“Professions, like nations, keep their shape by moulding their members’/citizens’ understanding of the past, causing them to forget those events which do not accord with a righteous image, while keeping alive those memories that do. Novelist Milan Kundera has said that the struggle of people against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting”
Leonie Sandercock 1998
Introduction
Planning has always been a class phenomenon, dictating where surpluses are taken from and where they are used. Planners have ideas on what is needed, visions of what the perfectly planned city would look like. As a profession, there is intellectual and professional consensus on steps that need to be taken to ensure an equitable existence. Yet, planners are largely limited in achieving these goals. How can planners change the city to their own hearts’ desires? How can they force through necessary changes that go against capital interests? There is no one answer, but an intersectional consideration of labor, workers, organizing, and the history of extracted progress in America will help planners exact the changes they know are needed. Traditional planning history has omitted many perspectives, and that of the organizing worker is one such perspective. Planners must think about labor because labor history can give planners a framework for achieving their ideals. Planners are workers, and there are parallels between labor movements and the planner’s struggle for material changes. Planners need to gain concessions from their superiors to realize changes they know must occur. Finally, planners must understand the dangers of failing to consider labor, for far too long planners have worked against their interests, failing themselves and their constituents.
Planners are Workers
Americans have mostly forgotten the history of labor movements in the United States. Americans are vaguely familiar that labor organizations fought for the right to a weekend, and limits on daily working hours, amongst other benefits. The details of such fights, however, are largely missing from public consciousness. For example, the struggle for the 8-hour workday and 40-hour work week killed hundreds of protestors and unionists. The long process began when the Baltimore Ohio Railroad company cut pay by 10% in 1877, the third immediate pay cut of the year (Domhoff, 2012). Strikes soon followed, which were quelled by militias and federal troops who killed over a hundred strikers. These strikes spawned a national movement, which resulted in a national labor environment more violent than any other nation in the Western world, save Russia (Mann 1993). Following these strikes, a more organized union front staged a protest for the 8-hour workday in Chicago during which the police fired directly into the crowd. Reciprocal violence from the protestors resulted in 5 men being hung to death after a dubious trial. There are many such cases throughout American history. The point of this example is not simply to say that private capital interests and American governments have always aligned themselves against labor organizing, or to glorify the bloody history of union power. The point is that this history is not common American knowledge for a reason. The right to an 8-hour workday was codified by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937, 60 years after the railroad strikes (Domhoff, 2012).
Unions force management to change dangerous working conditions, increase certainty and transparency about the future, and distribute equal rights in workplaces as rights in society. As unions get stronger and more widespread, the basics like workplace safety and better wages are covered and they can bargain for increased concessions such as benefits and company commitments to ethical practices. Planners also need to draw concessions from their management. Like the 8-hour workday struggle, any efforts for better conditions or increased collective ownership of the planning process will not be conceded on a whim. Planners cannot afford to assume or wait for goodwill from their benefactors to enact necessary changes for the public good.
Planners should understand themselves as workers, part of a system in which they carry out the wishes of their management. White collar workers are typically union-less, or if they are unionized, are disinterested in progressive political organizing as a group. For planners, the management includes the local government most directly, but cannot be limited to that. Planners are subject to both public and private management, the governments which employ them and manage localities, and the private entities which facilitate growth and development, and thus wield similar power to governments. As companies can be scaled and generalized by levels of ownership, governments can also be scaled. A planner is first managed by their employer and local government, but both are party to multiple levels of public and private organization. Just as the worker’s wishes disagree with the boss’s, planners’ wishes often contradict those of their management. Planners are also legally workers, literally employees as defined by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Under the FLSA, factors such as workplace, the presence or absence of a formal employment agreement, the type of payment, and whether an individual is adequately licensed by the state have no bearing on whether a person is an employee under the FLSA (Elaws – Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor, n.d.). Further, independent contractors, a category that some planners on the consultancy side may fall into, are still legally considered workers with the ability to organize under the NLRB if they “follow the usual path of an employee” (Final Rule, n.d.). While these legal definitions may be less meaningful than the social stratifications of workers, managers, and owners, they are important to note because of the inevitable question of whether or not planners should unionize.
The parallels between historic American labor movements and a prospective planners-labor push are indirect. There are few direct occupational comparisons to the historic labor movement, as planners often work for governments or as consultants for private enterprises. Planners as an occupational class seem closer to managers or design specialists, both of which have generally been removed from the forefront of labor struggles. This type of worker has tended to support after the first adversarial actions occur, rather than lead them. However, most modern-day labor organizations represent white-collar professions. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), for example, represents technical and administrative workers in the field of engineering (Ifpte, 2024). Labor organizations at all levels are inherently tied to the foundations of organized labor; these groups could not exist without the legal framework for unionization or without the precedents of successful bargaining.
Populist Planning as an Extension of Advocacy Planning
Paul Davidoff’s 1965 Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning articulated an influential framework for reassessing the position of a planner in relation to the public they serve. These ideas have been a part of many successful progressive planning triumphs, but the current planning systems are still flawed: they aren’t effective enough. Planners can do well with what they have control over, but what they have control over isn’t enough. Control in this sense reflects the planner’s ability to take on a project or their ability to implement the populus’s wishes in that project, rather than personal decision-making over a project. Advocacy and pluralism in planning, as put forth by Davidoff, help planners better address the needs and desires of their constituents (Davidoff 1965). A body of planners organized around the collective goals of implementing both the fruits of planning theory and the public good would be better suited to take on larger, more structural projects. As an extension of Davidoff’s logic, the self-interested planners each have constituent groups that they represent and advocate for, but collectively all planners want their constituents’ needs to be represented in the final product. This process can be understood as the planners being similar to lawyers, arguing their group’s case and having the ability to choose groups to represent based on similar values or maintaining professionalism in representing a group which they may disagree with.
This process could also be likened to a national labor union, such as the teamsters, in which all union leadership represents a unique, localized group of constituents and argues on their behalf to shape the movement of the national body. The teamsters don’t even share the same profession or even similar professions, yet as a cohesive body, the union wields great power. The diversity of interest groups within the teamsters makes them a helpful example for this analogy. The planners in this case would be the local representatives, whether from individual groups, a single warehouse for example, or from a local group, such as a regional warehouse worker’s association. This comparison is not totally parallel with Davidoff’s planner-lawyers view in that the national union must negotiate with the state and private actors for concessions, rather than appealing to a consensual universal truth. However, the teamster analogy does reflect the reality that planning often negotiates between the public’s wishes and the demands of the state and private capital. Planners should continue to reach consensus on how to equitably allocate concessions to all parties involved, but should also try to use this consensus as leverage for collective bargaining. Davidoff’s advocacy and pluralism ideas already collectivize the communities of interest groups and assign them to the proper representative lawyers, so an extension of this logic would collectivize the planners and pit them against their state and private interests, moving from the planner’s courtroom to a bargaining table.
Planners Need to Gain Concessions
Planners have already named their demands, which can be split into two general categories. First, planners demand self-interested concessions. These demands usually entail funding, as planning offices are often understaffed or underfunded, which limits the scope of projects that an office can take on. This is particularly apparent in small or relatively low-income planning offices (Shi et. al 2015). Planning theory tends to deal more with the second category, indirect demands, which concern social concessions. Increased decision-making power, democratization, requirements for inclusion, and considerations of equity are a few generally agreed-upon indirect demands.
Where organizations have the funding and opportunity to do so, many of these demands are acted upon. But that’s not the case everywhere. Universally, the levels of inequality in America are immense. Rich cities are not homogeneously rich. Land and its use are concentrated in the hands of few, and thus control over building materials, labor, housing, and all of the conditions of the working class are dictated disproportionately by private actors. Planners have an inherent obligation to address these issues. At its core, planning deals with the ordering of land. Planners with the ability to address these issues due to funding or a uniquely progressive municipal environment should empower other planners to reach the same level of ability.
The distribution of power determines the extent of justice in planning practice (Marcuse 2015), and planners must collectively leverage themselves to redistribute power so they can pursue justice in the public interest. Planners should be selfish in extracting power from their management, but should also aid communities in organizing themselves. Negotiations between planners as a professional class and their management are a means for achieving necessary actions. If the stronger impose justice as they see fit, they also define it as they see fit (Marcuse 2015). Throughout the history of labor struggles in America, there are few examples of private capital interests offering public good concessions simply because they see it fit. Planner’s have not been able to achieve wholesale just distribution because governments and corporations have not used the same idea of justice.
Right to The City: Marrying Labor and Planning
David Harvey’s Right to the City can be a helpful conceptual framework for marrying the field of planning with labor struggles. Harvey states, “popular groups should wrest control over the deployment of surpluses through urbanization.” Planners interested in furthering the practice and achieving material changes should jump into this struggle. The right to the city is more than individual access to a city’s resources, it is the right to change oneself by changing the city more after one’s heart’s desires. Planners crave this. The profession has many basic intellectual and professional standards of best practices and necessary actions to be taken to ensure an equitable existence. Climate change is one of the most pressing issues for planners to address. Planners know that chronic sea-level rise will inundate many development projects currently being planned, yet those developments ensure short-term growth so they move forward. The right to the city is inherently collective, and it requires collective power and control. In this context, planners should not have complete control. Rather, as in the thinking of advocacy planning, the planners should represent common public interests as mediators between the public and the government. Collective power would reside with the public, but planners have a role in extracting this power from the government and private interests. At the very least, the public and planners need more power and control. The majority of labor organizing has been self-interested for good reason.
Dangers of Not Considering Labor
In failing to consider labor, planners will perpetuate their roles as complicit intermediaries in the neoliberal systems that dictate land and its uses. Neglecting labor models harms workers and undermines the potential for implementing planning goals. Planning deals with labor already, but doesn’t necessarily view itself as a vessel of the working class’s interest. The homes and movements of the working class have been a cornerstone of planning practice and theory. The garden cities, city-beautiful, and other waves of planning idealism treated the poor workers and homeless people, the unsanitary conditions crowding of cities as problems to be solved with beauty and separation. Implicit in these movements is the separation of workers by their status. Some of the foremothers of city planning history approached the urban poor through justly compassionate housing programs, the tenements, which can serve as very important examples of planning with labor in mind (Sandercock, 1998). Today, transportation planning and housing planning both generally concern planning for the daily movements and actions of most people, and most people fall into the working class.
The dangers of ignoring labor models in planning history mirror those of failing to consider the perspectives of non-white and non cis male people. Sandercock’s analysis of Barbara Hooper’s writing describes how women became synonymous with threats to patriarchal space and power. Thus, white men built patriarchy into planning, solidifying sexual differences in the designs and uses of city spaces. As planning conquered poverty and disorder, it also conquered the female body. Hooper summarizes this phenomenon with the statement that “planning takes on the baggage of the dominant cultural traditions;” in this case male dominance (Hooper 1998). The conquest of the female body has been accompanied by the conquest of workers’ bodies, workers of certain classes have been planned for in separational ways. The treatment of women’s work is demonstrative of this overlap. Women’s work has been both ‘unproductive’ yet essential to families, ‘productive’ but threatening and deserving of less compensation. Planning has come far in addressing problematic cultural traditions, but this progress hasn’t resulted in an undoing of the physical manifestations of the traditions.
Marxism and class theory have not been absent from planning theory, and Marxist historical analysis in the field has brought class impacts of planning practice to the forefront of planning theory (Sandercock 1998). However, Marxist analysis is an incomplete framework for planners without an analysis of labor movements. As Sandercock outlines in her landmark Planning for Multicultural Cities, when applied to planning Marxist theory concludes that every idea and action of planners is simply the maintenance of capital accumulation (Sandercock 1998). Successful American labor movements have occurred without a Marxist or similar theoretical basis (Domhoff 2012), and planning can be successful in its organizing without ascribing to a totalizing ideological narrative.
Sandercock actively advises against centering Marxist theory in planning frameworks because of its potential for ‘grand theorizing,’ generalizing, and reducing the nuances of intersectionality in planning. In only focusing on class dynamics, planners may lose sight of other important, cross-sectional factors such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Labor unions were mostly segregated throughout the great swells of labor militancy, up until the 1950s. This segregation meant that oppositional businessmen could tap into a steady supply of non-white scab labor, which complicated race-labor relationships further. During the civil rights movements of the 1960s, even the UAW, widely considered the most progressive industrial union, felt it was incapable of representing a cross-class coalition of both black and white workers (Boyle, 1998/2017). The UAW and other unions lost many white members during the civil rights movements, and ultimately both African-Americans, white workers, liberals, and the New Left all considered the UAW to be a symbolic prop committed to the status quo, albeit for very different respective reasons (Domhoff, 2012). American labor movements have mirrored the systemic racism and sexism of their contemporary societies. Thankfully, labor history has a plethora of successful cross-sectional movements that planners can consider. Losing sight of the transformational power of class dynamics in shaping urban landscapes is almost as detrimental as not considering labor at all.
Planning has always been a class phenomenon, dictating where surpluses are taken from and where they are used. Planning often enacts the absorption of surplus, which directly and indirectly subverts labor: giant infrastructure projects allow power players to redesign landscapes in their interests while shoring up unemployment and stabilizing social unrest. This flexing of surplus capital is a timeless tool implemented by governments and capital owners through planners. There is no more famous example of this than Haussman’s destruction of Paris. Haussman’s work on Paris is notorious in planning theory for a few reasons, but the use of labor to subvert labor should be the most prominent.
Crises occur when surplus labor and surplus capital exist side by side, as governments must come up with some solution to use up both. The 1848 workers’ uprising in Paris spawned Haussmann’s notorious remodeling project (Harvey 2015). Both the action and the product of the project undermined the working classes. The renovations expelled the working class and working people from the center of the city, replacing homes with wider streets that catered for the higher classes. Haussmann seized hold of Paris socially by changing it physically, demanding wider boulevards so he could march soldiers through them. Increased alienation from labor and other laborers became enforced by separations in physical space which eliminated natural third spaces. Haussman intended to destroy the role of streets as a public organizing and meeting space, increased divisions and alienation combined with increased commodification keep the proletariat distracted and numb from their worsening conditions. Considering labor in planning necessitates planning for labor: supporting workers in things like transit and housing, but also supporting the spaces in which labor organizing occurs. Bars and other third spaces are crucial for union organizing, but so too are walkable areas and alleys. Haussman’s work on Paris and Robert Moses’s destructive highway projects are the most prominent examples, but there are many other examples of public and private works. The destruction of homes and neighborhoods rarely occurs in wealthy areas, major infrastructure projects often uproot the working poor. The natural third spaces, small streets and alleys, stoops, parks, and other informal urban gathering places have been destroyed, intentionally by Haussman and inadvertently by Moses and others.
This system is understood in planning theory, yet planning is perpetually co-opted for such projects. The depression in the 1930s was soaked up by the war effort’s demands for labor under a just cause, and following the war suburbanization and highway projects soaked up surplus labor and capital further. From the 1990s and onward, financialization fueled investments in urbanization, urban forms of development soaked up capital and labor. Planners have an outsized impact on capital movements when they concern building projects such as these, which are typically not grand state-ordered projects but individual projects of private interests. Today, American cities are entrenched in a cycle of redeveloping developed land, even in areas which are known to be at risk of sea level rise, wildfires, and other natural disasters which will only increase in frequency and intensity in the coming decades. In short, the cycles of capital and labor surplus absorption have been known in planning theory as ill-fated for decades, yet planners today are still forced to work within such cycles. Planners need to learn from labor movements and the state-capital reactions to such movements, as neglecting labor models not only harms workers directly but also undermines the potential for achieving progressive planning goals.
So, Should Planners Form a National Union?
An optimistic view of a planners union would assume that the planners wishes conveyed more, and that the planners wishes reflect the public’s wishes. However, union organizing often necessitates collective selfishness. Planning has been co-opted before, so who’s to say that the unionized planners wouldn’t set aside their constituents and continue to undermine themselves and their constituents for more pay and benefits? A national planners union would perhaps avoid these issues, as the individualized demands would be diluted. American Planners are already organized under the APA as paying members. APA journals publish pieces arguing for radical change in every issue, yet the organization does little to assemble its members to extract concessions from their employers. If the APA were to assume the role of a legitimate labor union organization, it could more effectively enforce adherence to its goals within the profession, but would also allow for planners to use their collective bargaining power against the federal government.
In 1965, Marcuse floated the idea of a whistleblower’s bail fund as a step towards increasing justice in the field of planning (Marcuse, 2015). The fund has not materialized, but actions like a support fund can be the first steps of labor militancy for planners whether they occur within or outside of a union. Whatever the means, planners must act on their demands. Planners can force through necessary changes that go against capital interests, or can at least try to, by keeping both the victories and history of labor and the current struggles of the working class in mind. Large-scale labor struggles and unionization efforts always involve risk. Early labor movements were extremely violent, and today unionization is still dogmatized. Planners seeking to organize may jeopardize their jobs and careers. But, they will also be striving to achieve the highest goals of planning in doing so.
Works Cited
American Planning Association. (2021). AICP code of ethics and professional conduct.
https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicscode/Links to an external site.
Davidoff, P. (1965). “Advocacy and pluralism in planning.” In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.),
The City Reader (2016, Sixth edition., pp. 480–491). Routledge.
Davis, M. (1990). “Fortress L.A.” In City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles (pp.
221–263). Verso.
Domhoff, G. W. (2012). Power in America: The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions in the U. S. From
the 1830s until 2012(But mostly the 1930s-1980s). Who Rules America?; University of
California at Santa Cruz.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/history_of_labor_unions.html
Harvey, D. A. (2015). Massacre: the life and death of the Paris Commune. Choice, 52(9), 1581.
http://silk.library.umass.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/massacre
-life-death-paris-commune/docview/1677215568/se-2
Harvey, D. (2008) “The right to the city.” In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.), The City Reader
(2016, Sixth edition., pp. 281 – 289). Routledge.
Mann, M. (1993). The sources of social power: Volume 2: The rise of classes and nation states,
1760-1914. Cambridge University Press.
Marcuse, P. (2015). “Justice.” In R. Crane & R. Weber (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of urban
planning (2015; pp. 141–165). Oxford University Press.
Sandercock, L. (1998). “Re/presenting planning’s histories.” In Towards cosmopolis: Planning
for multicultural cities (pp. 33–54). JWiley.
Shi, L., Chu, E., & Debats, J. (2015). Explaining Progress in Climate Adaptation Planning
Across 156 U.S. Municipalities. Journal of the American Planning Association, 81(3),
191–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2015.1074526
Warner, S.B. (2011). “Evolution and transformation: The American industrial metropolis: 1840 –
1940.” In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.), The City Reader (2016, Sixth edition., pp. 63 – 72). Routledge.
Leave a Reply