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How (In)accurate are demand forecasts in public works projects?”
- Journal of the American
, 2005
"... Abstract This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth US$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical signi ..."
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Abstract This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth US$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical significance that forecasters generally do a poor job of estimating the demand for transportation infrastructure projects. The result is substantial downside financial and economic risks. Such risks are typically ignored or downplayed by planners and decision makers, to the detriment of social and economic welfare. For nine out of ten rail projects passenger forecasts are overestimated; average overestimation is 106 percent. This results in large benefit shortfalls for rail projects. For half of all road projects the difference between actual and forecasted traffic is more than ±20 percent. Forecasts have not become more accurate over the 30-year period studied. If techniques and skills for arriving at accurate demand forecasts have improved over time, as often claimed by forecasters, this does not show in the data. The causes of inaccuracy in forecasts are different for rail and road projects, with political causes playing a larger role for rail than for road. The cure is transparency, accountability, and new forecasting methods. The challenge is to change the governance structures for forecasting and project development. The article shows how planners may help achieve this.
New Directions in Planning Theory
- Urban Affairs Review
, 2000
"... The last decade has witnessed a reinvigoration of theoretical discussion within the discipline of planning. Inspired by post-modernist cultural critique and by the move among philosophers away from logical positivism toward a substantive concern with ethics and public policy, planning theorists have ..."
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The last decade has witnessed a reinvigoration of theoretical discussion within the discipline of planning. Inspired by post-modernist cultural critique and by the move among philosophers away from logical positivism toward a substantive concern with ethics and public policy, planning theorists have reframed their debates over methods and 1 program to encompass issues of discourse and inclusiveness.TP
New paradigm or old myopia? Unsettling the communicative turn in planning theory
- Journal of Planning Education and Research
, 2000
"... The field of planning theory has gone through periodical changes, with previous dominant theories drawing on, and in turn reacting to, urban-form concepts; com-prehensive, rational decision-making, advocacy, and equity planning; Marxist and Weberian critiques; economic, public choice, and public goo ..."
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The field of planning theory has gone through periodical changes, with previous dominant theories drawing on, and in turn reacting to, urban-form concepts; com-prehensive, rational decision-making, advocacy, and equity planning; Marxist and Weberian critiques; economic, public choice, and public goods theories; and envi-ronmental and sustainability approaches. During the last decade, a growing number of scholars have taken what is described by Healey (1996) as a "communicative turn," ' in describing and theorizing urban and regional planning or located policy-making. A rapidly growing body of work drawing on Habermasian, pragmatist, ethnographic, ethnomethodological, and related frameworks has prompted some to declare the emergence of a "new paradigm " (Innes 1995) or a dominant consensus among planning theorists (Mandelbaum 1996). In what follows, we wish to raise a number of broad questions about the commu-nicative paradigm and claimis for its theoretical dominance. We thus extend an on-going debate that began earlier, in sites such as the issue of Planning Theory edited
Planned abandonment: the neighborhood life-cycle theory and national urban policy. Housing Policy Debate 11(1
"... This article discusses the history and political economy of the neighborhood life-cycle or “stage ” theory, an evolving real estate appraisal concept used as a basis for urban planning decisions in the United States. The life-cycle theory was revived by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Devel ..."
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This article discusses the history and political economy of the neighborhood life-cycle or “stage ” theory, an evolving real estate appraisal concept used as a basis for urban planning decisions in the United States. The life-cycle theory was revived by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after the urban riots of the 1960s and used by local planners to encourage the “deliberate dispersal ” of low-income and African-American urban neighborhoods, followed by the eventual reuse of abandoned areas. Postriot urban policy can be understood as a dialectical process of social change. “Triage ” planning was used to depopulate areas of social unrest. Conflict over the neighborhood life-cycle theory changed the politics of urban renewal, leading to a greater focus on redlining. Community-based development became an alternative to planned abandonment, directing public and private resources into redlined areas.
Seeing from the South: Refocusing Urban Planning on the Globe's Central Urban Issues." Urban Studies 46(11
, 2009
"... live in cities and, in future years, most of all new global population growth will be in cities in the ‘developing ’ world. The second important insight was that the rate and scale of this growth, coupled with impending issues such as climate change and resource depletion, posed massively serious pr ..."
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live in cities and, in future years, most of all new global population growth will be in cities in the ‘developing ’ world. The second important insight was that the rate and scale of this growth, coupled with impending issues such as climate change and resource depletion, posed massively serious problems in the cities of the global South and required specifi c intervention. In effect, UN Habitat was recognising that the profession of urban
The Search for a New Development Planning/Policy Mode
- Problems of WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on ENVIRONMENT and DEVELOPMENT Slavka Zekovic, Miodrag Vujosevic ISSN: 1790-5079 301 Issue 4, Volume 4, April 2008 Expertise in the Transition Period, SPATIUM, 10/March
, 2004
"... The former system and practice of planning in Yugoslavia collapsed as early as towards the end of 1980s, not to be substituted for in the sequel by a new and legitimate development planning mode that has been compatible with the key processes and factors of the post-socialist transition, i.e., polit ..."
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The former system and practice of planning in Yugoslavia collapsed as early as towards the end of 1980s, not to be substituted for in the sequel by a new and legitimate development planning mode that has been compatible with the key processes and factors of the post-socialist transition, i.e., political pluralisation, privatisation, marketisation, and so forth. Under the recent circumstances, a number of new ‘ideologies of planning ’ came to the surface, thereby rendering the current practice a peculiar mix of various concepts of ‘quasi/pseudo planning ’ exercises, imbued with new biases, partisanship dominating the public scene, the notion of public interests almost lost, low transparency regarding the value and interest background of planning, etc. In effect, two general practices have been dominating the planning area, i.e., ‘crisis management’, and ‘planning-supporting-the-wild-privatisation-and-marketisation’. To a large extent, this has been caused by a poor experience, i.e., a lack of planners/experts to work under the new circumstances (‘transition’), paralleled by a lack of critical mass of social and economic actors interested in the sustainable development matters and supportive to them, and a wide spread anti-planning stance among the political and economic elites (‘architects of the transitional reforms’). A more modernising and emancipatory model, e.g., ‘planning-supporting-complex-transformation of society’, seems to be still out of sight for some time to come. As the new coherent planning theory might not be expected for a longer period, preferably a preliminary planning heuristics would have to be elaborated, to more or less ‘safely ’ direct the practice within the strategic framework defined. In this context, a number of specific issues of expertise would also have to be resolved, ranging from general theoretical and methodological
THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLANNING CONTROL: Mizrahi Jews in Israel's 'Development Towns'
"... Analysts of urban and regional planning often depict the 1950s as the 'golden age ' of planning when the vision of a brave new world offered by planners was adopted by governments world-wide in an all-encompassing quest to mould prosperous, democratic and modern societies. Planning was see ..."
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Analysts of urban and regional planning often depict the 1950s as the 'golden age ' of planning when the vision of a brave new world offered by planners was adopted by governments world-wide in an all-encompassing quest to mould prosperous, democratic and modern societies. Planning was seen as a positive and often central agent of this progressive transformation. The fusion of noble intentions and increasing state power behind planning appeared to have brought the profession to a historical zenith (Cherry, 1994; Hague, 1984; Hall, 1988). In this paper I wish to critically assess this widely accepted position, and question planning's reformist intention or impact. For this end, I will evaluate the consequences of a grand project implemented according to the leading planning concepts of the time: Israel's development town program, which entailed the establishment of 28 new towns during the 1950s, mainly in the country's peripheral regions. Four and a half decades later we can discern the long-term consequences of this project, and thereby better comprehend the potential consequences of planning, particularly in the Israeli context. The evidence shows that, indeed, planning left a powerful impact on Israeli society, although it was not noble or progressive. Rather, it caused the reproduction of inequality, and the creation of a discernible low status
The Social Construction of Space and Gender
"... ABSTRACT Over the past 10 years two concepts of central significance in the social sciences have come up for rediscussion: ‘space ’ and ‘gender’. Today the two concepts are seen as relational, as a production process based on relation and demarcation. Gender and space alike are a provisional result ..."
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ABSTRACT Over the past 10 years two concepts of central significance in the social sciences have come up for rediscussion: ‘space ’ and ‘gender’. Today the two concepts are seen as relational, as a production process based on relation and demarcation. Gender and space alike are a provisional result of an – invariably temporal – process of attribution and arrangement that both forms and repro-duces structures. This article takes a microsociological look at the construction of the local, seeking to trace the genderization of spaces. For this purpose, it discusses the organization of perceptions, in particular of glances and correspond-ing body technologies. Referring to the example of beach life, the article shows that the genderization of perception (including a culture of the glance) leads, in the sense of an embodiment of social order, to a practice of localization that repro-duces the structural principles of society (including gender). In other words, gender may be seen as inscribed, via body practices, in the production of spaces. KEY WORDS beach ◆ body ◆ gaze ◆ perception ◆ perspective ◆ placings ◆ space ◆ territories In her film Office Killer, the New York artist Cindy Sherman depicts a woman who kills her adversaries and then carefully arranges the various parts of their bodies in her apartment. In an interview for the German Zeit-Magazin (see Sager, 1997), Sherman says that what interests her is not the actual killing but what the woman does with the bodies. Sherman’s themes are the practice of arrangement, homogeneity and its destruc-tion. The idea of a homogeneous whole is ever present in modern societies, invariably serving to keep the alien, the other, the diverse at ‘arm’s length’. Exclusion of the heterogeneous from everyday practice and thought is reflected in the construction of the modern nation-state, of the homogeneous society, the unbroken identity, of closed corporeality, etc. It is also firmly anchored in our thinking on space. Although Henri Lefèbvre
TESTING THE PORT-OF-ENTRY CONCEPTUALISATION AND EXAMINING CAPE TOWN’S SPATIAL POLICY FOR COGNISANCE OF MIGRANT’S DIVERSE SPATIAL AND LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES
, 2013
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"... Charles Taylor (1993) has lamented the extent of “moral skepticism ” inherentwithin contemporary intellectual thought that results, as he sees it, in the ero-sion of the space for reasoning and the triumph of the arbitrary. Such an intellectual context poses particular challenges for the development ..."
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Charles Taylor (1993) has lamented the extent of “moral skepticism ” inherentwithin contemporary intellectual thought that results, as he sees it, in the ero-sion of the space for reasoning and the triumph of the arbitrary. Such an intellectual context poses particular challenges for the development of the conceptual basis of an activity such as planning, premised as it is on the need for action and the ability to make choices between good and bad, right and wrong, in relation to the making and shaping of places. Recognition of the oppressive and exclusionary capacity of homogenizing models of identity leaves planners floundering in a sea of difference and fragmentation: if no contention has any more validity than any other, how can planners justify arriving at closure, even temporarily, on a particular course of action? The depth of the resulting conundrum is accentuated by the contested nature of the issues with which planning is concerned. Notions of what makes for good places and the appropriate distribution of the spatial consequences of governmental, market, and individual decisions are characterized by dissent, dispute, and even violence (Flyvbjerg 1998; Watson 2003; Yiftachel 1998). Contestation, with respect to both process and outcome, is inherent in the planning activity (Campbell 2002). Moreover, it is not only different worldviews and identities that may be in friction; often basic issues of economics add an edge to the passionately held concerns at stake. The inadvertent coalition between the implications of the individualism inher-ent in the politics of identity and the spread of neoliberalism (Sayer and Storper 1997; Storper 2001) has if anything further accentuated the underlying conflicts with which planning (and planners) must engage. There is, however, no formula available through which the right and the good may be calculated. Consequently, in this con-text of contestation, planners are fundamentally concerned with making ethical judg-
