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Spatial planning and economic development
Spatial Planning and Economic Development NIGEL University
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unpredictable, since we know so little of the changing interactions which cause spatial micro-change. Yet this is precisely the target of spatial planning. In the end, macro-economic analysis requires boundaries which inevitably are arbitrary; given the boundaries, it offers a complete description of economic activity without the need to refer to geography or, usually, even land (except as one of several factors of production and by no means an important one; or a commodity, peculiar only insofar as its price varies with its location). Furthermore, what is important within macro-economic analysis does not necessarily have any spatial implications; what causes the most rapid changes in spatial interactions may scarcely register in the economic measures. A retail tomato market may cause large numbers of people and vehicles to move in a small locality, far larger numbers than those that move around a tomato exchange, where millions of tonnes of tomatoes change hands - but only in the form of paper claims. The second is far greater in importance for a much larger number of people (including those engaged in the thousands of retail tomato markets), but involves less spatial activity. We are confronted by the ancient philosophic problem of the relationship between the part and the whole,” or, in a special form, the ‘individual’ and ‘society’. Personality is not a simple reflex of social aggregates any more than local space can be read off from the movements of the national economy - the links between the one and the other exist, but can produce endless perverse forms. From the viewpoint of the need to plan economic activity in a given area, a piece of territory, the concepts of macro-economic analysis encourage only myopia. On the other hand, the traditions of thought devoted to the analysis of space suffer from a different - but no less disastrous - form of myopia. Now the problems are not economic, but spatial, aggregation. Economic geographers have identified different sets of spatial relationships - for example, central places, settlement systems, hinterlands, hierarchies of settlements, regions, etc. Mere geographical contiguity - space itself - is identified as economically significant, without this being proved; or, rather, without it being shown in what circumstances it is true for what activity, and in what, not. Given the changing technical specifications of production, one would also assume that what might be true in one historical period is not necessarily true in another. Like economics, economic geography accommodates historical changes only with difficulty. Underlying the geographical formulations are propositions in spatial demography. Censuses marshal1 classes of settlement, identified - given a set of, in economic terms, arbitrary administrative boundaries - by size of residential population, and imply that these sizes represent something in the spatial economy. Yet it is quite unclear what they do represent - they are almost Plato’s shadows on the wall of the cave, their movements without self-evident meaning. No one would suppose the same significance attaches itself to eleven people whether they are in a pub, on the moon or playing cricket. It is the specific activity of the group, not their number, which is important. By analogy, we have no reason to suppose that settlements of the same population size play the same or similar roles in the spatial economy; each settlement has a unique composition of output and services, and thus a unique role in a spatial economy. In this sense, the concept of ‘city’ covers such a diversity of economic territories, the appearance of similarity or homogeneity in the class of cities is achieved by no more than nomenclature. However, this is to judge by the criterion of spatial economic activity. By contrast, space is a vital question in the measures of political power, or politics ’ For an exccllcnt exposition of the issues, see Lucien Goldmann. Vi.>iot~ iti the Prmc’e.s of Puscul urld the Tragedies of Rucine. Chap. London. 1964.
The Hidden God. a Study of the Trqrc 1, pp. 3-22. Routledge & Kcgan. Paul.
and adlninistratioll. Borders ~ and the tax paying or war-fighting population within them - in part determine the power of States. of public officials. and the rights and obligations of people. Public action ~ the purpose of planning - is thus ncccssarily closely WIICCI-IIC‘~ with territory and powers over given patches of land. But the concepts associated with the operation of political or administrative lxn~ci gi\,c no ciircct insight into the underlying spatial pattern ot economic acti\,itv. except insofar as Govcriiiiiciit is itself an economic activity. The one and the other cannot easily subsume each other. Undcrst~mciing the simplicities of the distribution of po\vers 13~ territorial prescription is verv l‘ar from understanding govcrnmcnt action and its spatial effects. Thus. it i<-often assumed that Government has. at least in principle. ;I single \vill. dircctcd I>!, ;I single ccntrc. ;I group of Ministers or ;I President, txickcd I-T!, ;t centraliscci bureaucracy. ;I view summariscd in the idea ot‘ ;I single X iS WetI kii~~Wli. ~m’~IXIiiciit c~~iisists Of institution. the State. In practice, multiple agencies. man\’ of them pursuing purposes bvhich arc contradictor\,. Indcccl. it is usually cluiie be~~o~~i the inforiiiationa1 and institutional capacity ;,f Ministers to impose ;I hingle imperati\,e. cvcii Lvheli ~ in times of LV;II-. for example ~ a supposcdlv o\,crriding aim is imposed upon all public agcncics. (~ovcrniiicnt is not at ali ;I machine. \+ith ;I single driving seat. hut rather. quite often. ;I ni;i,ior traffic jam. A better nlodei than that of the machine is perhaps Government as more like ;I market. ;I competition of agencies for ;~cccss to funds. As lvith the results ot market competition, the final outcome of competition is not kno\vn to the competitors until th c‘ market closes. Thus. funds - and powers - arc distrihuted not as the rcflcx of Ministerial statements or edicts, but rather as the result of ;I competitive mix cstending over long periods of time. afflicted both by the changing political fortuncs of different clans . groups. individuals, and I?\: the bad tuck of c\‘ents. The simplicities of ‘the plan - stated pui-posts. policy ciocumcnts. implemcntation - at-e far removed from the real tumult of the public domain. ‘I‘he purposcs Iaid dowii ~ c’vc’ii if WC‘can assume rashly that they arc ;I rational 1-csp~Jnsc to the correct diagnosis of a given probiein - arc presented for ;I particular aiidicncc. and thus in ;I special form. Given the multiplicit\: of audicnccs, the stated aims may be self-contradictorv (that is. the achievcmcnt of one aim esctudes the achievement of another). Thcv may he accompanied hy ;I covert set of‘ aims, conscious or unconscious. In the process of discussing the purposes. diffcrcnt political and social pressure groups may 13~’ rcciefining Lvhat ought to be undertaken. and the Minister making concc‘ssions. all within the same weasel phi-ascs of policy. The ctatcd aims must then fact the hazards of transmission through the co~nples structure and interests of the administrati\,e institutions charged with directing ii7iplement~~tion (again. with another set of parallel covert purposes): the institutional perception of ohJccti\,c constraints imposes ;I new set of disciplines. Finally. there wilt he the further refashioning introduced tw the public and private agencies which undcrtakc ii7i17lemcntatit,n and ill:iY be conccrneci to maximise returns in areas which arc remote from the polic!, daims. At each concessions. stage, outside interests inav achieve redefinitions, promises. and at the end. those in~mecii~itcly affected h> implement~ition ma\; also oblige the implcmcnters to shift their emphasis. The whole compllcatcd process can take place without any reformulation of the original statement of policv. l‘hc phrases so beloved of Governments arc elastic enough to COVCI- ;I wide range of intentions and final bcha\:iour. It is scarcely surprising that the evaluation of policy is such ;I murky and difficult cxercisc for it is frcqucntl~~ quite unclear which set of p~~~-pos~s should pro\idc the criteria to judge the final outcome. The problem txxo~~~es the more SCC’CI-c‘. the Icss spccii’i: and quantifiable the aim.
If understanding what Governments do and why is so difficult, understanding the impact of Governments on the use of space compounds the problems: WC are connecting two types of unknowns. Insofar as the many agencies of the State are important in the national economy - and they are usually only some of the many agencies involved - then they are to some extent important in terms of the spatial consequences of economic activity. But their importance in terms of space is usually an accidental by-product of the pursuit of other purposes. Take, for example, the argument of some economists’ that import-substitution strategies as pursued in the post-war period tilt the terms of urban-rural trade so that agricultural output is cheapened relative to industrial output, capital relative to labour, producing an ‘over-concentration’ of the labour force in urban areas. The spatial effects - if such they be - are and must be on their own a very small consideration in terms of the national importance of the central economic strategy. Or again: exchange rates may have powerful ‘accidental‘ effects in terms of the regional distribution of activity; for example, other things being equal, the dollar-peso exchange rate is a very important factor in the growth of industry on the Mexican side of the border with the USA, but the Minister of Finance would not allow that this should determine decisions about the relative value of the two currencies. Interest rates affect local building rates; the price of petrol is a powerful element in the volume and direction of traffic; the discovery of new natural resources - for example, oil - affects national priorities in so decisive a manner, the merely spatial effects could not be considered of sufficient importance to determine central policy. Thus, the complex of Government policies, however we define the reasons for specific policies and their implementation, may have overwhelming effects in terms of the use of space. But these are unintended effects which, for much of the time, are unpredicted and, at the present state of knowledge, often unpredictable. Furthermore, even if Governments could predict the spatial effects of primarily ‘non-spatial’ policies, it is unlikely they would want to change them since they are far too important to be subject to merely spatial purposes. Where does all this leave explicitly spatial planning? It is certainly not a wand to transform the physical environment, but it is more than a straw in the wind. However, what effect planners might have is sometimes nullified by the somewhat messianic image that physical planning can transform the environment, when the reality of competing public agencies daily contradicts this assumption. Perhaps the heroic view is part of the reason for the inability of planners to identify the complex spatial economy? In the old land-use map, we find only the primitive coloured patches of Industry, Commerce, Residential, an abstention from the real functions of the city which almost inevitably forces the planner back into the role of planning publicly available consumer goods (housing, land, access to shops), not planning an important part of the national economy. Failing to plan the spatial economy, the planner is then the victim of the unpredicted results of changes in the spatial economy; his is responsibility without power. Thus the concepts of physical planning produce a kind of ‘contentless’ space in terms of economic activity, no less abstract than the ‘spaceless’ content of macroeconomic analysis. Lines are drawn on maps with little or no attempt to relate the lines to what is happening in the spatial economy, the movement of workers. the flows of freight and services. The changing commodity composition of output, the changing elaboration of territorial divisions of labour, the continual ’ See Ian Little, Tibor Skitovsky and Maurice Scott, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Co~mrrie.~. (I Comparative Study. OECDiOxford University Press, Oxford. 1970. On different case studies. with different conclusions, see Adriaan ten Kate and Robert Bruce Wallace, Profecrion and Economrc~ D~,l,c,/o/““‘~‘r/iti Mexico, Gower, Farnborough. 1980, and Ashok Mitra, Terms of’ Trade and Cluss Relnrions. Cass. London. 1977.
‘remassaging‘ of land uses. takes place sotncwherc below the level of aggregation of the map. It is that level of a,,~~(~rcgation, of abstraction. which hcenis to confirm the assumption that cities art‘ the same. that their problems arc attributable simply to the physical bv-products of concentrating population in ;I limited area of land. The policies which flow from such ;I primitive perception arc nccessaril! no less primitive and thus incapable of achieving their stated purposes. The failures then alienate the planner from what can be achic\,ed. The gap bct\veen traditions - the ni;icro-c‘conomic and t hc physical 01. political - provide endless opportunities for spurious associations to fiII the gap. The curious tyranny of the urban-rural distinction, I‘ot- csample. is in par1 due to the USC of the dichotomv as ;I surrogate for other things - the diffcrencc between industry and agriculture. between modernit! and the traditional. between wealth and poverty. the neurotic and the healthy. the criminal and the honest. and even, in Fidel Castro’s cat-licr views. the hol/r,qcv)i,sic and the proletariat.” Differcnccs in territorial j,c’r crrpittr income arc idcntificd as evidence of incyuditv of household incomes . and Govcrtitiietits frame politics to narrow the territorial differences. even though thev can succecci in this aim while actually increasing the inequalities in household income. The territorial distribution of population is seen as e\:idcnce of it social condition. as signs of ;I given level of welfare. Many Govcrnmcnts, on this basis. pursue politics of population t-distribution - rcdistrihution can, it is assitmd. increase \+,eIt’arc. The evidence is very slight indeed that Governments can pcrcei\,e opportunities to increase wclfarc by I-distribution in advance of the population at large.The myths of space. of territory, provide an opportunity for C;overnmcnts to avoid unclcrtaking the obvious actions required. Urban scr\,iccs. it is said. arc poor. not txxai~se investment in public services is inadequate. but txxause thcrc arc ‘too many people’; the policv response becomes not lo invest more in services. but to redistribute population. Social inequalitv is redefined to bccomc territorial differences. and the demand to redistribute iticc,me reformulated ;I’; ;I spatial distribution of income to the same people as before. Thus. space plays an important role not only in the organisation of political power. but in the hypocrisy of society. The economists when obliged to collaborate, relinciuish their abstractions for an eclectic selection of the phvsical elements. absorbing the hypocrisy c11 I’oiit~~. Many of these points will be familiar. since the criticiuc 01‘ each tradition is rather tnore developed than rctncciies to the problem. Yet some tnodest remedial direction is required if spatial planning is to contribute to the process 01 economic development and play. some role in minitnising the da~~age which seems an intrinsic part of industrtalisation. It scetns that there is almost :I new field of enquiry, so far only ill-explored despite several decades of physical planning. This is the field of study of spatial economic activity. whether construed as cievotcd to settlements of different population sizes -or the interaction of territorial ;trc;ts spccialised in different sorts of output. We arc far from being able to say very much about the pattern of emerging economic activity for the territorial arca of a whole country esccpt at ;I very crude level. but there is greater possibilitv of bein g able to bcsin the process
of identification at the level of one district - within a region or metropolitan area, without placing any economic significance on the external boundaries concerned, nor implying the existence of ‘an economy’. Each locality, at a disaggregated level of analysis, is the location for the production of a unique composition of output, a unique ‘economic mix’ and ‘industrial mix’. Production therefore engages a unique combination of skills in the employed labour force, and requires a unique pattern of movement of goods, services and workers between the spatially distributed units of production. Identifying this set of unique patterns and their interrelationships is the precondition for effective spatial planning relevant to economic development. Without this, physical planning is necessarily blind, and we cannot identify its relevance either to popular welfare or expanded production and employment. The central determinant of the use of space and the settlement pattern, of different rates of increase in the labour force in different settlements in the process of economic development, is the pace and chmging strrlctrur of ‘capital accumulation’ (that is, the accumulation of financial assets and the stock of capital equipment in the country). The process can be measured directly (hut the data are usually of doubtful reliability), and indirectly - through measures of capital per worker, changes in labour productivity, scctoral redistributions of the labour force, etc. For our purposes, there are two crude measures of importance, indirect indications of the central process; they do not necessarily coincide in terms of proportionate changes: (a) the rate of increase and changing composition of output, seen as a spatially disaggregated system of production and services; and (b) the rate of increase and changing composition of the labour force, conceived as a spatially distributed labour market. The changes measured in these two forms interact with a historical endowment, a given distribution of territorial uses, of settlements (identified as locationally specific units of fixed capital). The forces at stake are mediated by complex systems of political power, social, legal and institutional conditions. Just as changes in output are not matched directly by changes in employment - the capital-labour ratio of each unique commodity composition of output determines different proportionate changes in each - so also the utilisation of space is not a simple reflex of changes in output and employment (we need here estimates of the ratios between different capital-labour coefficients and space utilisation, both direct and indirect). There are also considerable lags in adjustment as well as innumerable social and legal obstacles. Nonetheless, despite the complexity, we need to hold hard to the two ends of the process, accumulation and space, if we are then to have a measure of the force of the intervening variables, and thus some idea of what points in the process are accessible to limited public intervention to reshape the initiating processes or the spatial outcome. An industrialising society is continually transforming the composition of output and thus the composition of the labour force. If we are to identify the spatial implications of this transformation, we have to be able to identify and quantify the changes in output. People are generally aware of some of the effects of high rates of national economic growth - Mexico City, ,520 Paula, Seoul, arc monuments to rapid national growth. But there is much less familiarity with the dramatic changes in the structure of production even when rates of growth may be relatively low. Again, the cruder results are apparent - the decline of NorthEastern Brazil as sugar flagged; the decline of Britain’s West Midlands in our own time as the commodity composition of national output changed. In industrialised societies, it is assumed that the process of continuing output transformation operates on an institutionalised basis - firms continually inliAB 7:5/b-F
novate, and the trajectory of technical change is thus, supposedly. smoothed; but the spatial implications of this process arc ill-understood and, even then. onI> long after the event. The statistics do not help us. They can identify large crude changes - the rise of new subsectors, garments or micro-processing devices - but not when those subsectors began, because they were then part of larger aggregates. In practice, products are continually redefined, the marginal adjustments rcm:tining undetected except by the irntne~ii~~te p~~rtici~?~lntsuntil the st~ltistici~~l~sdecide that ;I new product has appeared and is of sufficient importance to record soparatcl~; the grcy areas - where one product is becoming another - remain unidcntlfied. It is as if the process of the evolution of spccics wcrc enormously accelerated so that we wcrc c(~ntiIlu~~lly obliged to redefine the ch~~r~~ctcristics hitherto associated with our taxonomy of spccics. Not all of these many technical changes have spatial implications, particularly in a settled system of industry with spare capacity. But au industrialising~tising society is one where, at least in theory. spare capacity is c~~r~tiilLl~~tlv being clillliI~~~tc~iby expansion, product innovation is at a very* high rate. aAd existing industrial capacity is ill-equipped to cope with cxpans~on and multiple innovations ill .si~rr. It is likely then that capacity will be more mobile: changing characteristics of output as well as expansion then product changes in location. The process of change is rapid and also new. WC cannot therefore take for granted that there wilt be useful historical gcncralis:ttions cq~1;111~ applicable today as in the past. For cxamplc, in the fast century it was taken for granted that the growth of the ln~~nu~~cturiilg industry and the city wcrc associated. I1owcvcr. it has long been clear in the industriatised countries th;lt that :lssociation is declining; cities are becoming much more providers of services at the same time as MDCs as a whole are increasingly oriented towards the provision of scrviccs. The factors behind the first change arc not very clear. but XVL‘ can prcsumc thev are related to a new composition of output (impelling IIC\I’ locations. SOIIIC: c;f which are outside the MDCs), different capital-labour ratios. a higher rate of mobility among workers (reflecting higher incomes and pr~)~iLlcti~it~). as wull as the provision of roughly uniform scrvicex in rural and urban areah. tIoweve~-, even if at much lower average IXY cupitrr incomes. the LDCs arc simultaneously embarking upon the same process. Thus. while the initiA surge of growth of industry still products in a relativelv backward country ;I rapid cot~cc~ltr~~ti~~~~ of part of the labour force. that process is now tlcing.ovcrt~tkcn 1~~relative dispersal a of production (even if ‘dispersal’ represents still, in ttic national picture. regional concentration). Indeed, in the coming period. it will probably be this dispersal which will require more pt~Illning attention than the l~l-e~~ccu~~~~ti~~li of the recent past, urbanisation. It follows from what has been argued earlier that the use of land is a dependent variable. The control of the use of land could not thcreforc bc the kev to reshaping the process in significant wavs. Rather we could suggest a kind of modified and unstable equilibrium model. Land uws xc constantly but discontinuously tending to be transformed to reach an ‘equilibrium‘ with the commodity composition of output. or rather with the economic mix of activitv. Industriatisation is C~~ntinu~~Ily changing the economic mix of activity - c&n where highly aggregated measures of output show only stability. So there is no final destination, no ‘equilibrium’ where the changes cease and 1;1nd uses settlc into a given form. Of course. thcrc are large elements of inertia in the appearance of the physical form. Street layouts tend to persist through successive and even it is sometimes found the modern highway changes in the economy, had a humble ancestor in a farm track. But the elements of inertial in some aspects of the form shoutd not blind us to the changing content. Thcrc is little place for building the eternal city in the midst of economic dc\~clopment;
planners have tried, but the society invariably refashions the physical artefacts in entirely new ways in order to cope with a swiftly changing activity. Not all parts of the land surface of, say, a city contribute equally to the generation of employment and incomes. Population densities do not indicate what are the most important areas. The key areas are conjunctural, points in the exchange of goods, people and information that play a disproportionate economic role - the central business district, transport junction points (ports, roads), markets, specialised industrial districts, localised airports, railways, complexes of servicing and processing activity. At such points, quite often. the distinctions between sectors disappear in a dynamic context - the dock wharves offload steel to be sold in the adjacent steel wholesale market, financed by the adjacent banks and commodity houses, broken down by the adjacent steel stockholders for use by the mass of adjacent small users of steel, petty manufacturing and servicing. The thread of continuity between the activities is steel, beginning in a homogeneous form and ending in a vast array of outputs. In such a spatial context, it is steel that requires a plan, not ‘markets’, ‘industry’, ‘services’. Nor can it be assumed that the market for the final products is local; the forces of rapid change may be finally external to the city. Take for example the small city of Novo Hamburg0 in south Brazil. The city is the point of origin of a major part of Brazil’s shoe exports, and thus the pattern of urban land uses is intimately related to demand for shoes in the USA and elsewhere. Ultimately, everything - wharves, banks, markets, ancillary activities - is related to shoes. A plan for the economic space of Novo Hamburg0 has to be a plan for shoes. However, these conjunctural points in the city have traditionally been those areas least understood in the planning office. Very often, in the planning office the preoccupation has been, not planning an existing spatial economy in situ, but rather with planning new areas entirely, whether new suburbs, towns, industrial estates. Even these have been planned, not with a view to their essential functions, patterns of interaction with the rest of the spatial economy, but with designing ‘ordered land-uses’. The power of the planner, particularly relative to the traditional ethic, is severely circumscribed. Often planners attribute the failure to implement plans to this lack of power, the lack of the means to force coordination of all public agencies. This is a mistaken diagnosis for, in principle, the agencies could not be effectively coordinated without subordinating important national purposes solely to spatial considerations. The ‘failure to implement’ is a complex animal, but it allows the planner to escape consideration of the relevance of the plan to key national issues. Indeed, the ‘failure to implement’ may be a key indication that the plan was bad, regardless of its technical merits. However, public agencies are usually important in initiating or influencing patterns of the use of space. The most obvious level is the role of highway planning in opening up some areas rather than others. Of course, highways do not create activity; they, as it were, ‘release’ it; they make possible the redistribution of economic activity. The provision of other public services, although usually playing a less pioneering role, may have similar effects - for example, the provision of water supplies (particularly irrigation networks), or electrical power, of drainage, etc.,. education policy may partly determine where particular categories of trained labour are available. These are the surface elements. The most important area, the influence of public agencies on basic accumulation, and thus spontaneous or ‘accidental’ spatial development, is much less easy to specify. The effects of different decisions in the different departments of the Ministry of Industry, of Agriculture, of Trade and Commerce, of Finance, of Defence, and of the Central Bank, let alone insert in a single spatial are extremely difficult to put together,
framework. Indeed. it is difficult enough understanding the direct economic effects, let alone the spatial ones; Governments are guided by a frequently uncodified combination of experience and shrewd guesswork. However, rather than seek to tackle this heroic scale of problem, it might be more sensible to adopt the view of one locality. The focal planning office can, with much greater manageability, seek to assess the implications for the focal area of diverse national decisions, and what focal planning responses are required. Settfement and regional planning, whether at the level of the grand national scheme or land uses in a locality. is obviously rather marginal in the evolution ot the spatial economy. Despite Government proclamations to the contrary, kc) national issues will always take priority over the question of the use of space. and thus the use of space will be directed ‘accidentally’. But this does not excuse the sheer ignorance of the spatial economy, nor the attempt to draw imaginary spatial designs that have no relationship to reality. There are areas of cffcctive planning and action, even if these are both different and more modest than the aspirations traditionally espoused.’ To summarise, then, the traditions of macro-economic analysis and pofiticogeographic concern with space are ill-equipped to deaf with planning the spatial economy in the process of economic development. The one constitutes a ‘spaceless’ set of abstractions, the other a ‘contentless’ preoccupation with land: the one subsumes the locality wholly in national accumulation and therefore fails to relate to the unique composition of focal output; the other subordinates production and employment to inferred physical relationships. Spatial economic activity is highly disaggregated and specific. The available knowledge is far too shallow to provide a foundation for the type of planning cust~~rn~~ry at the focal level. Far more work is required to build up even a rudimentary knowledge of the focal interactions which could provide a basis for policy, let alone the knowledge needed to design a national territorial division of fabour. To some extent. a concern with settlements of different population sizes is a diversion from understanding the spatial economy, for we cannot assum that population size is an accurate surrogate for the economic relationships wc need to identify. Indeed, if we were to discover that settlements of the same size had some common elements in terms of the spatial economy that would bc an important step forward (as well as an unfikeiy coincidence, probably the function of the degree of statistical aggregation). Identifying the spatial economy is vital if planning is to contribute to the process of’ economic development, is to anticipate the frequently violent changes that flow from industri~~fisation, and to develop plans of public inter~/enti(~n to strengthen employment and income generation. It is also important if we are to begin to assess the impact of the whole complex of public activity on any particular locality. The central task. then, for planners is not the regulation of land uses, nor the attempt to redistribute population, but rather to shape economic activity as a direct c~~ntribution to economic development, to maximise the contributioI1 ot the locality to the national economy. This implies not the force of the law. the framework of the Master Plan, but indicative planning, closely related to the national economic development plan with a comparable time horizon and Policy documents for the key sectors of focal output and clear-cut targets. employment then take priority over land-use regulation; land becomes only one c~~ntributory factor, and the planner’s ‘ordered land uses’ becomes ‘ordered to maximise output and employment’.
’ On what is specifically required in terms of metropolitan planning, SW my “Metropolitan Developing Countries: Tasks for the 19Xtfs”. Hnhitnr ~~~er~~~iona~ Vol. 7. No. 3/J. pp. S-17.
Planning 10X3.
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Ii becomes possible to conceive of physical planning in this form assuming its rightful place as an instrument of the public organisation of production, rather than, as it were, a qualitatively separate departure. As a departure from national imperatives, it must necessarily be marginal, and the frustration of the planners - not to mention their relative irrelevance to what happens - grows extreme. On the other side, Governments grow irritated at what, quite unfairly, is seen as ‘the failure of planning’. From its marginal position, planning could not fail; and that is the problem.
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unpredictable, since we know so little of the changing interactions which cause spatial micro-change. Yet this is precisely the target of spatial planning. In the end, macro-economic analysis requires boundaries which inevitably are arbitrary; given the boundaries, it offers a complete description of economic activity without the need to refer to geography or, usually, even land (except as one of several factors of production and by no means an important one; or a commodity, peculiar only insofar as its price varies with its location). Furthermore, what is important within macro-economic analysis does not necessarily have any spatial implications; what causes the most rapid changes in spatial interactions may scarcely register in the economic measures. A retail tomato market may cause large numbers of people and vehicles to move in a small locality, far larger numbers than those that move around a tomato exchange, where millions of tonnes of tomatoes change hands - but only in the form of paper claims. The second is far greater in importance for a much larger number of people (including those engaged in the thousands of retail tomato markets), but involves less spatial activity. We are confronted by the ancient philosophic problem of the relationship between the part and the whole,” or, in a special form, the ‘individual’ and ‘society’. Personality is not a simple reflex of social aggregates any more than local space can be read off from the movements of the national economy - the links between the one and the other exist, but can produce endless perverse forms. From the viewpoint of the need to plan economic activity in a given area, a piece of territory, the concepts of macro-economic analysis encourage only myopia. On the other hand, the traditions of thought devoted to the analysis of space suffer from a different - but no less disastrous - form of myopia. Now the problems are not economic, but spatial, aggregation. Economic geographers have identified different sets of spatial relationships - for example, central places, settlement systems, hinterlands, hierarchies of settlements, regions, etc. Mere geographical contiguity - space itself - is identified as economically significant, without this being proved; or, rather, without it being shown in what circumstances it is true for what activity, and in what, not. Given the changing technical specifications of production, one would also assume that what might be true in one historical period is not necessarily true in another. Like economics, economic geography accommodates historical changes only with difficulty. Underlying the geographical formulations are propositions in spatial demography. Censuses marshal1 classes of settlement, identified - given a set of, in economic terms, arbitrary administrative boundaries - by size of residential population, and imply that these sizes represent something in the spatial economy. Yet it is quite unclear what they do represent - they are almost Plato’s shadows on the wall of the cave, their movements without self-evident meaning. No one would suppose the same significance attaches itself to eleven people whether they are in a pub, on the moon or playing cricket. It is the specific activity of the group, not their number, which is important. By analogy, we have no reason to suppose that settlements of the same population size play the same or similar roles in the spatial economy; each settlement has a unique composition of output and services, and thus a unique role in a spatial economy. In this sense, the concept of ‘city’ covers such a diversity of economic territories, the appearance of similarity or homogeneity in the class of cities is achieved by no more than nomenclature. However, this is to judge by the criterion of spatial economic activity. By contrast, space is a vital question in the measures of political power, or politics ’ For an exccllcnt exposition of the issues, see Lucien Goldmann. Vi.>iot~ iti the Prmc’e.s of Puscul urld the Tragedies of Rucine. Chap. London. 1964.
The Hidden God. a Study of the Trqrc 1, pp. 3-22. Routledge & Kcgan. Paul.
and adlninistratioll. Borders ~ and the tax paying or war-fighting population within them - in part determine the power of States. of public officials. and the rights and obligations of people. Public action ~ the purpose of planning - is thus ncccssarily closely WIICCI-IIC‘~ with territory and powers over given patches of land. But the concepts associated with the operation of political or administrative lxn~ci gi\,c no ciircct insight into the underlying spatial pattern ot economic acti\,itv. except insofar as Govcriiiiiciit is itself an economic activity. The one and the other cannot easily subsume each other. Undcrst~mciing the simplicities of the distribution of po\vers 13~ territorial prescription is verv l‘ar from understanding govcrnmcnt action and its spatial effects. Thus. it i<-often assumed that Government has. at least in principle. ;I single \vill. dircctcd I>!, ;I single ccntrc. ;I group of Ministers or ;I President, txickcd I-T!, ;t centraliscci bureaucracy. ;I view summariscd in the idea ot‘ ;I single X iS WetI kii~~Wli. ~m’~IXIiiciit c~~iisists Of institution. the State. In practice, multiple agencies. man\’ of them pursuing purposes bvhich arc contradictor\,. Indcccl. it is usually cluiie be~~o~~i the inforiiiationa1 and institutional capacity ;,f Ministers to impose ;I hingle imperati\,e. cvcii Lvheli ~ in times of LV;II-. for example ~ a supposcdlv o\,crriding aim is imposed upon all public agcncics. (~ovcrniiicnt is not at ali ;I machine. \+ith ;I single driving seat. hut rather. quite often. ;I ni;i,ior traffic jam. A better nlodei than that of the machine is perhaps Government as more like ;I market. ;I competition of agencies for ;~cccss to funds. As lvith the results ot market competition, the final outcome of competition is not kno\vn to the competitors until th c‘ market closes. Thus. funds - and powers - arc distrihuted not as the rcflcx of Ministerial statements or edicts, but rather as the result of ;I competitive mix cstending over long periods of time. afflicted both by the changing political fortuncs of different clans . groups. individuals, and I?\: the bad tuck of c\‘ents. The simplicities of ‘the plan - stated pui-posts. policy ciocumcnts. implemcntation - at-e far removed from the real tumult of the public domain. ‘I‘he purposcs Iaid dowii ~ c’vc’ii if WC‘can assume rashly that they arc ;I rational 1-csp~Jnsc to the correct diagnosis of a given probiein - arc presented for ;I particular aiidicncc. and thus in ;I special form. Given the multiplicit\: of audicnccs, the stated aims may be self-contradictorv (that is. the achievcmcnt of one aim esctudes the achievement of another). Thcv may he accompanied hy ;I covert set of‘ aims, conscious or unconscious. In the process of discussing the purposes. diffcrcnt political and social pressure groups may 13~’ rcciefining Lvhat ought to be undertaken. and the Minister making concc‘ssions. all within the same weasel phi-ascs of policy. The ctatcd aims must then fact the hazards of transmission through the co~nples structure and interests of the administrati\,e institutions charged with directing ii7iplement~~tion (again. with another set of parallel covert purposes): the institutional perception of ohJccti\,c constraints imposes ;I new set of disciplines. Finally. there wilt he the further refashioning introduced tw the public and private agencies which undcrtakc ii7i17lemcntatit,n and ill:iY be conccrneci to maximise returns in areas which arc remote from the polic!, daims. At each concessions. stage, outside interests inav achieve redefinitions, promises. and at the end. those in~mecii~itcly affected h> implement~ition ma\; also oblige the implcmcnters to shift their emphasis. The whole compllcatcd process can take place without any reformulation of the original statement of policv. l‘hc phrases so beloved of Governments arc elastic enough to COVCI- ;I wide range of intentions and final bcha\:iour. It is scarcely surprising that the evaluation of policy is such ;I murky and difficult cxercisc for it is frcqucntl~~ quite unclear which set of p~~~-pos~s should pro\idc the criteria to judge the final outcome. The problem txxo~~~es the more SCC’CI-c‘. the Icss spccii’i: and quantifiable the aim.
If understanding what Governments do and why is so difficult, understanding the impact of Governments on the use of space compounds the problems: WC are connecting two types of unknowns. Insofar as the many agencies of the State are important in the national economy - and they are usually only some of the many agencies involved - then they are to some extent important in terms of the spatial consequences of economic activity. But their importance in terms of space is usually an accidental by-product of the pursuit of other purposes. Take, for example, the argument of some economists’ that import-substitution strategies as pursued in the post-war period tilt the terms of urban-rural trade so that agricultural output is cheapened relative to industrial output, capital relative to labour, producing an ‘over-concentration’ of the labour force in urban areas. The spatial effects - if such they be - are and must be on their own a very small consideration in terms of the national importance of the central economic strategy. Or again: exchange rates may have powerful ‘accidental‘ effects in terms of the regional distribution of activity; for example, other things being equal, the dollar-peso exchange rate is a very important factor in the growth of industry on the Mexican side of the border with the USA, but the Minister of Finance would not allow that this should determine decisions about the relative value of the two currencies. Interest rates affect local building rates; the price of petrol is a powerful element in the volume and direction of traffic; the discovery of new natural resources - for example, oil - affects national priorities in so decisive a manner, the merely spatial effects could not be considered of sufficient importance to determine central policy. Thus, the complex of Government policies, however we define the reasons for specific policies and their implementation, may have overwhelming effects in terms of the use of space. But these are unintended effects which, for much of the time, are unpredicted and, at the present state of knowledge, often unpredictable. Furthermore, even if Governments could predict the spatial effects of primarily ‘non-spatial’ policies, it is unlikely they would want to change them since they are far too important to be subject to merely spatial purposes. Where does all this leave explicitly spatial planning? It is certainly not a wand to transform the physical environment, but it is more than a straw in the wind. However, what effect planners might have is sometimes nullified by the somewhat messianic image that physical planning can transform the environment, when the reality of competing public agencies daily contradicts this assumption. Perhaps the heroic view is part of the reason for the inability of planners to identify the complex spatial economy? In the old land-use map, we find only the primitive coloured patches of Industry, Commerce, Residential, an abstention from the real functions of the city which almost inevitably forces the planner back into the role of planning publicly available consumer goods (housing, land, access to shops), not planning an important part of the national economy. Failing to plan the spatial economy, the planner is then the victim of the unpredicted results of changes in the spatial economy; his is responsibility without power. Thus the concepts of physical planning produce a kind of ‘contentless’ space in terms of economic activity, no less abstract than the ‘spaceless’ content of macroeconomic analysis. Lines are drawn on maps with little or no attempt to relate the lines to what is happening in the spatial economy, the movement of workers. the flows of freight and services. The changing commodity composition of output, the changing elaboration of territorial divisions of labour, the continual ’ See Ian Little, Tibor Skitovsky and Maurice Scott, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Co~mrrie.~. (I Comparative Study. OECDiOxford University Press, Oxford. 1970. On different case studies. with different conclusions, see Adriaan ten Kate and Robert Bruce Wallace, Profecrion and Economrc~ D~,l,c,/o/““‘~‘r/iti Mexico, Gower, Farnborough. 1980, and Ashok Mitra, Terms of’ Trade and Cluss Relnrions. Cass. London. 1977.
‘remassaging‘ of land uses. takes place sotncwherc below the level of aggregation of the map. It is that level of a,,~~(~rcgation, of abstraction. which hcenis to confirm the assumption that cities art‘ the same. that their problems arc attributable simply to the physical bv-products of concentrating population in ;I limited area of land. The policies which flow from such ;I primitive perception arc nccessaril! no less primitive and thus incapable of achieving their stated purposes. The failures then alienate the planner from what can be achic\,ed. The gap bct\veen traditions - the ni;icro-c‘conomic and t hc physical 01. political - provide endless opportunities for spurious associations to fiII the gap. The curious tyranny of the urban-rural distinction, I‘ot- csample. is in par1 due to the USC of the dichotomv as ;I surrogate for other things - the diffcrencc between industry and agriculture. between modernit! and the traditional. between wealth and poverty. the neurotic and the healthy. the criminal and the honest. and even, in Fidel Castro’s cat-licr views. the hol/r,qcv)i,sic and the proletariat.” Differcnccs in territorial j,c’r crrpittr income arc idcntificd as evidence of incyuditv of household incomes . and Govcrtitiietits frame politics to narrow the territorial differences. even though thev can succecci in this aim while actually increasing the inequalities in household income. The territorial distribution of population is seen as e\:idcnce of it social condition. as signs of ;I given level of welfare. Many Govcrnmcnts, on this basis. pursue politics of population t-distribution - rcdistrihution can, it is assitmd. increase \+,eIt’arc. The evidence is very slight indeed that Governments can pcrcei\,e opportunities to increase wclfarc by I-distribution in advance of the population at large.The myths of space. of territory, provide an opportunity for C;overnmcnts to avoid unclcrtaking the obvious actions required. Urban scr\,iccs. it is said. arc poor. not txxai~se investment in public services is inadequate. but txxause thcrc arc ‘too many people’; the policv response becomes not lo invest more in services. but to redistribute population. Social inequalitv is redefined to bccomc territorial differences. and the demand to redistribute iticc,me reformulated ;I’; ;I spatial distribution of income to the same people as before. Thus. space plays an important role not only in the organisation of political power. but in the hypocrisy of society. The economists when obliged to collaborate, relinciuish their abstractions for an eclectic selection of the phvsical elements. absorbing the hypocrisy c11 I’oiit~~. Many of these points will be familiar. since the criticiuc 01‘ each tradition is rather tnore developed than rctncciies to the problem. Yet some tnodest remedial direction is required if spatial planning is to contribute to the process 01 economic development and play. some role in minitnising the da~~age which seems an intrinsic part of industrtalisation. It scetns that there is almost :I new field of enquiry, so far only ill-explored despite several decades of physical planning. This is the field of study of spatial economic activity. whether construed as cievotcd to settlements of different population sizes -or the interaction of territorial ;trc;ts spccialised in different sorts of output. We arc far from being able to say very much about the pattern of emerging economic activity for the territorial arca of a whole country esccpt at ;I very crude level. but there is greater possibilitv of bein g able to bcsin the process
of identification at the level of one district - within a region or metropolitan area, without placing any economic significance on the external boundaries concerned, nor implying the existence of ‘an economy’. Each locality, at a disaggregated level of analysis, is the location for the production of a unique composition of output, a unique ‘economic mix’ and ‘industrial mix’. Production therefore engages a unique combination of skills in the employed labour force, and requires a unique pattern of movement of goods, services and workers between the spatially distributed units of production. Identifying this set of unique patterns and their interrelationships is the precondition for effective spatial planning relevant to economic development. Without this, physical planning is necessarily blind, and we cannot identify its relevance either to popular welfare or expanded production and employment. The central determinant of the use of space and the settlement pattern, of different rates of increase in the labour force in different settlements in the process of economic development, is the pace and chmging strrlctrur of ‘capital accumulation’ (that is, the accumulation of financial assets and the stock of capital equipment in the country). The process can be measured directly (hut the data are usually of doubtful reliability), and indirectly - through measures of capital per worker, changes in labour productivity, scctoral redistributions of the labour force, etc. For our purposes, there are two crude measures of importance, indirect indications of the central process; they do not necessarily coincide in terms of proportionate changes: (a) the rate of increase and changing composition of output, seen as a spatially disaggregated system of production and services; and (b) the rate of increase and changing composition of the labour force, conceived as a spatially distributed labour market. The changes measured in these two forms interact with a historical endowment, a given distribution of territorial uses, of settlements (identified as locationally specific units of fixed capital). The forces at stake are mediated by complex systems of political power, social, legal and institutional conditions. Just as changes in output are not matched directly by changes in employment - the capital-labour ratio of each unique commodity composition of output determines different proportionate changes in each - so also the utilisation of space is not a simple reflex of changes in output and employment (we need here estimates of the ratios between different capital-labour coefficients and space utilisation, both direct and indirect). There are also considerable lags in adjustment as well as innumerable social and legal obstacles. Nonetheless, despite the complexity, we need to hold hard to the two ends of the process, accumulation and space, if we are then to have a measure of the force of the intervening variables, and thus some idea of what points in the process are accessible to limited public intervention to reshape the initiating processes or the spatial outcome. An industrialising society is continually transforming the composition of output and thus the composition of the labour force. If we are to identify the spatial implications of this transformation, we have to be able to identify and quantify the changes in output. People are generally aware of some of the effects of high rates of national economic growth - Mexico City, ,520 Paula, Seoul, arc monuments to rapid national growth. But there is much less familiarity with the dramatic changes in the structure of production even when rates of growth may be relatively low. Again, the cruder results are apparent - the decline of NorthEastern Brazil as sugar flagged; the decline of Britain’s West Midlands in our own time as the commodity composition of national output changed. In industrialised societies, it is assumed that the process of continuing output transformation operates on an institutionalised basis - firms continually inliAB 7:5/b-F
novate, and the trajectory of technical change is thus, supposedly. smoothed; but the spatial implications of this process arc ill-understood and, even then. onI> long after the event. The statistics do not help us. They can identify large crude changes - the rise of new subsectors, garments or micro-processing devices - but not when those subsectors began, because they were then part of larger aggregates. In practice, products are continually redefined, the marginal adjustments rcm:tining undetected except by the irntne~ii~~te p~~rtici~?~lntsuntil the st~ltistici~~l~sdecide that ;I new product has appeared and is of sufficient importance to record soparatcl~; the grcy areas - where one product is becoming another - remain unidcntlfied. It is as if the process of the evolution of spccics wcrc enormously accelerated so that we wcrc c(~ntiIlu~~lly obliged to redefine the ch~~r~~ctcristics hitherto associated with our taxonomy of spccics. Not all of these many technical changes have spatial implications, particularly in a settled system of industry with spare capacity. But au industrialising~tising society is one where, at least in theory. spare capacity is c~~r~tiilLl~~tlv being clillliI~~~tc~iby expansion, product innovation is at a very* high rate. aAd existing industrial capacity is ill-equipped to cope with cxpans~on and multiple innovations ill .si~rr. It is likely then that capacity will be more mobile: changing characteristics of output as well as expansion then product changes in location. The process of change is rapid and also new. WC cannot therefore take for granted that there wilt be useful historical gcncralis:ttions cq~1;111~ applicable today as in the past. For cxamplc, in the fast century it was taken for granted that the growth of the ln~~nu~~cturiilg industry and the city wcrc associated. I1owcvcr. it has long been clear in the industriatised countries th;lt that :lssociation is declining; cities are becoming much more providers of services at the same time as MDCs as a whole are increasingly oriented towards the provision of scrviccs. The factors behind the first change arc not very clear. but XVL‘ can prcsumc thev are related to a new composition of output (impelling IIC\I’ locations. SOIIIC: c;f which are outside the MDCs), different capital-labour ratios. a higher rate of mobility among workers (reflecting higher incomes and pr~)~iLlcti~it~). as wull as the provision of roughly uniform scrvicex in rural and urban areah. tIoweve~-, even if at much lower average IXY cupitrr incomes. the LDCs arc simultaneously embarking upon the same process. Thus. while the initiA surge of growth of industry still products in a relativelv backward country ;I rapid cot~cc~ltr~~ti~~~~ of part of the labour force. that process is now tlcing.ovcrt~tkcn 1~~relative dispersal a of production (even if ‘dispersal’ represents still, in ttic national picture. regional concentration). Indeed, in the coming period. it will probably be this dispersal which will require more pt~Illning attention than the l~l-e~~ccu~~~~ti~~li of the recent past, urbanisation. It follows from what has been argued earlier that the use of land is a dependent variable. The control of the use of land could not thcreforc bc the kev to reshaping the process in significant wavs. Rather we could suggest a kind of modified and unstable equilibrium model. Land uws xc constantly but discontinuously tending to be transformed to reach an ‘equilibrium‘ with the commodity composition of output. or rather with the economic mix of activitv. Industriatisation is C~~ntinu~~Ily changing the economic mix of activity - c&n where highly aggregated measures of output show only stability. So there is no final destination, no ‘equilibrium’ where the changes cease and 1;1nd uses settlc into a given form. Of course. thcrc are large elements of inertia in the appearance of the physical form. Street layouts tend to persist through successive and even it is sometimes found the modern highway changes in the economy, had a humble ancestor in a farm track. But the elements of inertial in some aspects of the form shoutd not blind us to the changing content. Thcrc is little place for building the eternal city in the midst of economic dc\~clopment;
planners have tried, but the society invariably refashions the physical artefacts in entirely new ways in order to cope with a swiftly changing activity. Not all parts of the land surface of, say, a city contribute equally to the generation of employment and incomes. Population densities do not indicate what are the most important areas. The key areas are conjunctural, points in the exchange of goods, people and information that play a disproportionate economic role - the central business district, transport junction points (ports, roads), markets, specialised industrial districts, localised airports, railways, complexes of servicing and processing activity. At such points, quite often. the distinctions between sectors disappear in a dynamic context - the dock wharves offload steel to be sold in the adjacent steel wholesale market, financed by the adjacent banks and commodity houses, broken down by the adjacent steel stockholders for use by the mass of adjacent small users of steel, petty manufacturing and servicing. The thread of continuity between the activities is steel, beginning in a homogeneous form and ending in a vast array of outputs. In such a spatial context, it is steel that requires a plan, not ‘markets’, ‘industry’, ‘services’. Nor can it be assumed that the market for the final products is local; the forces of rapid change may be finally external to the city. Take for example the small city of Novo Hamburg0 in south Brazil. The city is the point of origin of a major part of Brazil’s shoe exports, and thus the pattern of urban land uses is intimately related to demand for shoes in the USA and elsewhere. Ultimately, everything - wharves, banks, markets, ancillary activities - is related to shoes. A plan for the economic space of Novo Hamburg0 has to be a plan for shoes. However, these conjunctural points in the city have traditionally been those areas least understood in the planning office. Very often, in the planning office the preoccupation has been, not planning an existing spatial economy in situ, but rather with planning new areas entirely, whether new suburbs, towns, industrial estates. Even these have been planned, not with a view to their essential functions, patterns of interaction with the rest of the spatial economy, but with designing ‘ordered land-uses’. The power of the planner, particularly relative to the traditional ethic, is severely circumscribed. Often planners attribute the failure to implement plans to this lack of power, the lack of the means to force coordination of all public agencies. This is a mistaken diagnosis for, in principle, the agencies could not be effectively coordinated without subordinating important national purposes solely to spatial considerations. The ‘failure to implement’ is a complex animal, but it allows the planner to escape consideration of the relevance of the plan to key national issues. Indeed, the ‘failure to implement’ may be a key indication that the plan was bad, regardless of its technical merits. However, public agencies are usually important in initiating or influencing patterns of the use of space. The most obvious level is the role of highway planning in opening up some areas rather than others. Of course, highways do not create activity; they, as it were, ‘release’ it; they make possible the redistribution of economic activity. The provision of other public services, although usually playing a less pioneering role, may have similar effects - for example, the provision of water supplies (particularly irrigation networks), or electrical power, of drainage, etc.,. education policy may partly determine where particular categories of trained labour are available. These are the surface elements. The most important area, the influence of public agencies on basic accumulation, and thus spontaneous or ‘accidental’ spatial development, is much less easy to specify. The effects of different decisions in the different departments of the Ministry of Industry, of Agriculture, of Trade and Commerce, of Finance, of Defence, and of the Central Bank, let alone insert in a single spatial are extremely difficult to put together,
framework. Indeed. it is difficult enough understanding the direct economic effects, let alone the spatial ones; Governments are guided by a frequently uncodified combination of experience and shrewd guesswork. However, rather than seek to tackle this heroic scale of problem, it might be more sensible to adopt the view of one locality. The focal planning office can, with much greater manageability, seek to assess the implications for the focal area of diverse national decisions, and what focal planning responses are required. Settfement and regional planning, whether at the level of the grand national scheme or land uses in a locality. is obviously rather marginal in the evolution ot the spatial economy. Despite Government proclamations to the contrary, kc) national issues will always take priority over the question of the use of space. and thus the use of space will be directed ‘accidentally’. But this does not excuse the sheer ignorance of the spatial economy, nor the attempt to draw imaginary spatial designs that have no relationship to reality. There are areas of cffcctive planning and action, even if these are both different and more modest than the aspirations traditionally espoused.’ To summarise, then, the traditions of macro-economic analysis and pofiticogeographic concern with space are ill-equipped to deaf with planning the spatial economy in the process of economic development. The one constitutes a ‘spaceless’ set of abstractions, the other a ‘contentless’ preoccupation with land: the one subsumes the locality wholly in national accumulation and therefore fails to relate to the unique composition of focal output; the other subordinates production and employment to inferred physical relationships. Spatial economic activity is highly disaggregated and specific. The available knowledge is far too shallow to provide a foundation for the type of planning cust~~rn~~ry at the focal level. Far more work is required to build up even a rudimentary knowledge of the focal interactions which could provide a basis for policy, let alone the knowledge needed to design a national territorial division of fabour. To some extent. a concern with settlements of different population sizes is a diversion from understanding the spatial economy, for we cannot assum that population size is an accurate surrogate for the economic relationships wc need to identify. Indeed, if we were to discover that settlements of the same size had some common elements in terms of the spatial economy that would bc an important step forward (as well as an unfikeiy coincidence, probably the function of the degree of statistical aggregation). Identifying the spatial economy is vital if planning is to contribute to the process of’ economic development, is to anticipate the frequently violent changes that flow from industri~~fisation, and to develop plans of public inter~/enti(~n to strengthen employment and income generation. It is also important if we are to begin to assess the impact of the whole complex of public activity on any particular locality. The central task. then, for planners is not the regulation of land uses, nor the attempt to redistribute population, but rather to shape economic activity as a direct c~~ntribution to economic development, to maximise the contributioI1 ot the locality to the national economy. This implies not the force of the law. the framework of the Master Plan, but indicative planning, closely related to the national economic development plan with a comparable time horizon and Policy documents for the key sectors of focal output and clear-cut targets. employment then take priority over land-use regulation; land becomes only one c~~ntributory factor, and the planner’s ‘ordered land uses’ becomes ‘ordered to maximise output and employment’.
’ On what is specifically required in terms of metropolitan planning, SW my “Metropolitan Developing Countries: Tasks for the 19Xtfs”. Hnhitnr ~~~er~~~iona~ Vol. 7. No. 3/J. pp. S-17.
Planning 10X3.
in the
Ii becomes possible to conceive of physical planning in this form assuming its rightful place as an instrument of the public organisation of production, rather than, as it were, a qualitatively separate departure. As a departure from national imperatives, it must necessarily be marginal, and the frustration of the planners - not to mention their relative irrelevance to what happens - grows extreme. On the other side, Governments grow irritated at what, quite unfairly, is seen as ‘the failure of planning’. From its marginal position, planning could not fail; and that is the problem.