The Power of Plans - in Shenzhen, Dublin and New York

Posted on: 15 August 2023 by Ian Wray in Blog

In three unmissable podcasts with international guests, Profs. Lucy Natarajan at UCL and Ian Wray at the Heseltine Institute explore what makes for a powerful plan.

I’ve long been fascinated by the question of implementation, of how successful infrastructure and development plans work. Maybe this was because there seemed to be so little convincing literature on the topic – academics and media alike seem to prefer putting failure rather than success under the microscope. Maybe it was born of the frustrations of being a practising chief planner for over a decade. Whatever the motivation, my obsession has produced two books, the first looking at great British plans, the second their American equivalents. And the academic tide does seem to be turning a little. The brilliant Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg, who made his name as an arch critic of mega plans, has now started to focus on success and what we can learn from it (I don’t of course pretend to be responsible for Professor Flyvbjerg’s conversion).

So when Assoc Professor Lucy Natarajan at UCL asked me to collaborate on a special edition of the journal Built Environment – titled The Power of Plans - I took only a little persuasion. Commissioning an international set of case studies on plans that have been shown to work, we asked authors to give us their insights on how they worked and why. The papers ranged widely in scope and geography - from Europe, to India, to China and the USA - and include a great piece on Liverpool’s long turnaround from Professor Michael Parkinson.

To pursue the debate a little further we collaborated with planning podcaster Sam Stafford to explore three of those case studies in discussion with their authors. These discussions generated some rich insights, alongside moments of humour which really reveals how plans and their makers tick. My favourite moment has to come from Professor Bob Yaro, the guiding light behind decades of planning for New York. Yaro’s team had just seen off one of Mayor Bloomberg’s big mayoral projects. Next day Bob is at an event and the waters clear as Bloomberg crosses to room, headed directly for Yaro…

Sam Stafford’s podcasts aim is ‘to cover the breadth of the sector both in terms of topics of conversation and in terms of guests with different experiences and perspectives’. We were therefore delighted when Sam agreed to make this mini-series with us, in what he terms as an ‘international triumvirate’.

There are three episodes, all of which you can click on to below. We hope you enjoy them and that they will encourage you to read the original papers in Built Environment, which you will find referenced along with other key readings on the podcast site.

Episode 1 covers Shenzhen, one of China’s fastest growing cities. In a recording made online in June 2023, Ian Wray and Sam Stafford talk about Shenzhen with Professor Mee Kam Ng. Shenzhen is a city that, when designated as China’s first Special Economic Zone in the late 1970s was a border town with a population of less than 250,000 and is now the country’s ‘Silicon Valley’, with a population of over 17 million.”

https://pod.co/50-shades-of-planning/the-power-of-plans-shenzhen

Episode 2 looks at Dublin. In a conversation recorded at the end of November 2022, Sam Stafford and Lucy Natarajan talk to perhaps the UK’s leading transport planning consultant Jim Steer about Dublin, where town planning in the 1960s and 1970s was not kind, with large-scale road building to serve car-dependent suburbs and little investment in public transport. In the early 1990s an EU-funded Dublin Transportation Initiative put the city on a new path…”

https://pod.co/50-shades-of-planning/the-power-of-plans-dublin

Finally, episode 3 turns to New York, still perhaps the most dynamic and powerful city in the world. In a conversation recorded at the end of November 2022, Sam Stafford and Lucy Natarajan talk to Bob Yaro about New York, a city that has experienced rapid growth, rapid decline and an impressive economic turnaround. New York has long been planned on a city region scale, but the origin of its series of great plans lies in a small number of planning pioneers and philanthropists.

That economic turnaround has much to do, despite it not having a statutory function, with the Regional Planning Association, with which Bob is heavily involved and whose role he describes as ‘advancing ideas whose time has not yet come’.

https://pod.co/50-shades-of-planning/the-power-of-plans-new-york

Links to the special edition of Built Environment ‘The Power of Plans’

Wray, I. & Natarajan, L.(2022) The Power of Plans. Built Environment, 48(4), pp. 476–616.

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alex/benv/2022/00000048/00000004

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/alex/benv/2022/00000048/00000004/art00002

Wray, I. & Natarajan, L.(2022) The Power of Plans. Built Environment, 48(4), pp. 477–492.

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/alex/benv/2022/00000048/00000004/art00008

Ng, M.K. (2022) From a Special Economic Zone to a smart sustainable city: the power of strategic spatial planning in Shenzhen. Built Environment, 48(4), pp. 581–593.