism as the most recent movement tries to integrate various
sustainability principles into neighborhood development. It should be viewed by planners as a
movement that can guide creation of sustainable and climate resilient neighborhoods.

A major knowledge gap is that, while carbon discourse is an essential component of Eco-urban
movements, the focus has been more on emissions in the operation phase rather than on life cycle
emissions. Although an Eco-urban project may be low-carbon when completed, carbon emitted
during the extraction, construction and demolition phases should also be taken into account. Future
work needs to be carried out to investigate whether Eco-urban projects are still low-carbon when
lifetime emissions are taken into account. Such a research may provide insights for further
development of neighborhood planning movements.

Table 1: Main features of different movements

Table 2: Degree of incorporation of sustainability related criteria in the studied movements

Highlights

•Literature on five major neighborhood planning movements has been reviewed.

•Urbanization and climate change have affected the evolution of neighborhood planning.

•There is a mismatch between rhetoric and reality of neighborhood planning.

•Neighborhood planning movements have been influenced by market mechanisms.

•Planning needs a paradigmatic shift from physical determinism to pluralism.