When 'Plan' Is a Four-Letter Word

Planning and Education in a 'Hands-Off-My-Land' State

By David M. Simpson, AICP, and Alice L. Jones

How does planning fare in a hostile environment? The situation in Kentucky is one that may be familiar to many planners across the country — poorly planned urban growth that inspires a call for better control of development, yet the absence of community support or political will to pass planning-oriented legislation.

As with other states with a very strong personal property rights orientation, the planning profession is not a particularly glamorous one in Kentucky. The state is one of 16 with no accredited planning degree program at either the graduate or undergraduate level, although a master's in urban planning program was launched in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Louisville. Membership in the Kentucky Chapter of the American Planning Association (KAPA) is relatively small compared with states of similar land area or population size, and a "Smart Growth" bill introduced in the 2000 legislature was summarily assassinated by a coalition of homebuilders and county administrators before it ever left committee. Planning bills before the 2002 Kentucky legislature are given little chance at passing.

While this environment indicates less than ideal planning conditions, there was no real proof of the existing conditions because there has never been a survey of planning activity in the state. On behalf of the Kentucky Chapter of the American Planning Association, we undertook a survey to determine, among other issues, whether or not the state's current demand for planning expertise is being met by the region's universities. We found four common themes:

1. It is hard, if not impossible, to gather complete information about the state's planning
   units in an anti-planning environment.
2. Existing courses do not appear to match the needs of those planning units that did respond.
3. Informal networks and non-planners control much of the non-urban planning.
4. The culture at most academic institutions presents barriers that do not help.

Who's on First? What We (Don't) Know About Planning

KAPA's Executive Board in 1998 proposed a survey of all the state's planning commissions to gauge the need for professional development workshops, planning commissioner training, and other services. In consultation with KAPA's Professional Development Committee, author and KAPA board member Alice Jones developed a mail survey for distribution. The study was further seen as a way for the state's academic institutions to evaluate their role in planning education in the state.

What began as a study of what the state's planners and planning commissions do however, evolved into a study of where planners and planning commissions are — a question not originally considered for the study because no-one knew that ... well, that no one knew.

One month after the survey was mailed, 20 surveys had been completed and returned (out of 154 addresses provided by KAPA), and a dozen had been returned as undeliverable — the first indication that the list was not completely accurate. Through telephone follow-up it became apparent that many of the "missing in action" surveys had been passed around city halls and courthouses by head-scratching civil servants with no clue who should be handed an envelope addressed to "Planning or Zoning Administrator." Our objective of a 100 percent response by May 1999 was abandoned, and we began to concentrate our efforts on the question: Where are the active planning commissions in Kentucky?

What we knew in August of 1999 was just who didn't know about planners and planning in Kentucky: no one in the state capitol knew, KAPA didn't know, the academic institutions didn't know, and even the state's area development districts (ADDs) — the state agencies that contract with local communities to perform professional planning and development services — didn't know, although the ADD offices in the more populated areas were much better informed than were those in more rural areas.

Two years after that initial survey mailing, we believe we have finally assembled an accurate listing of planning units in the state.

Click here for Figure 1: Kentucky's Active Planning Units

The task involved more than a thousand hours of student sleuthing and nearly 300 telephone calls to county courthouses and city halls across the state with the questions, "Does your community have a planning commission?" and "Who handles zoning in your community?" — questions that stumped many, particularly in the more rural areas. While one would expect the courthouse operator to be confused in a county without a planning commission, those in communities with planning commissions were often in the dark as well.

To date, of the 129 planning units we have identified, we have completed surveys from 72 — a response rate of 55.8 percent. The picture of the planning profession that has emerged is a much different landscape than the one we originally intended to explore. The picture includes a dramatic multi-directional communication gap about planning that involves (or more precisely, doesn't involve) state agencies, local communities, the ADDs, professional planners in the field, the state's professional organization, and the academic institutions presumably training the next generation of the region's practitioners.

Results also indicate that much of the planning activity throughout the state is occurring in very small towns and rural areas, and being handled by city or county staff with no formal education in planning and little or no contact with the professional community of planners within the state. Finally, the apparent stealth with which planning commissions operate in some areas draws into question the degree to which these groups are effectively addressing their communities' land use concerns.

Big City Planning Programs in a Mayberry RFD World

Fifty-six of Kentucky's 120 counties have either an independent county planning commission or are part of a joint city/county planning commission. An additional 73 cities have independent planning commissions. While about 70 percent of the state's population lives within an area served by a planning commission, the majority of the planning units are in small towns and rural communities.

About 27 percent of the state's population is concentrated in the metropolitan areas of Lexington, Louisville, and Covington (location of the state's only regional planning commission) — each with metro populations greater than 200,000. The cities of Bowling Green and Owensboro are the next largest, with population around 40,00 and 55,000 respectively (University of Louisville, State Data Center, 1997). Outside these areas, population drops off dramatically — the average population of the remaining 148 communities with an independent or joint planning commission is just over 5,200 — and more than two-thirds of the state's people live outside of a city with a population greater than 20,000. More striking is the number of counties with populations greater than 25,000 that have no major population centers — a dispersed pattern of settlement that Hart and Morgan (1995) have termed "spersopolis."

Despite the rural and small town bias of the state's planning units, the recently launched urban planning program at the University of Louisville (only graduate Master's of Urban Planning Degree in the state) offers no coursework in rural or small-town planning. Neither do any of the major universities in surrounding states. A review of courses at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Georgia Tech, University of Cincinnati, Indiana's Ball State, the University of Illinois, and Ohio State all represent a clear bias towards urban issues, which is reflected in the names of their programs (e.g., urban planning, city and regional planning, urban design, urban policy, urban transportation).

So why have these major academic institutions left rural and small-town planning coursework in the cornfields? The first explanation may be a bias in the academy of either (a) "if you learn how to plan for big cities, it's easy to just step it down to smaller ones" or (b) "big cities have the big problems; the problems of small cities are just not as important." Another academic bias may be geographic: Larger universities tend to be located in larger cities, thus their conveniently accessible study areas are primarily urban.

Should we expect these institutions to be responsive to the planning needs of their immediate area? The mission of most land grant and public universities includes language related to serving the needs of the people in the state/region. On that basis, there seems to be a reasonable expectation that academic institutions examine the planning practice needs of their region and devote some portion of their resources to meet those needs. Institutions may argue the realities of the job market — while it is true that the majority of planning units are in small towns and rural areas, it is also true that many of these units do not have the budgets to hire professional staffs. A counterargument is that these small towns with no budgets for their own planning staffs rely on outsourcing much of their planning activities to consulting firms or the ADDs.

Figure 2 lists the issues identified by the responding planning units as current concerns in order from most frequently identified to least frequently identified, and then the agency or office responsible. One important finding is the number of issues for which consultants are hired-including transportation planning, economic development, regional planning, historic preservation, and downtown revitalization. So it may be that even a planner working for a Louisville engineering consultant will likely be called upon to apply his or her trade in a small town or rural area.

While the analysis is limited by the response rate (56 percent) and the absence of the two largest planning units (Louisville and Lexington), it still offers valuable insights into trends of current planning issues in the state.

Click here for Figure 2: Responsibility for Planning Issues in Kentucky Communities

All Who Plan Are Not Planners

Another important trend is that city and county staff, other than planners, are handling many planning-related issues. This raises a different set of questions: If the folks who are doing planning aren't planners, then who are they, and do the academic institutions have some responsibility to ensure they have the training and information they need in order to appropriately make long-range community decisions related to land use in such areas as community development, industrial and commercial development, and historic preservation? Do the academic institutions have an obligation to broader public and community education about planning issues?

Our results suggest that the community is not aware of what the planning profession can do to assist with areas of concern. One answer is to promote the idea of cooperative efforts to further public education on the benefits of planning and how it can improve the quality of life in a community. In addition to creating local public support for planning, this also has the potential to create larger statewide support for planning regulation, whether it is "smart growth" or simply giving more planning authority to local jurisdictions.

Also at issue is the relationship between academic institutions and state planning chapters, such as KAPA, which have an explicit public education mission. Too often there is a wide gulf between the academy and the profession when it comes to cooperative or interactive activities. Faculty aren't always involved with state APA chapters, members of professional practice aren't always supportive of university efforts.

Examples of how faculty could be more involved with APA chapter activities include serving on professional chapter boards and committees, and assisting with chapter activities. A clear need identified by this study is that of compiling and regularly updating data about the state's planning units. If the state's academic institutions took on this task, it would be a valuable service to the profession, and one that could also help those programs identify and better meet emerging needs in education. In turn, professionals could work more closely with the academy by offering to serve as mentors to students, creating internship opportunities, and helping find and direct community projects to the university for possible use in studio or project-based courses.

If You Teach Them, They Will Plan

Planning issues getting more academic attention in recent years such as urban design, environmental planning, sustainable development, public transportation, brownfield site planning, and planning for special populations were identified as current planning issues by only a handful of the responding Kentucky planning units. The issues identified by at least half of the units that also indicated planners were the responsible are comprehensive land use, GIS, transportation, and rural/small-town planning. Does this mean topics such as environmental planning and housing be abandoned across the curricula in favor of those issues that ranked higher, such as GIS?

One might ask, should a planning program be tailored to the identified needs of the region (reactive), or should a program target the highest of planning ideals, on the assumption that appropriately trained graduates will be able to apply these ideals to situations they encounter (proactive)?

The answer is no doubt somewhere in between. There are core skills one would like all planning students to be taught — a principle upon which program accreditation is built. We agree as a profession and as an academy that all students should receive a core planning knowledge base; be able to perform a certain set of basic tasks; and have a sense of the history, thought, and foundations of the discipline. Beyond this, however, it should not be unreasonable to expect a planning program to identify the needs of the region it serves, and then tailor appropriate coursework or other degree requirements.

Does this mean academic programs must become tied exclusively to their geographic context? There are nationally recognized proactive and theoretical programs that produce students who work all around the country. And while it is a noble goal for all universities to have a national or international reputation, not every planning program can — or should — serve that function. There should be a place where students can go to get skills that will serve them best in the region in which they intend to work and live. Planning is different on the East Coast than the West Coast, and different still from places in the Midwest. Academic programs need to realize that and focus on the differences that are unique to their region and further how they can help produce planners that will excel in the profession for that region.

The state's universities need to find a way that academic programs can cooperate with their state APA chapters to inventory planning needs and then modify curricula in appropriate ways to meet those needs.

Professional Service or Academic Career

The recommendations made for more closely allying the profession with the academy are not novel, and neither are the academic barriers to such alignments. The academic system is not set up to reward faculty who devote time to building the profession, unless it is through the traditional outputs of journal articles and books.

A report prepared by the ACSP Committee on Promotion and Tenure Policy (1986) notes that due to the nature of planning, many faculty publish their best work in places that are not academic journals, and that many faculty who do not publish in scholarly journals instead "devote their creative energies to professional practice." The report points out that routine professional work should not be considered equivalent to scholarly activity, but that innovation and creativity for work that advances the field should be recognized. The service aspect of most faculty evaluations is a very small portion of the evaluation, typically 10 percent or less. Most evaluations focus on the number and placement of journal articles, funded research in terms of total dollars, and other research related activity.

So the system is biased against a professor using his/her time to serve on committees, boards, and other professional practice activities that normally would help build a stronger relationship between the academy and the profession.

Last Thoughts

Media and political attention to smart growth and sprawl has shone a spotlight on the often unnoticed profession of planning, and in September 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that "urban and regional planning" had one of the largest percentage increases among all occupations. Despite this new-found national interest, planners in Kentucky and other states often work in an environment of distrust, if not antagonism. The growing popularity of the "wise use" movement-particularly in more rural areas of the country — and the recent attempt in Congress to declare any land-use regulation as a taking of private property — suggests that Kentucky's experience is not unique. There is a real need for education about planning and planning issues throughout small towns and rural areas, a need that is not being met by many, if not most, accredited planning programs.

Planning education is not limited to the formal degree programs through which professionals gain their credentials; it also means educating community residents and local decision makers about the value of planning principles and practices. Among the ways academic planning programs can be more responsive to a broader definition of planning education is to first evaluate their curricula to ensure they reflect their service region's true needs, and to find ways to more formally reward — rather than punish — faculty who participate in the promotion and support of the profession.

What's the take-home message here? The profession and the academy need to work much harder in the anti-bias states to make planning work. Practitioners need to seek out and work with the academic institutions. The academy needs to take a hard look at the relationship of teaching a practitioner degree and reward faculty for being more involved in the practice of planning, not just the teaching of it.

Dr. David M. Simpson is Associate Director, Center for Hazards Research and Policy Development, and Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Public Affairs, at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Alice L. Jones is Planning Program Coordinator in the Department of Geography at Eastern Kentucky University. Copyright by the authors.

References

Hart, John Fraser, and John T. Morgan. 1995. "Spersopolis." Southeastern Geographer XXXV, 2 (Nov.): 107-117.

ACSP Committee on Promotion and Tenure Policy. 1986. "Guidelines on Evaluation of Planning Faculty for Promotion and Tenure." ACSP Committee on Promotion Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

November 2002