Rutherford Platt is Emeritus Professor of Geography at UMass Amherst. We have cited on several occasions his concept of The Humane Metropolis. In Saturday's Gazette, Dr. Platt cautions about the hazards of overplanning a city:

The 'humane micropolis'

...Urban adaptation cannot be imposed from above through preconceived plans. Instead, it depends upon the resourcefulness of local citizens and their leaders in responding to challenges and opportunities...

Regardless of neighborhood economic status, our side streets are graced with impromptu patches of wildflowers, sunflowers, tomatoes, blackberries and ferns, overshadowed by iconic oaks, maples, sycamore, white pine, and spruce trees...

...fortunately, the funky pre-zoning neighborhoods in Florence, Bay State, and near downtown have been little affected by zoning which typically ratifies the status quo rather than create nonconforming use problems. Post-zoning subdivisions like the Ryan Road area are more akin to standard suburbs across the country than to the older parts of Northampton.

Northampton has mercifully been spared top-down, macro plans in vogue from the Garden City era to Urban Renewal in the 1960s...

See also:

Today's Urban Planning Debates Echoed in Northampton's Near Past
Brinkley Thorne (speaking below) and Maisie Cox, architects and co-owners of Thornes Market, with their children (p.20)

"A town like Northampton should be careful. Now for the first time in a long time, people want to build new buildings downtown. It could be done badly. What really intrigues me is that the most sophisticated thing is informality. That quality is so easily lost as things get more prosperous."

Randall Diehl, painter (p.59)

"Northampton used to be small-town America, now it seems to be trying to imitate New York, which it can never be, and I don't know why it would want to be... I think it's important to preserve the old buildings that give the town dignity..."

Herbert and Robert Ross, owners of Ross Bros. (p.87)

"Holyoke's sad because they're renovating it and it's too homogenized. In Northampton, it's been individualized--people grab a building, put their own selves into it. In Holyoke, it's people buying whole blocks and fixing them up without having any tenants in mind for them. I worry about that happening in Northampton now, I think that growth should be looked at carefully. It looks like such a sparkling little jewel to these outside investors, they just want to jump on it without any real perception of what is going on..."

Seeing Like a State: Planning Gone Awry in the 20th Century
[James C. Scott] argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not--and cannot be--fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.

The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impost administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans...

From time to time [Jane] Jacobs stands back from the infinite and changing variety of American cities to express a certain awe and humility: "Their intricate order--a manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans--is in many ways a great wonder. We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is." The magisterial assumption behind the doctrines of many urban planners--that they know what people want and how people should spend their time--seems to Jacobs shortsighted and arrogant... (p.140)

Most cities are the outcome...of innumerable small acts bearing no discernable overall intention... [Jacobs praises the unplanned city, saying,] "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody... The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish."

...A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity. (p.142-143)

...Jacobs quotes with approval Stanley Tankel... "We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone's imagination to create a community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by."

...[T]here is little doubt that [Jacobs] has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning. The first flaw is the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require... Second, thanks in part to Jacobs, we now know more about what constitutes a satisfactory neighborhood for the people who live in it, but we still know precious little about how such communities can be fostered and maintained. Working from formulas about density, green space, and transportation may produce narrowly efficient outcomes, but it is unlikely to result in a desirable place to live. Brasilia and Chandigarh, at a minimum, demonstrate this. (p.144-145)

New York Times: "Report Says Public Outreach, Done Right, Aids Policymaking" (8/22/08)
...a growing body of evidence suggests that [public participation], done correctly, can improve [environmental] policies and smooth their implementation, according to a report [link] issued Friday by an expert panel convened by the National Research Council. Though critics often assert that members of the public are too ignorant to weigh the science involved in environmental policies, “public participation can help get the science right and get the right science,” said Thomas Dietz, the director of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University, who headed the panel.

“A lot of science has to be applied to a very local context,” he said in a telephone interview. “Local knowledge is essential.”

Wall Street Journal Opinion Column: "What Jane Jacobs Really Saw" (5/2/06)
Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Life"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners...

Sadly, many in the Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements cite Jacobs as the inspiration for their efforts to combat so-called "urban sprawl" and make over suburbia with dense, walkable downtowns, mixed-use development, and varied building styles. While Jacobs identified these as organic elements of successful cities, planners have eagerly tried to impose them on cities in formulaic fashion...

Berkeley, California: Cautions on Infill
...propelled by their simplistic “smart growth” philosophy, [the Planning Department] encourages developers to build the largest possible projects over neighborhood objections...

Vancouver Sun: "Call it EcoDensity or EcoCity --either way it's a hard sell"
Despite Yaletown, almost 70 per cent of the city is single-family housing. Vancouver, essentially, remains an urban suburb. And there is a reason for this.

People love it.

They love the city's garden-like nature. They love the stability and social cohesion of a single-family neighbourhood. They like having neighbours they know...

...A group called Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver -- which itself has said it is in favour of densification, but only if properly planned -- has signed up almost 30 community organizations in every neighbourhood in the city to oppose "the city's plan to densify neighbourhoods without plans to ensure adequate safeguards or amenities."

Portland Suburb Successfully Staves Off Densification
The problem is that people don't want to live in high densities, especially when there are planner-induced parking shortages. A state regulation requires Portland to reduce its parking by 10 percent, so new developments are often built with limited parking. Since developers won't build what they can't sell, planners have to subsidize them to get them to build high-density developments...

Portland, Oregon Voters Sour on Densification Over Time
The neighborhood densification that resulted from the transportation planning rule alienated many urban residents who had previously supported Oregon's planning. It was one thing to downzone rural lands to protect the scenery enjoyed by urban residents. It was another thing to upzone urban neighborhoods, increasing congestion and often bringing down residential values.

Halle-Neustadt: A Case Study in Compact, Transit-Oriented Development
There will always be a market, though probably a small one, for high-density housing, whether in Radiant-City high rises or New-Urban mid rises. The problems arise when planners ignore the market and try to impose their ideology on people through prescriptive zoning codes, regulations, and subsidies.

Wendell Cox: "METROPOLITAN DENVER AT RISK: How Densification Will Intensify Traffic Congestion, Air Pollution and the Housing Affordability Crisis"
What is in vogue is not always correct...

Planners and architects in the 1950s thought that 20-story public housing projects were the answer --- the same projects that are being imploded around the country today...

Sustainable Northampton Plan
Infill Development
...Target: A minimum of 50% of all housing developed in Northampton (p.15)

The New Draft Sustainable Northampton Plan: Balancing Compact Growth Against Taxes, Urban Greenspace, Homeowner Preferences
An objective of the Plan is to "implement ideas for maximizing density on small lots". (p.16) It calls for the City to "consider amending zero lot line single family home to eliminate 30' side yard setback". (p.69) It suggests the zoning laws be changed to "encourage single family homes in Urban Residential zoning districts by significantly reducing minimum frontage/lot width, for projects meeting form-based coding". (p. 71)

These changes have the potential to reduce or eliminate the yards that separate homes from each other and from streets. This loss of greenspace may well entail a loss of privacy, attractiveness, flood protection (through an increase in impervious surfaces), and an increase in the heat island effect, noise and congestion. If fewer trees are shading homes, cooling costs are likely to rise...

Photo Essay: 10 Reasons People Like Trees Around Them; Will the Sustainable Northampton Plan Put Urban Trees at Risk?
Our urban centers need to become more attractive to help counter the continuation of a sprawl pattern of development. If the appeal of low density, widely scattered development is derived from the need to be closer to nature, then making trees an integral part of the urban habitat will help make our town and city centers more desirable places to live and work. It is profoundly important to see this linkage between making cities and towns more "liveable" and stemming the continued spread of scattered development across the countryside.

CommonWealth Magazine: "Urban greenery can bring better health, more attractive neighborhoods, and even safer streets"
[A study in Baltimore by Morgan Grove of the US Forest Service] found that neighborhoods with higher tree cover had stronger social connections, and residents had a significantly lower desire to move away, presumably because trees increase the attractiveness of the area.

Video: Best Practices Forum Studies Evolution of Meadows Plan
The purpose of this event is to record the story of what many consider a difficult but largely successful public process told by the people who made it happen.