24 May 2009 (London)

Encounters with Development Planning

John Friedmann

When I was asked to give this talk, my first thought was that since this conference celebrates the first 30 years of the International Development Planning Review, and that many of you would probably be tempted to engage in reflections about the past, I would focus on the next thirty years instead. But on second thought, this didn’t seem as promising a topic for our common concerns as some reflections on my own experiences with “development planning.” Towards the end of my comments, I will venture to take a peek beyond the visible horizon, with some remarks about the current world situation and what it augurs for development, but will keep them brief. My main concern today will be with what is already safely behind us.

I won’t entertain you with anecdotes, but I do have a message, and it is this. Development planning is necessarily concerned with the future. Inevitably, it is also situated in circumstances that, as Marx reminds us, are not of our own choosing. The past may hold some lessons for us that are relevant when decisions must be made. But planning decisions are never based on scientific evidence, because a future that is grounded in actual space and time cannot be foretold except as one among several possible scenarios. Although we can posit an abstract future (for instance in the form of specific development objectives, i.e., a normative future), the policies we prescribe are merely uncontrolled experiments. Under the circumstances, they may be the best experiments we can devise, but we cannot claim to know their eventual outcomes. If we are honest with ourselves, development planning is essentially a way of learning about the future, a future in which we have chosen to involve ourselves through policies and other institutional interventions, but one that we cannot in any meaningful way design. Typically, development planning initiates something—for instance, a new way of harnessing locally generated power from alternative sources, but whether and to what extent this will accomplish our purpose remains an open question. Let me put this succinctly and then move on to my stories. Good development planning involves continuous social learning. But what is good in one place and time is not necessarily good in another. And inevitably we have to ask ourselves: who is engaged in learning, and what is being learned? For in reflecting on policy outcomes, there are many lessons to absorb.

For most of the remainder of my talk, I will speak about myself and what I have learned about the art of policy planning over the course of the past 60 years or so. I begin my story shortly after Christmas 1945 when, as a young intelligence officer with the American forces, I arrived in a Germany most of whose cities lay in ruins. I stayed on for about 18 months, and when finally returned to civilian life at the ripe age of 21, I wrote an article for my hometown newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, about my experiences abroad. I vividly described a conquered nation exhausted by six years of war and concluded that the former master race that I had seen vanquished, demoralized, scraping together a bare existence among the rubble of its cities, would never rise again. I wrote about a people for whom I saw no future.

Now we know, of course, that this prognosis was dead wrong. Once stability had returned through a currency reform initiated by the Occupation Forces and the democratic election of Konrad Adenauer, the former Lord Mayor of Cologne and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, as Prime Minister in 1947, a whole new Germany rose from the ashes. Its cities were destroyed, but now they were quickly rebuilt. The German people had the embodied technical and scientific knowledge, the work ethic, the discipline and organization that within a relatively short time would propel their country to the front rank of industrial nations. This was my first experience with making a complete misjudgment about a country’s chances for development; years later, there would be others. I had thought I knew the future, but I didn’t know enough.

I began my graduate studies in planning at the University of Chicago in the Fall of 1948. After earning my master’s, I found a position as industrial economist with the regional studies division of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville. Having read Lewis Mumford’s Culture of Cities, a book I adored, I was keen to find out more about the way planning was done in this world-famous institution which, many thought, represented the epitome of actually existing regional planning in the world. For weeks I scoured the technical library of the TVA searching for the Master Plan of this region, but to my dismay, there was none to be found. TVA was a planning agency with a mission; about this there was no doubt. But its planning was done without a comprehensive regional plan. I was stunned by this discovery. For if there was no plan, how was planning done? It would take me decades to find the answer to this question, or better: How shall we think about planning?

I also collected data for my doctoral thesis in Knoxville, which concerned economic development. When the TVA was given its legislative mandate, it was heralded as an agency that would harness the Tennessee River and its tributaries for multiple purposes, among which were flood control, navigation, the generation of hydro-power, and recreation. More generally, the objective was to revitalize what had been a poor, largely rural region through the development of its water resources. The more ample term, “economic development,” was not yet in common use. What my study revealed, however, was a significant discovery. Overlaying the original river basin that constituted the heart of this bio-region was a much larger power service area in which the TVA had a monopoly in the generation of low-cost energy. It was the electrification of this larger area that not only brought power to rural communities via cooperatives but, more significantly, hooked up the larger cities on the Valley’s rim—cities such as Nashville and Memphis—that could now buy low-cost hydro- and later also coal-generated power, and which in turn allowed them to industrialize. Thus the initial development of water resources in the Tennessee Valley was turned into a dynamic regional development scheme for a much larger area through the agency of urban centers and their surrounding regions. As it happened, many of the new industries had moved from their old locations in New England to the Southeast, where surplus rural labor was not yet unionized. Though lacking a general plan, the TVA had helped to promote the region’s economic development along with a major restructuring of the “space economy” of the eastern United States. None of this had originally been intended, and in the early 1950s, concepts such as “regional development,” “city-region, and “space economy,” were still virtually unexplored concepts.

The next stop on my journey was Brazil. I was initially detailed to Belém do Pará to participate in a course on development planning in that vast ocean of rain forest called the Amazon. The date was 1955, and I had just received my doctorate in regional planning. I knew virtually nothing about Brazil nor spoke Portuguese. All I knew about regional development was what I had learned during my two years with the TVA. An inauspicious beginning, one might have thought. But during the next two and a half years, when I finally did learn to speak the language of the country, I ended up in the colonial city of Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil’s northeast, where I helped to set up a research and training center in regional development planning at the economics faculty of the Federal University. During my time in Bahia, I learned three things.

Development, I found, was not part of the vocabulary of ordinary people, but was chiefly an obsession among a small group of elite intellectuals. What ordinary people did talk about was the concrete, specific things that would improve the quality of their lives: a job, a roof over their head, electric power, clean water, a basic education, access to good health. Development was an abstraction. But what ordinary people got instead, was Brasilia.

President Juscelino Kubitschek had committed himself to moving the nation’s capital from the fleshpots of Rio de Janeiro to the austere Planalto Central, a thousand kilometers in the interior of the country, a location where, it was claimed, a vision of the Virgin Mary had once appeared to devout believers in the 19th century. Clearly, then, this was the sacred site where Heaven was joined to Earth, the axis mundi of Brazil. In a frenzy of construction that he hoped would make his dream of a new capital city irreversible by subsequent governments, funds were siphoned off from the sorts of development that ordinary people hoped might make a difference in their lives. Nonetheless, it was a bold undertaking, symbolic of the dynamic and ebullient modern nation that Kubitschek envisioned, and that in time would change the political geography of the country. Planning Brasilia had been an impulsive act. As is well known, the initial sketch of the city was the inspiration of Lúcio Costa who had won the international competition, which Oscar Niemeyer, a close friend of the President and Costa’s former student, would subsequently turn into an architectural master piece. None of this fits the model of development planning that we normally write about and practice, beginning as it did with mystical visions and a charismatic leader who managed to persuade Brazilians that a new capital city is what they had always wanted.

But there is a tragic epilogue to this story. Three years after Kubitschek’s term of office had expired, a military coup abolished democracy in Brazil and imposed an authoritarian system from Brasilia that would last 21 years.

Meanwhile, I had moved on to Asia. For two years, from 1958 to 1961, I worked on the staff of the United States Operations Mission in Seoul, Korea. It was the period of reconstruction following the Korean War which had brought about a shaky end of hostilities between North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. Here, I thought, I would at last have a chance to engage in real development planning. But things took a different turn. Following massive student protests throughout the country, President of the Republic of Korea, Syngman Rhee, an autocrat who had ruled with American support since 1948, was forced into exile in Hawaii in April 1960. A brief democratic interlude came to an abrupt halt when a military coup raised General Park Chung-hee to power. It was during Park’s 17 years as head of the government, that South Korea’s economy made impressive gains, largely a result of tight links between government and private capital that served to enrich both, and the continued military alliance with the United States. Perhaps, I wondered, development planning is an illusion after all. What’s at stake are not the technicalities of planning, whose mastery is claimed by professionals, but games of power and the obscure dynamics of history.

In early 1961, I returned to the States, where I was recruited by Lloyd Rodwin to teach regional planning at MIT and join a research team that he together with Martin Meyerson at Harvard were putting together to help the Venezuelan government design and build Ciudad Guayana, a new “growth pole” in the eastern part of the country. Ciudad Guayana was to become a center of iron and steel production which, it was hoped, would help to diversify Venezuela’s economy while drawing population into the under-populated, resource-rich Orinoco region. The project of building the city was entrusted to General Alfonzo Ravard, an MIT graduate, who in turn contracted the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies to provide both technical and research services.

Like many South American countries, Venezuela has a unitary, centralized system of government; its regional economies are highly diverse; and its distribution of population and cities is heavily skewed towards the national center of power. In the 1960s, it was President Rómulo Betancourt’s hope to promote new regional growth centers, among which, and by far the most promising, was Ciudad Guayana. But as I noted at the time, the three-year Plan de la Nación had failed to articulate a national policy for regional development. The most likely reason is that a conceptual language for such a policy had not yet been invented. Stubbornly, and against the advice of Professor Rodwin, I decided to make it my business to suggest such a policy and provide for it both a theoretical and empirical framework. Published in 1966, Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela was published by the MIT Press. But by then I was already in Chile, where I would have an opportunity to actually help implement such a policy.

The Ford Foundation had asked me to lead a large-scale technical assistance effort in regional development, urban policy, and social programming to the incoming Christian Democrat government of Chile under Eduardo Frei. Initially, we had the support of Jorge Ahumada, a Chilean academic whom I had first met when he still headed CENDES, a development center at the national university in Caracas, and who now served as economic advisor to President-elect Frei. Unfortunately, Ahumada died shortly before my arrival in Santiago de Chile; nevertheless, he had helped to lay the groundwork for what we proposed to do, especially the emphasis on a national policy for regional development. Like Venezuela, Chile was a unitary state, and Ahumada who had attended my research presentations in Caracas, was familiar with my theories and a strong advocate of the regional approach for diffusing development throughout highly centralized countries.

It took me some time to realize that what we in Chile were engaged in was something altogether different from what I had learned at the University. Mainstream planning in America was chiefly about the allocation of urban lands to their “best” use. But what the Frei government was attempting to do was to shape new institutions that would enable the country to achieve specific development objectives. I called such planning innovative, a term I coined to refer to the introduction of institutional innovations into the central guidance system of a society. In the specific case of Chile, a central planning office was established in the Presidency, with separate sections for macro-economic and regional planning; a Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs was created to bring together diverse offices and corporate units concerned with the urban; and a new agency called “Popular Promotion” would operate out of the President’s Office to devise and implement programs for the poorest sectors of the urban population. A rural land reform agency was also established, but was not part of our charge.