land-use change and transport policy

HABfT.4TfNTL. Vol. 7. No. 314, pp. 67-77.1983. Printed in Great Britain.

0197-397m3 $3.00 + 0.w Pctgamon Press Ltd.

Land-use Change and Transport Policy”

PETER HALL U~ive~s~~y of Reading, UK

INTRODUCTION

In all cities at all times, there is a close mutual interaction between the pattern of transportation facilities and the pattern of activities and land uses (Hall, 1970). Traditional cities, in the whole of history down to cu. 1850, were based on horse- drawn transportation for the few and on pedestrian travel for the many. Logi- cally, they were dense and compact. Early public transportation cities, from about 1850 to about 1914, were based on horse-drawn buses and streetcars and on steam trains. They showed some limited degree of suburbanisation along radial routes, with increasing concentration of central business district functions served by these routes. Late public transportation cities, from about 19 14 to the present day, demonstrate a much greater and more uniform suburban spread based on motor buses and electric trains, including subway systems. Automobile- based cities - a form that has developed especially in the western half of North America, since about 1940 - are characterised by uniform low-density suburbanisation and by a wide dispersal of workplaces; they are “suburbs in search of a city”.

Attempts have been made to modify such patterns, for instance by developing rapid transit systems in low-density automobile cities, but there is no evidence that they fund~enta~y alter the patterns of living and working. Most cities, however, do not belong purely to any single archetype, but rather are combin- ations of late public transportation and an automobile city; the central business district and to some extent the inner residential and industrial areas depend mainly on public transportation by bus or subway, while the suburbs are chiefly based on automobile travel.

These historically developed types of city are affected also by size. Generally, other things being equal, large cities tend to have large concentrations of workers in their central business districts. This concentration leads to congestion on the streets, which in turn discourages use of the car and enhances the use of rail-based public transportation. Rail modes are also more economic in such cities, where a combination of size and density produces high traffic volumes appropriate to capital-intensive rail operation. Hence the great dependence on rail, and the re- stricted use of automobiles, in such large and highly centralised urban areas as London, Paris and New York City. Typically, such rail-based cities have total populations (within the boundaries of the entire metropolitan area) of more than

*This paper was originally presented at the First International Congress of Planning of Major Cities, Mexico City, June 1981, and is reproduced here by kind permission.

67

68 Peter Hall

about four million and total central area employment of more than one million. Though cities smaller and less centralised than this do have rail systems, they tend to be less important and/or to be operating on the basis of artificial sub- sidies.

Thus, in many of the great cities of the world, there is a degree of congruence between the form of the city and the pattern of transportation. One can see large, strongly concentrated cities dependent on rail (including subway systems); medium-sized cities of medium concentration dependent on bus or streetcar systems, and less-concentrated systems at various size levels which depend on the private automobile. All can work adequately, all can serve the needs of their populations, provided the land-use activity systems can be kept congruent with the transportation system, However, adequacy may not be a sufficient criterion for the planner. Among adequate systems, one may be superior to another on the criterion of efficiency (as defined for instance in total distance travelled), another in terms of equity (the dist~but~on of real income). These two criteria may therefore have to be balanced.

Cities in developing countries follow the same broad rules as those in developed indust~al counties - but with some lllodifications. Many of them demonstrate rather higher rates of c~-ownership, in relation to average income levels, than in developed countries. This may be partly due to skewed income distributions, and partly due to the fact that some other items of consumption (shelter, heating) take a smaller proportion of disposable income than in cooler environments. The effect is particularly marked in some Latin American countries that enjoy cheap domestic sources of energy. Mexico, clearly, belongs in this category.

As a result, some of these countries suffer fairly acute transportation prob- lems - more acute, certainly, than cities in developed countries. That section of the population able to purchase automob~es does so, and then insists on driving them for all purposes, including peak-hour commuting. But a majority of all households, and a great majority of all individual members of households, has no access to a car. For them, public transpo~ation on conventions streets is often slow and L~ncomfo~able. Commuter journeys for such people often occupy a far longer part of the working day than in cities of the developed world. Because such developing cities have typically exhibited very rapid growth in the last quarter-century, they tend not to have developed the elaborate rail-based transportation systems characteristic of major cities in the older-industrialised nations. Mexico City’s subway system, for instance, was initiated at a far later stage in the city’s growth curve than similar systems in London, Paris or New York.

Cities in this category thus exhibit some major contradictions that call for res- olution through planning mechanisms. Their spatial structures are often not congruent with their transportation systems. Typicahy they have quite highly developed central business districts, since they are primate cities in large and quite highly centralised po~ti~~economic states. They also have fairly dense zones of commerce and small workshops in the inner residential districts close to the eentre. Larger, newer manufacturing or warehousing facilities tend to occupy discrete sites more distant from the central district. However, because of accidents of development, the residential districts of the newer arrivals to the city are quite often at considerable distances from both the central district and the new industrial zones. This is because so many of them represent irregular or squatter developments that have taken place at a considerable distance from the city, on land that was outside the scope of municipal regulation. The normal pattern of social segregation characteristic of advanced western cities, whereby the homes of blue- collar workers are close to the factories, tends not to occur in many cases. As a result, journeys to work are often further attenuated. The public transportation system, which tends to be radial in form, results in very long commuter journeys through the central district, where congestion is most serious.

Land-use Change and Transport Policy 69

A TYPOLOGY OF CITIES

Following the analysis of J. Michael Thomson (Thomson, 1977), we can further classify the major cities of the world according to their associated land use, transportation and income-level characteristics.

The first type is termed by Thomson the full motorisation city. This is the untraditional type of city that has grown up in, and with, the automobile. Los Angeles, Detroit, Denver and Salt Lake City are examples. Such a city has a central business district that is very weak, in terms of total number of jobs, in comparison with traditional cities; in general it has a maximum of about 120,000- 150,000 jobs, this being the maximum number of car commuters that can be brought in without extreme congestion. Since the city centre is so weak, the transportation pattern is not radial, as in traditional cities; it takes a grid-like form, as the freeway network of Los Angeles so well illustrates. Residential densities are quite low (typically four dwellings per acre), streets are wide, shopping and employment areas are low-rise with plenty of ground-level parking. Freeways, at 4 mile (6.5 km) distances, form the primary means of communication. Secondary roads, typically six or eight lanes wide, occur at intervals of about I mile (1.6 km). The system allows free-flow communication by car between all parts of the city, with only moderate peak-hour congestion.

This of course is the ideal, which in practice is not reached. This kind of city permits a very high degree of mobility to many, but only at high costs in energy consumption. In order to work well, it also requires that virtually every adult (not merely every household) has access to a car at any time; so it is also costly in terms of private consumption. Lower-income households, who cannot afford this level of ownership, may find that their level of accessibility is relatively poor.

The second type of city is characterised by Thomson as the weak centre city. Melbourne, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston are examples. This is essentially a compromise form between the full-motorisation city and the traditional city, and it is no accident that it is represented in many slightly older American cities. It has a traditional radial road network serving a small city centre, to which a relatively high proportion of workers travel by car. Most workers find jobs outside the centre, and travel to work by car, aided by high- capacity circumferential highways. However, the city centre characteristically offers employment to at least 250,000, considerably in excess of the 120,000 or so who can comfortably commute by car; so that some form of public transportation - usually in the form of a simple radial commuter rail service - will also be needed.

This kind of city is a compromise in another way. It does manage to preserve some kind of traditional urban structure, with the commercial and social ad- vantages of contact that go with it; yet it gives considerable freedom to use the private car. But the city centre remains fairly weak; the commuter rail system tends to be costly; and suburb-to-suburb car journeys tend to be long. However, the main problem with this type in Thomson’s view is its instability; left to itself, it may gravitate to one or another of the other archetypes. Therefore, if it is to be maintained, it may require continuous and skilled planning with the help of controls and incentives, which may prove politically unpopular. This is an important point, to which this paper will return later.

The third type, the strong centre city, includes most of the great metropolitan cities of the world: London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Rome, New York, Tokyo. Characteristic of all such cities is a very large and dense mass of central district employment: characteristically more than one million, and sometimes (as in New York) more than two million. The transportation system, both rail and road, is strongly radial, conferring accessibility on the centre and fortifying its predomin- ant position. Only a small minority of central trips can be made by car, and a

70 Peter Hall

high proportion are made by rail, since only this mode can offer the very high corridor capacities necessary to carry the dense peak-hour demands. In such a city, public transportation offers a combination of cost, comfort and convenience that is approximately equal to that offered by the private car, so that - in comparison with other kinds of city - there is a greater incentive to use public modes.

In practice, there are some interesting differences between these cities. Paris and New York, for instance, have much higher residential densities in their inner areas than does London. But this is not of paramount importance: London’s medium densities nevertheless produce sufficient numbers of people close to the traffic corridors to guarantee efficient and economical operation of the public transportation system. Thus London Transport has always run without an operating subsidy, in sharp contrast with many other urban transportation systems.

Thomson does not specifically mention disadvantages of this kind of city. But undoubtedly they exist, as is only too evident from contemporary studies in London, Paris or New York. In all, rising labour costs tend to make public transportation more and more expensive, with the result that riders are lost. Despite acute traffic congestion, car-owners try to use their cars if possible, even for commuting. The quality of service, both for public and private transportation users, is low. In many instances, public transportation - unless massively sub- sidised - faces recurrent fiscal crises.

A fourth type of city, identified by Thomson, is specific to the developing world; he calls it the Eow (~~~~~~0~~~~~0~) cost city. Bogot& Lagos, Calcutta, Istanbul, Manila and Teheran all provide examples. Such cities are ~haracterised by extreme poverty of a large part of the population (but, because of great inequality of income distribution, also the extreme wealth of a minority); thus, as a rule, only a small minority of households can own a car. Investment resources are extremely limited, so any high-cost solution - whether in the form of new roads, or new rail systems - will be found impracticable. However, it is technic- ally possible to provide reasonable levels of accessibility for the great majority of the population in such cities. To achieve this, the city must have a high overall density in ter_ms of both people and jobs. Thus it can support numerous high- density transportation corridors carrying frequent and cheap buses or streetcars. The city centre cannot carry as many workers as in the strong centre type of city, because of the more limited capacity of buses and streetcars as compared with trains; but it should be as high as practicable. This may be about 500,000- 700,000 at maximum. Thus, in larger cities - say, about two million people or more - additional sub-centres will be needed. They should be along the main radial corridors, and distant enough from the central district so as not to place an extra burden on road capacity. Each such sub-centre, generally operating on a pedestrian scale, might offer about 30,000 jobs.

Like other kinds of city, this type does not arise of its own accord -- though some features of it may. The problem, Thomson stresses, is not technical but political. Even a minority of car-owners, in such cities, can cause havoc because they are rich and influential. Traffic management and code enforcement of any kind tends to be very weak. This exacerbates the poor infrastructure; roadspace, which typically occupies a smaller proportion of total urban area than in cities of the developed world, is inefficiently utilised. As a result, acute traffic congestion is characteristic of this kind of city. only a few cities of this type have a really good record in handling traffic and in providing an efficient and cheap public transportation system. Among them, Singapore and Hong Kong are probably outstanding.

This is because they belong to a small and rather special group of cities, distin- guished by Thomson: those that have practised trafjCic limitation strategies. All such cities also belong by definition in one or another of the four classes just out- lined; they include places as varied as London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vienna,


Stockho~, Bremen and Gothenburg. In each one, deliberate policies have been adopted to restrain private automobile traffic, especially in and around the city centre, and to give priority to public transportation. The means to this end include pedestrianisation, diversion of car traffic, parking controls and charges, special fees to enter the central area at peak hours, bus lanes, and bus-only streets. In addition, a hierarchy of different kinds of centre is developed to reduce the need for travel to the main city centre. These cities have had varied degrees of success in implementing such policies, nearly all of them during the last lo- 15 years; but all of them have reduced private automobile use below that which would otherwise have been obtained. This therefore is an option open to other cities, but it does require a considerable act of political will, especially in implementation.

To summarise, then: no one of these urban archetypes is totally spontaneous. All result from a close and subtle relationship between the provision of transportation facilities and the pattern of land uses and activities, both of which are subject in varying degrees to conscious planning and control. Within limits, set by previous history, planners can affect the subsequent pattern of development, making a city resemble rather more one archetype, rather less another one. This particularly applies to the last example, the traffic-restrained city, which arises almost entirely from deliberate action. Much of the interest and the difficulty in planning the growth of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, therefore, concerns the precise nature and degree of the scope for planned change.

THE PLANN~R’S RESPONSE: POLICY ~NSTR~ENTS AND THEIR USES

If transportation and land-use patterns are incongruent, the problem for the planner is how progressively to make them more congruent. Clearly there must be two kinds of policy instrument: those affecting land use, and those affecting transportation.

The control of land use, viewed from an international perspective, depends very greatly on the stage of economic development and on the associated cultural norms. Observably, land-use controls tend to be most restrictive in intent - and also most effectively administered - in advanced industrial countries where the influential political interests place great weight on environmental considerations. It is no accident that the most effective land-use planning controls are found in such countries as Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and now in parts of the United States such as northern California. Conversely, nations still in course of rapid economic development place less weight on land-use controls - and, in general, devote less resources to making them work. This tends to be fortified by the prevailing culture. Some developing nations with more effective land-use controls (Singapore, Korea) have cultural traditions which stress collective decision- making as against individualism. But in many parts of the developing world, the individualistic ethos is dominant. In such places, it is often observed that the planning activity tends to the production of paper plans which cannot effectively be implemented. The mechanisms for policing implementation, and in particular for monitoring and penalising deviations from the plan, tend to be weak or non- existent.

How, in such circumstances, can land-use policies be made more effective? Experience suggests that in general, positive inducements may be more effective than negative regulations. In particular, industrialists may be stimulated to locate in certain places rather than others by the provision of necessary infrastructure in the form of highways, water and sewerage facilities and power lines. Residential construction in the informal sector may be influenced by the provision of basic site-and-service plots. Insofar as negative controls are used, they should be of a kind most likely to be implemented - whether by public agencies or by private

72 Peter Hall

individuals. One such means is direct public ownership of land for such purposes as watersheds, flood control, military training or park uses. Another is private control of the land by large landowners with a direct interest in preserving the land in its existing use. Low-density residential zoning, though it may sound contrary to received notions of social equity, may actually be an effective way of preventing the development of low-income areas badly placed for access to jobs.

The other kind of policy inst~ment, transportation planning, tends to be much more effectively available to the planner. Public agencies are usually responsible for critical decisions to develop the infrastructure of transportation, such as new highways or rapid transit lines. They may also help shape the mix of vehicles that use the infrastructure, such as buses, jitneys or taxis. They may, within limits, affect the use of the infrastructure by private vehicles, by such means as parking controls and parking charges, supplementary charges for the use of roadspace at peak periods, and other methods. Such measures, conventionally termed ‘traffic management’, are often seen in isolation from decisions regarding infrastructure investment. But in a well-articulated system of land-use and transportation planning, investment and management should be seen as two parts of a single operation.

Additio~lally, transportation planners may set fare structures for public transportation so as to attract passengers, or particular types of passenger. They may for instance subsidise public transportation so as to keep it cheap for low-income users, or regular users. They may on the other hand set charges so as to discourage peak-hour use, in order to encourage a more even flow of traffic throughout the day. In a completely articulated public transportation system, charges for public transportation may be related to charges for use of roadspace by private vehicles, so as to shift users from one mode to another.

In the transportation planning process, the first essential is to make a detailed survey of the entire metropolitan area in order to study the interrelation between land-use and transportation patterns. For this purpose, well-developed and well- known conventions techniques are available. Brought to a peak of development in the 196Os, these techniques have recently fallen into some degree of discredit - mainly because scientific methodology was used to legitimise political decisions. This is unjust: as a method of survey and as a device for considering alternative strategies, there is really no alternative to this kind of basic fact-finding study. From this analysis of the present position, several scenarios should be developed showing alternative projections of growth during the medium-term future (conventionally, 15-20 years). These should be chosen so as deliberately to demonstrate different dispositions of living and working, with a stress on the areas to be newly developed, but with attention also given to the changes that may occur within the already-developed areas closer to the central district. These alternatives should then be evaluated for efficiency, equity (in terms of the distribution of real income among different sections of the population), and feasibility. Though some of these considerations can and should be quantified, some - in particular feasibility - must involve judgement.

This last point needs stressing. It relates to the discussion earlier: a pattern of living and working, depending for its realisation on a set of policy instruments that are unlikely to be available, is not a feasible policy - however desirable on other grounds it may seem to be. The aim should be to identify a robust strategy reasonably capable of being implemented with the kinds of policy instrument that have been successfully used in the recent past. And, in addition, the plan should provide for a fail-safe capacity: if implementation does not occur as predicted, the plan can be modified without fundament~ repercussions on the rest of the urban system.

It is fairly easy to imagine the main kinds of alternative that will emerge. One is a fairly strongly decentralised kind of metropolitan area, in which workplaces


and residential areas are located in intercalated fashion, so as to give each resident a wide choice of workplaces within a given radius. Such a pattern would demand reliance principally on the private automobile, supplemented by individualistic public transportation modes such as the jitney or taxi. A modified version of this form would call for groupings in new town or new city concentrations, with a public transportation system focusing on a number of strong local hubs within the metropolitan area. In turn, these hubs could be linked by high-speed public transportation in the form of commuter railroads, while freeways bypassing the hubs could provide interconnection between the main activity concentrations for the private automobile. Yet a third variant would group the new activity concentrations on strong transportation corridors, some of a radial character connecting with the main central business district of the metropolitan area, some perhaps of a circumferential or tangential character so as to provide new lines of force bypassing the congested central city. Another, quite different, possibility would be to develop a denser urban form with greater use of concentrated urban sub-centres and an emphasis on high-rise residential structures, linked by an extended subway system.

These alternatives, and others, are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that one part of an extended metropolitan area could receive one kind of treatment, another part a different one. Local circumstances - physical geography, the existing form of development, the available transportation infrastructure - will help shape the choices. But, in most rapidly-growing cities within the fast-developing nations, the scope for a creative use of integrated land-use transportation planning will be very great indeed.

This planning will invariably involve all the policy elements that were earlier specified. Investment in transportation infrastructure will determine the main lines of accessibility, that will help guide the developing patterns of urbanisation. Management policies will determine the charges to be made for the use of different elements of the system (road use, parking, fares on public transportation) and to some extent the capacity of the infrastructure. Positive inducements will guide key developers, especially for industrial and commercial uses, to develop in certain areas well-served by transportation and other infrastructure. Negative controls, self-enforcing so far as this is possible, will keep development away from the areas that are less well-served. Public development of housing, or of site-and-service areas for housing, will attract residential development. The crucial point will be to try to ensure that these elements are coordinated so that they work in the same direction.

In many of the great urban areas of the world, this will be far from easy. Differ- ent elements of planning (transportation, infrastructure, land use) may be under the control of different agencies. Similarly, different parts of the metropolitan area may be under the control of different local governments, with perhaps con- flicting aims. Thus, even if plan-making is coordinated at the level of the entire metropolis, the critical tasks of implementation may not. For this reason, planners should be critically concerned with questions of local government reorganis- ation. Particularly in the larger and faster-growing cities of the world, unified control over the whole area of urban development is a vital condition for successful transportation and territorial planning.

If fully coordinated, unitary control is however not possible, there is a second- best solution. This is the development of one or more special-purpose authorities with effective control over the crucial elements of land and associated infrastructure. Here, the critical elements are essentially two:

(1) Lund. What matters here is not the ownership of the raw land, but its servicing. The first may be completely in private ownership large or small; but it will be of very little use for any form of urban development, unless it is minimally serviced with water, electricity, and - for any form of residential development -

74 Peter Hall

sewerage. Additionally, for industrial development there may be special require- ments in the form of water, telecommunications or waste disposal. Therefore, one or more public utilities authorities will have a quite crucial leverage over the whole development process. They should therefore either be publicly owned (preferably under a single authority) or be made subject to public directives.

Servicing provides a means not merely to guide and control the pattern of development, but to recover for the public purse some element of so-called ‘betterment’: that is, the rise in land value that is ascribable to public action. This can take the form of a once-for-all connection charge, to be levied on each development plot according to a pre-determined scale. Evidence from many rapidly-developing cities suggests that at the point of connection to services, a sudden speculative gain in land value occurs. The connection charge would allow some at least of this speculative value to be siphoned off to the public benefit.

(2) Transportation infrastructure. The ideal here would be to create a single metropolitan area rapid transit authority, responsible for the management - and, at least in part, for the operation - of all kinds of rapid transit over the entire urbanised area. It is of course crucial that this area embraces all the areas likely to be subject to rapid urbanisation in the medium term. The most important function to be played by this authority is the reservation of rights of way for transit of all kinds: metro, light rail, conventional bus, para-transit. It may not even be necessary to determine at once the exact use of the rights of way; indeed the authority might pursue a flexible and incremental policy, upgrading the system as the traffic volumes grew. Further, the authority may not have a mon- opoly over the running rights, which - in the case of buses and para-transit vehicles - may be shared among a great variety of agencies both public and private. The critical point is to employ the rights of way to create differential patterns of accessibility, which can then be used to guide the pattern of urban development.

These are the two critical levers. Ideally, each should be in the hands of a single authority - and indeed, one authority might be responsible for both utilities and transit, thus making it unquestionably the implementation agency. However, there are associated policy elements that may well be in the hands of yet other agencies. One of these is the pattern of industrial incentives (and in some cases disincentives) that are used to influence the location decisions of major corporations. Especially in developing countries, the decisions of such corporations have a quite disproportionate influence on the geography of development. Further, evidence suggests that they do respond directly to geographically-differentiated incentives. It is important that these are used, in association with the provision of appropriate industrial infrastructure, to steer major industrial plants into key locations well sited in relation to areas of new residential development and associated commuter transportation.

Another such element concerns the general pattern of taxation and subsidy employed to influence the mixture of transportation modes within the metropolitan area. There is abundant evidence that the choice of modes is influenced to some degree by price, so that a policy of cheap gasoline will - for instance - tend to frustrate any attempt to develop effective public transportation and the patterns of land use that would go with this. This is not automatically to con- demn such a policy; for certain cities at certain times, it might be the right policy. It is merely to say that as far as possible, taxation policies should be working in the same direction as infrastructure and other policies.

SOMEEXAMPLES

Because of these limitations, it is not easy to find good examples of the successful integration of land-use and transportation planning. Further, where these


exist, they invariably came into being in special political circumstances, as in the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe or the Social Democratic regimes of North- ern Europe.

Most outstanding, and often quoted, are the examples of Copenhagen and Stockholm. Copenhagen’s famous “Finger Plan” of 1948 involved the development of axial urbanisation along existing and planned transportation corridors in the form of streetcar and rail systems. Because fairly comprehensive land-use control was available, it was successfully implemented and was even extended in the late 1960s to encompass the development of new towns at a greater distance from the city along selected corridors. Stockholm’s plan, implemented in the 3%year period from 1945, involved the creation of a completely new metro system (the Tunnelbana) as the basis for a series of satellite towns, carefully ordered as service centres within a hierarchy, all linked by the metro to a recon- structed central business district that became the focus of the transit network. Thus, while the primacy of the central business district as a centre of commercial activities was assured, it was relieved by the development of a series of suburban centres catering for most everyday retailing needs. Significant however was the fact that the city owned most of the land in the vicinity, and so was able to exert an extremely strong control over development (Hall, 1967, 1974).

The Paris Regional Plan (S&&ma Directeuv) of 1965 was another example on an even more ambitious scale. Eight satellite cities of up to 0.5 million people (later reduced to five) were to be constructed east and west of Paris, following two parallel axes. They were to be linked with each other, and with a revivified centre of Paris, by a totally new express rail rapid transit system (RER). The new cities were to be built around this system, which would also serve major commercial and cultural redevelopments in the central and inner areas (La Defense, Chatelet-Les Halles-Beaubourg). At the same time, new freeways would link the new developments circumferentially. Sixteen years after this plan, much of the RER system is open and the new cities are well advanced, though the freeway system has not made such rapid progress. Again, the implementation of the plan depended on a comprehensive control over land use in the Paris region (Hall, 1977; Moseley, 1980).

In the developing world, the new metro system partly open and in course of extension in Hong Kong will serve a similar purpose in linking the central business district with the newly constructed satellite cities. Singapore’s rapid transit system will perform the same function for the peripheral public housing projects, while Seoul’s new metro system, currently in course of completion, will in part serve a deliberate plan of decentralisation to satellite industrial cities. Interestingly, however, all these countries - though often hailed as bastions of free enterprise - enjoy comprehensive and quite centralised planning powers, especially over land use.

In nations with freer traditions of land development, the experience of this kind of planning has been less successful. Thus the Washington, DC, regional plan of 1959, which was similar to Copenhagen’s in its use of strong radial axes of development, foundered on the inability or unwillingness of the county zoning commissions to restrict development in the spaces between the corridors. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area was perhaps more successful in its policy of encouraging satellite suburban developments around the new rapid transit system (BART); but it was aided by one of the most restrictive land-use planning policies that could be found anywhere in North America, and besides the BART system failed to play the role in the plan that its proponents had postulated. Elsewhere, though there were local successes, they were in terms of more limited objectives. Toronto for instance used its subway system to generate central area revival and strong concentrations of activity around stations - an achievement that so far seems to have eluded the BART system. But it did not really try to use the system

76 Peter Hall

to restructure the entire metropolitan area. Overall, therefore, the successes have come in cities and in countries where

cultural traditions or political regimes (or both) permitted the planning authority to maintain fairly strong controls over land development. There is not so much precedent for a successful integration of land-use and transportation planning where this element is absent. That is not to say that it will be i~~possible; rather, that it will present a challenge.

For this reason, it may be helpful also to look at cases where the process of urbanisation has been guided despite fairly weak planning controls. Such examples can be found in western European countries before World War II. London and Paris provide a particularly instructive contrast here. Between 1920 and 1939, London rapidly extended its metro (‘Underground’) system at relatively low cost above the surface, up to a distance 12-l 5 miles (20-25 km) from the centre. Bus services, under the control of the same transit authority, fed into the newly opened stations. This opened up large tracts of land for medium-density suburbanisation. Fairly simple planning legislation, that permitted local authorities to develop town planning schemes, ensured at least a minimum of coordination in the development process. The whole process was far from random; the developmeilt of the transit system was the work of its commercial manager, Frank Pick, who had an acute understanding of the whole urban development process and who was an early advocate of effective urban planning for London. As a result, London developed in an orderly way. Millions of attractive new homes were provided at low cost for buyers with modest incomes. Commuting was cheap and convenient on what was then, by general agreement, the finest transit authority in the world. In contrast, Paris was limited by the fact that its metro system - developed by the City of Paris -- stopped short at the city gates. The rapidly-developing new suburban tracts in the 1920s and 1930s - many of them in the form of shanty towns, closely resembling the developments of today in Third World cities - were outside the metro’s range and had very poor access to the centre. Planning provision for these outer areas was almost completely lacking; many of them were not even properly serviced until years later. It took half a century before these mistakes were fully rectified (Hall, 1984).

The USA, after World War II, carried through one of the largest programmes of urban development in history. Rather like London a few years earlier, it did so with fairly elementary controls over land use in the form of zoning and sub- division control. The critical tools were first the provision of cheap housing finance for purchase of homes on mortgage, through the FHA and Veterans’ schemes; and secondly, the rapid extension of accessibility through the Interstate Highways programme (Clawson and Hall, 1973). Together, these ensured that land was developed rapidly enough to prevent any risk of speculation. Interest- ingly, the only areas in the US that today are experiencing a serious escalation of housing costs are in California, where restrictions on new development have be- come extremely onerous in recent years (Dowall, 1984).

These examples may be germane for the administrators and managers of rapidly-growing Third World cities. For they suggest that control over the critical elements of transportation, housing cost and servicing may provide the key to orderly and humane development of new suburban tracts, without the need for costly and elaborate systems of land-use control that these nations are unlikely to be able to afford for some time to come.

CONCLUSION

The conclusion is inescapable. Precise parallels can never be drawn between cities in different countries and continents, in different decades and even centuries,


with different cultural and political patterns, at different stages of development. But some experiences may be suggestive and may provide a tentative basis for experimental policy formulation, In the burgeoning cities of the developing world in the 1980s and 199Os, planners and managers face a task different in kind, let alone scale, from anything faced in the developed world half a century earlier. They do so, in many cases, with less resources in the form of skilled manpower and legislative power. But the experience of some of these cities, at a time when they too had relatively few points of leverage, may provide a guide. The lesson is that the best, in the form of the most advanced planning practice in the most highly-developed countries, may be the enemy of the good. Second-best, in many cases, can be pretty good - and it is certainly a lot better than nothing.

REFERENCES

Clawson, M. and Hall, P., Planning and Urban Growth: an Anglo-American Comparison. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1973.

Dowalt, D., Tl?e suburban Squeeze: an examination of suburban Land Conversion and Re~lation in the San Francisco 8a.v Area. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984 (in press).

Hall, P., “Planning for Urban Growth: Metropolitan Area Plans and their Implications for South East England”, Regional&dies Vol. 1, pp. 101-134, 1967.

Hall, P., “Transportation”, Developing Patterns of CJrbanization, Cowan, P. (Editor). Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1970.

Ha& P., Urban and Regional Planning. Penguin, London, 1974.

Hall, P., The World Cities. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1977.

Hall, P., “Metropolis 1870-1940: Challenges and Responses”, Metropolis 1870-1940, Sutcliffe, A. (Editor). Mansell, London, 1984 (in press),

Moseley, M.J., “Strategic Planning and the Paris Agglomeration in the 1960s and 1970s: the Quest for Balance and Structure”, Geoforum Vol. 11, pp. 179-223, 1980.

Thomson, J.M., Great Cities and their Traffic. Gollancz, London, 1977.

land-use change and transport policy

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