“My local park is criss-crossed with paths,” writes Dylan Reid in the introduction to Messy Cities, a . The paths are mostly paved, but “one is just earth, a wide gash in the grass trodden down by thousands of feet over the years.” It’s a vignette that introduces the complex relationship at the heart of the book: How should urban planning and freedom coexist?
Bringing together dozens of contributors from around the world, the book’s 43 short essays cover topics ranging from desire lines in parks to apartment tower architecture, guerrilla beaches, public health and parades. And while the arguments and reflections are diverse in scope, they collectively highlight opportunities to both improve planning practice and to understand its fundamental limits. Below, we share the essay “Planning for an Unplanned City” by Jason Thorne, who now serves as the City of Toronto’s Chief Planner.
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Several times a day, trains leave the central train station in Hanoi, heading to the outer suburbs and neighbouring cities to the south. It’s a scene that would be familiar in just about every major city in the world, except for one thing.
Immediately upon leaving the station, something happens that would be very unfamiliar in just about any other city. The train rumbles through what is locally known as Trân Phù, or Train Street. Train Street is a corridor about five metres wide, lined with shops and cafés, with the rail line running right down the middle. The train passes mere centimetres from the patrons seated at the cafés. There are no guardrails to separate pedestrians from the tracks. No flashing lights. No gates. In short, it violates pretty much every rule in the urban planners’ handbook. And yet the street is vibrant. The shops are full. The homes above are charming. All of this in what would be a dead space in the heart of most other cities.
Train Street may be a rather extreme example of what some call ‘messy urbanism,’ but it nonetheless presents an important question for the future of cities, and the future of the planning profession. Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities? Or are they critical bulwarks for protecting public health and safety?
Interest in a . This is a good thing. We should always be questioning and challenging our rules and regulations to ensure that they are serving a clear purpose and not getting in the way of fostering the kinds of vibrant cities we all want to see. But how do you plan and design a city that is safe and functional while also leaving room for spontaneity and serendipity? Or a more challenging question for planners: Can you even do so?
The planning profession was born out of a movement to improve public health and safety and remove risks and dangers from nineteenth-century urban environments that suffered from overcrowding, air and water pollution, and a lack of green space. Examples of the profession’s early successes are many: better access to potable drinking water, improved sanitation, cleaner air, safer housing construction. Unfortunately, so too are : racial segregation, class segregation, automobile dependency, environmental degradation, and urban sprawl, to name just a few of the more notable ones. Another victim of modern planning that is gaining attention is the kind of flexibility that has historically allowed cities to rapidly change and evolve to respond to new challenges, such as the current housing crisis.
How can a profession born out of a mission to root out hazard and disorder now reorient itself to welcome back risk, spontaneity, and serendipity as positive forces that can once again help shape our cities and neighbourhoods?
An important starting point is to recognize the limits of planning. The term planning has come to represent all the forces that shape our cities. But any planner will acknowledge the limitations of the impact that planning, on its own, actually has. Equally important are the host of other rules and regulations: building codes, engineering standards, alcohol regulations, fire codes, accessibility standards, traffic regulations, public health regulations, and so on. Each of these, on its own, serves a valuable public purpose. In the aggregate, however, they can also preclude some of the dynamic urbanism that many cities are trying to recapture.
The Café Apartments in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City is a typical nine-storey postwar slab-style apartment tower. It sits on a grand boulevard connecting the city’s 1908 French colonial city hall to the Saigon River. Its counterparts can be found in hundreds of cities around the world. About a decade ago, this apartment tower underwent a very unusual transformation. While many of the residential apartments remain, the street-facing units were converted into bars, shops, and restaurants. The balconies became the restaurant patios. It is now a unique example of a vertical mixed-use entertainment complex.
In many jurisdictions, including Ontario, a transformation like this would be at best cost-prohibitive, and more likely simply impossible. The dozens of bars and restaurants, as well as residential units, are serviced by a single small elevator and a single narrow stairwell. The landings on each floor are shared by bar patrons as well as residents. Only narrow party walls separate the commercial kitchens from the apartments next door.
The Café Apartments appears to be a successful urban intervention in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. It provides housing and commerce, and serves as a popular destination for locals and tourists alike. All are important public interest priorities that city planners constantly try to nurture. But even a cursory examination reveals numerous concerns, from fire prevention to emergency access to public health. A similar confluence of competing public priorities arises with respect to other aspects of Vietnamese urbanism.
On the famed market streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, hundreds of street vendors animate the scene and provide low-cost food options and much-needed jobs and enterprise. They also entirely privatize the public realm of the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians into the street and making access for those with disabilities virtually impossible.
The wonderfully livable Hẻm alleyway neighbourhoods are the lifeblood of both cities, but even the most urban-scale emergency vehicles would be challenged in accessing them.
There is no question that the streets and neighbourhoods of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are alive and vibrant. They exhibit much of what contemporary Canadian planners and urbanists hope to achieve in our own cities. But a Canadian planner wandering those streets can’t help but also notice what is missing: some of the very safeguards that we have come to take for granted in our own cities, so much so that they have become invisible to us.
There are signs that the approach to planning in Canadian cities is changing. And this is long overdue. Sterile downtowns, isolation, car dependence, and housing scarcity cannot be the price we pay for clean and safe neighbourhoods. The challenge for the planning profession is how to design for and cultivate into being the conditions that allow for messy or idiosyncratic urbanism without abandoning responsibility for public safety and protecting the public interest. The public interest includes ensuring the provision of those aspects of cities that don’t lend themselves to informality and organicness, such as parks and public spaces, schools, transit, and other services.
Some have argued for aggressive deregulation to achieve these goals. In other words, simply throw out all or most of the rules. This approach, however, contains its own very significant risks. It means a total reliance on market forces and commercial developers to determine the fate of our cities.
Anyone who has spent any time at the planning counter of a local municipality will know that the market, left purely to its own devices, does not always lean toward exceptional or even civic-minded urbanism. Municipal planners can tell many stories of development proposals that seek to maximize private profit at the expense of the public interest. At my former planning counter at the City of Hamilton, I saw development proposals that sought to address drainage by simply directing stormwater to the neighbour’s property, located waste collection bins under the bedroom window of a neighbouring home, and situated access driveways to force cars to queue in the on-street bike lane. The list of design decisions that get made in the financial interests of a single private development – but at the expense of the public realm or the broader community – is a long one. Ensuring that new development contributes positively to the public realm is why many of our local regulations and polices came to exist in the first place.
Interestingly, another Asian city, often celebrated as the poster child for messy urbanism, presents a cautionary tale for the impacts of deregulation. In 2002, the Urban Renaissance Special Measure Law came into force in Tokyo. It allowed for the creation of ‘Special Urban Renaissance Districts’ that would be free from many of the typical municipal planning regulations and restrictions. This deregulatory approach, however, did not expand or enhance Tokyo’s famed urban messiness. Instead, it led in many cases to large-scale land assembly and exclusive megaprojects of tall towers on shopping mall podiums, indistinguishable from similar developments in other global cities. While not necessarily an entirely problematic urban form in a city like Tokyo, such developments are far from the type of organic growth that proponents of messy urbanism are typically hoping to achieve.
In fact, what some perceive as a highly desirable messiness in Tokyo’s urbanism was, in many ways, planned. There are rules and, in some cases, strict rules. These apply to many of the same attributes that Canadian cities seek to regulate: height, density, setbacks, land use. But Tokyo’s rules allow for intentional and planned flexibility that gives local property and business owners the latitude to evolve and adapt their private spaces.
Messy urbanism presents a unique challenge for municipal planners and for the practice of local planning. Planners are responsible for anticipating the long-term delivery of major growth-related infrastructure, such as roads, parks, transit, and sewers. They are expected to be responsive to the priorities and needs of those who deliver local services: firefighters, police, transit operators, waste collectors, and so on. Planners are pulled between the often-competing interests of the diversity of residents and businesses that populate our cities. And municipalities often bear the brunt of the legal responsibility for ensuring public safety. Messy urbanism can be inconsistent with these responsibilities.
Messy urbanism not only poses questions about how our cities are planned, it asks whether they should be planned, at least in the way we have historically understood that term. Exceptional urbanism cannot simply be planned into existence. It also doesn’t magically arise from the unrestrained individual decision-making of private developers and market forces. Urbanism blurs the lines between the planned and the unplanned, the predictable and the surprising, the safe and the spontaneous. If our goal is to achieve exceptional cities and places, then a space must be found in our planning for some deliberate and intentional messiness.
Messy Cities is . A free book launch is taking place on T.
Lead image by Elric Pxl via Unsplash.
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