Growing concern with problems of race, poverty, and environmental quality, along with raising political awareness within community groups, have caused many metropolitan planning agencies to look beyond the efficient provision of basic services which no more than half a dozen years ago was their principal interest. The interaction of governmental policies with the political response of urban citizens has emphasized the need to integrate the numerous planning efforts being made in any sizable region. Lowdon Wingo, director of RFF's program of regional and urban studies, is one of a panel composed of social scientists which was created to advise the recently established Wayne County Planning Commission on its appropriate role in the Detroit metropolitan region.
Wayne County is one of the six counties of the Detroit metropolitan region carrying on planning activities; Detroit City Plan Commission carries on the typical big city planning roles, while the municipalities in the region plan at still another level.
The article that follows is adapted from portions of Mr. Wingo's report to the Wayne County Planning Commission.
What are long range public policies? The Wayne County Planning Commission sees its basic responsibility as one of devising innovations in a "broad spectrum of long-range public policies," What do we mean by long-range public policies? We used to house that they applied mostly to physical capital—houses, streets, factories, schools, and the like—that committed for long periods of time the way in which land was organized and used. We now can see that land use and public facility patterns were simply the physical manifestations of underlying attitudes and behavior which brought forth the "sick city" syndrome of the late 1960s: polarization of poverty and affluence, the confrontation of middle-class white and ghettoized black, the periodic collapse of public service systems.
It now seems that "long-rangedness" in urban public policy should be associated with the relationships between such phenomena as income distribution and changing residential patterns of the city, between the complex of urban activities and the quality of the natural environment, between the regional and local economies and those of the rest of the world, between public sector activities and the quality of human resources, between what people want in the way of consumption goods and the quality of public services, between group aspirations and the opportunities available for realizing them. Public policy should intervene in such relationships so that the benefits of an urban society are not only expanded but more equitably distributed. Local government must be continuously involved in the management of these crucial relationships. Planning involves the development of longer-range strategies for their management.
A new definition of mission for the Wayne County planning function might well begin with a reexamination of the relationship between "local" and "regional" planning appropriate to Wayne County's case.
What is "local" and what "regional"? The vast, almost organic functional interdependence of the Detroit regional economy confronts policy jurisdictions fixed in time and rigid in space. A regional component like Wayne County has a responsibility not only to the Wayne County constituency but to the region as a whole. Furthermore, Wayne County encompasses much of the region's economic heart: what is good or bad for Wayne County is anything but a matter of indifference to the rest of the region. Expansion of employment in Wayne County affords job opportunities to other parts of the region nearby. At the same time, this gain for Wayne County may be at the expense of other parts of the region. Hence, the Wayne County Board of Supervisors, to which the Commission is responsible, needs to be sensitive to developments in other parts of the Detroit metropolitan region, not only to assess their impacts on the welfare of Wayne's residents, but also to appraise the effects of alternative local policies on the rest of the region.
The important thing for Wayne County to understand is that not only are capital stocks—whether in the form of new plant and equipment, the skills and experience of the labor force, or public facilities—quite mobile within the region, but that income flows are even more so. To the extent that Wayne County cannot immobilize these capital stocks or confine the flows of returns from their employment, it must understand how changes in these stocks affect its own residents and interests. And, thus, the imperative for a planning process of greater-than-local scope becomes apparent.
Narrowing the Planning Task While a planning function such as that proposed for Wayne County presumes some deep involvement in the regional and local "problem arrays," it does not follow that it necessarily has to be involved in everything at all levels. The planning process, with its long view and cause-and-effect orientation, can be the responsible source of a particular kind of technical information for policy making. This kind of information is more germane to some kinds of problems than to others, which suggests that the roles planners assume should be tested against a principle which might be called "the conservation of credibility": an organization should confine its interests to those matters in which the information it produces carries more authority than that arising from competing technical sources and sufficient authority to command its day in court to confront purely political considerations. To neglect this principle will waste resources in the promulgation of policy proposals likely to be disregarded, and erode the fund of credibility so painfully built up previously.
The core content of such a new planning function might well consist of problems associated with the conservation and efficient employment of the region's productive assets and Wayne County's share of them, because any aggregate measure of regional welfare would vary with the total stock of private capital in the region, the stock of human resources, the stock of public capital or infrastructure, the stock of natural resources, and the region's institutional assets.
Such a substantive base has several advantages. It makes the planning agency the indisputable expert in the impact of major policies on regional and local welfare. Most agencies have technically defined missions addressed to internal performance criteria: a highway engineer can tell his superior which of several highway routes is most efficient in engineering terms, but he cannot tell him much about how all the gains and losses to people and activities net out.
As a corollary, this kind of focus makes the agency the expert on the network of intraregional interdependencies. The planning agency's principal claim to credibility ought to be its understanding of the processes by which the transmission all these consequences takes place.
The first step in carrying out such an orientation would be to put together some basic "models" which seek to articulate the processes at work altering the volume or quality of the regional asset stocks and of Wayne County's share of them. Each of the regional asset stocks and their interdependencies can be cast in such a format. A continuing function of the planning agency should be to increase the sophistication of this set of interrelated models over time, making conditional prediction of policy impacts an increasingly precise exercise.
A second and related step would be to inventory all the planning, formational, and coordinating activities that are germane to Wayne County's planning concerns and that are taking place anywhere in the region's public and private agencies. Thus, Wayne County's activities can be made to fit into the total context of planning and policy in the region.
A version of this article appeared in print in the June 1969 issue of Resources magazine.
