City streets create value, build community. Urban highways do exactly the opposite.

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City plans from sometimes decades ago written for a long-ago city, a city with little in common with the one we live in today

Photo: Kari Shea on Unsplash

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Very often when new city councillors are first elected they post a picture of the stack of technical reports and comprehensive plans that they’ve been given to read by city staff.

The picture is meant to convey how complicated and technical the city is and how eager the new councillors are to learn the ropes.

My reaction invariably is what an aggressive thing this is for city staff to have done.

I'll admit I’d love to see a new councillor straighten an arm across the surface of the desk and with one swipe send all these plans and reports flying.

I don’t question that city staff are skilled professionals, hard working, and good people. This is not a criticism of personal behaviour but it is a criticism of institutional behaviour.

New councillors learn quickly enough that city staff over the years have spent a great deal of time and energy making plans and writing reports. Plans and reports for the most part written sometimes decades ago by people and for purposes long forgotten, often written for a long-ago city that has little in common with the one we live in today.

Plans that are too often created by departments isolated within their own silos, "each wielding their position & rules like a veto power,” as former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian says in an essay linked in the recent blog post Silos, organized complexity, complex adaptive systems. The 21st Century city.

City hall and the city itself, being made up of human beings and working within continually changing circumstances, are by definition complex adaptive systems, what Jane Jacobs identified as systems of organized complexity, “the variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole,” they are interdependent.

No city plan should be on the books that has not had robust external review within an at most five year time span.

Political leaders and senior management “need to understand they are operating in a complex adaptive system, they should, rather than thinking that they can make master strokes that fix problems, [they should] keep on tweaking and improving, they should write the need for revision into every piece of legislation,” author, economist, former Dean Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Roger L. Martin.

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