One problem with planning, particularly for planning in the academy, concerns its normative basis: the good city, the just city, etc. Recently, a commenter here said:
That describes what a university SHOULD be, but not what I have found most universities to actually be. Anyone that disagrees with the mainstream academic viewpoint is not engaged in discussion, but shouted down. Students aren’t encouraged to explore and come up with new ideas, but to validate the ideas of their professors. Seems like the “debate” (or lack thereof) is not longer intellectual, but political and ideological.
That comment meshes with my experience in the planning academy, but not my experience with social scientists. Social scientists have their own sets of problems and limitations, but planning’s normative basis means that once consensus forms on what is good, deviations from that will be condemned not as misguided or inaccurate, but as evil. I’m not naive enough to believe the social sciences aren’t subjective and subject to ideological influences. But a common theoretical basis, such as that held in economics (however flawed), allows even for deep divisions to run alongside a rigorous body of empirical work. That is, unless you’re in macro, where ideologies rule and big names bellow at each other like mammoths across the primordial swamp about how to interpret theoretical models that have a weak empirical basis.
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s website made a triumphal proclamation this week that we have reached “the end of the segregated century.” The New York Times dutifully spread the news, leading with the headline “Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds.” The story beneath the spin, however, shows that segregation isn’t just a phenomenon to look back on regretfully during African American History Month (which begins today). Segregation lives on in far too many American cities.Rolf underscores an uncomfortable point--that Northern cities have more black-white segregation than Southern cities. The largest city in my home state of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is the most segregated large city in the country.
In 1970, two years had elapsed since Congress enacted the end of private-sector apartheid with the Fair Housing Act; only a few years before that, President Kennedy had ordered the desegregation of public housing. Why should we wonder that segregation levels have declined since then? Shouldn’t the real story be that in the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area, Chicago, over 70 percent of African Americans would have to move to a predominantly non-black neighborhood (or the same proportion of whites would have to move to mostly non-white areas) to achieve an even racial distribution? Chicago isn’t the only metropolitan area in this position: Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis also surpass 70 on this segregation index. New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia—that is, a continuous band of urbanization stretching from just north of Washington, DC, to the middle of Connecticut with well over 25 million inhabitants—stand between 60 and 65. The heart of the northeast corridor still lives in a segregated century, as does the fringe of the Great Lakes. Even “less segregated” metropolitan areas still have levels of racial segregation far higher than the Fair Housing Act promised.
