Engineers and planners have worked together for decades through many, varied cultural and societal expansions or “booms.” The relationships have been both across the table and at arms length, as we have served very different constituencies.
The current slowdown presents an opportunity to strive together -- to use this valuable time -- to protect the resources left to us from the last “boom,” as we prepare to address the next expansion – whether it be in transportation, housing, or infrastructure.
Investment in infrastructure is significant, and these investments must be protected. The community enjoys the results, and construction-related industries profit from the work. Both benefit.
Throughout my career as an urban planner, I have seen transportation easements and corridors, airports and maritime facilities, power plants and other facilities vital to the life of communities threatened by poor land use decision-making on one hand and also by the, perhaps, overconfidence of engineers and infrastructure owners on the other.
I have seen retirement communities and other new development spring up around military bases in North Carolina -- retirees returning for military benefits. Initially, neither the military engineers nor the planners for the surrounding communities anticipated the conflicts between retirement living and the noise associated with low flying military aircraft, and artillery fire and explosives. Planners and engineers remedied the conflict by reaching out to the retirement community, by retrofitting homes with noise attenuation, and by revising land use regulation to prohibit new residential development from extant and future noise and hazard areas.
We also have seen how easy it is to create irate homeowners elsewhere, while threatening infrastructure and industry. The most recent housing boom showed all of us how valuable "poorly located" land can be to a family in search of a dream home. We have watched as residential and retail land uses have encroached upon land adjacent to industry and infrastructure.
In a Pennsylvania town hundreds of families found affordable land not too far from a nuclear power plant. The area was rural and the transportation infrastructure was ample to handle the new development. Later, more residents were attracted to the region, then more businesses. Surrounding communities rushed to amend zoning to attract spin-off development and then infrastructure providers rushed to satisfy new needs driven by the new development. Land prices rose sharply and dream homes were built in the shadow of the nuclear power plant. Presumably, the plant operators selected the site in part because of its remote location. In some ways the plant is now constrained as thousands of new neighbors watch and wait to see how many new neighbors, new cars, and new roads will fit in the small spaces that remain. Plant operators likely wonder how and whether there might be any chance of enhancing generation capacity to meet new and future demand.
Now that we engineers and planners have seen the damage that can be done by poorly regulated land use and a too-narrow focus on our own projects, we have an obligation to work together. We need to carefully review what we have done and move forward to achieve land use compatibility in a manner that is reasonable, thoughtful and sensible.
Our professions share similar values and goals. We should work in service of the public good promoting public health, safety and welfare. This would include promoting the development of housing and infrastructure in our urban areas where health and safety are threatened by the decay of roadways and bridges. We should do our part to promote fiscally responsible development that will promote fairer share between public investment and private use. Transit oriented development in our cities and towns, and protection of public and private open space help focus investment on population centers and allow our rural communities to stay rural. Our professions should demonstrate that we can be trusted to offer consultation on matters around infrastructure and development. We all can be rewarded with work and revenues.
As a planner I believe some shared steps will greatly support these goals:
Together, engineers and planners should craft regulations for the redevelopment and revitalization of cities and towns, and discourage the development of rural and undeveloped areas.
We should work through our own professional and trade associations to promote federal and local policies that protect regional infrastructure resources like airports, vital transportation corridors, power plants, port facilities, and active military bases.
Finally, I believe it would greatly benefit engineers, if rather than relying on one or two in-house planners, they partner with independent firms of planners whose experience, diversity and knowledge of what is really taking place in the communities is ongoing.
Then together, I believe, we can collaborate to do work in line with our shared values. We can plan and build, and truly support the communities that have been entrusted to us.
Charnelle Hicks is president, CHPlanning, Ltd, Philadelphia. She can be reached at 215-751-1400 or charnelle.hicks@chplanning.com.
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