Abstract

Planning, in the sense of largescale public manipulation of socially-emergent structure, has always been contentious. However, attitudes vary from widespread rejection of economic or "social" planning, to widespread acceptance of potent "infrastructure" planning. The particular case of eminent domain planning of the "transport network" will be examined.

Any kind of planning accepts a paradigm that purposeful control can obtain, causally, a gratifying outcome. It will be argued that this paradigm is scale-dependent, and does not apply at large space-time scales typically associated with "public" planning, under eminent domain power with a notional public interest( or public convenience and necessity) as purpose.

Consider the physical space-time network--the term that will be used to generalize the concept of transport and land use that so engages planning today at the macro-social, scale. Historically, this network is clearly a self-organizing, evolutionary system. The application of eminent domain planning to it, in the form of the federal-state highway program, was belated and problematic from its start in the 1890's. Politically, it promised vast social benefits that could never be validated. The motivating public works cash flows (so-called top-down funding) destroyed essential mechanisms of accountability necessary for continued network evolution. Credibility demanded analytical modeling techniques that forecasted deterministic results. Contemporary problems, generically called "congestion" and "sprawl" demand different approaches. The planning institution is trying to meet these by analytical improvements. Most of these fail to reckon with fundamental dynamical aspects of the network as a self-organizing system. These include a scale-hierarchy in which different scales (e.g., private and public) are not purposefully nor causally related, but can be related only statistically, and then with nonstationarities.

The self-organizing view accords well with our political and economic idealogies. It suggests a more locally partitioned, predominately bottom-up emergent approach, with stronger economic and political accountability. It also accords with the likely dynamics of any complex, choiceful, system that generates information, and hence space-time uncertainty. In fact, a network modeling approach along these lines was developed in the 1970's, as a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) project initiated by WESS founder Robert Crosby. The interesting questions are why this approach was not pursued in the U.S. (but is being developed in a socialistic country like China), and why current USDOT research is still dismissing the earlier work, even as its technology is better prepared to implement it.
 

Biography

Gary Nelson has a Master in Systems Engineering form Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and further advanced graduate work there. He has been employed in various aspects of transportation planning and system engineering for over 25 years. He has also been active nationally in advocacy planning organizations and cases. He is working on a book about planning and self-organizing networks. Since 1984, he has been employed at the Mitre Corporation, briefly at the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, and now at Mitretek Systems Inc., in DC, working on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Gary is among the early members of The Washington Evolutionary Systems Society and has contributed to its development.