Elements of Urban Policy
Manually typed from Lithwick's Urban Canada
Next Installment: c) The Current Policy Framework and its Limitations
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Part III: Chapter Five - Directions for Public Policy
Section B
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b) Elements of Urban Policy
The phrase "urban policy" is subject to many interpretations. If asked, a municipal official, a provincial legislator, or a federal bureaucrat each might say that his government indeed has an urban policy. And each would be partially correct. At one level, the powers and responsibilities delegated to city governments by the provinces represent, at any one time, a partial statement of urban policy. Provincial governments administer a variety of services that specifically, but more often generally, have an impact on urban areas. This too constitutes a partial statement and when combined with that of the delegated powers administered by cities, represents a more comprehensive explanation of urban policy. Similarly, programs of the Federal Government are part of the overall picture. The point is that, in aggregate, all these -- municipal, provincial, federal -- constitute the sum of policies affecting urban areas, directly or indirectly. Do they then, together, constitute an "urban policy" when observed from the perspective of the city, the province, or the Federal Government? The answer, of course, is that they do not. They generally lack consistency, coordination, comprehensiveness, and explicit goals. They are a melane of programs and policies that affect urban communities but which are nto specifically tailored for urban communities. If such a plethora of "other directedness" is not urban policy, what might the dimensions of such a policy be? With no pretense of being exhaustive, among the most important components of such a policy are the following:
(i) PURPOSE
Thus, through a set of complementary policies and programs, an urban policy represents an explicit statement of the purpose of urbanization, its pace, its character, and the values that are to prevail as a result of it. Obviously, the bounds of human rationality are such that urban policies can never be more than partial statements. But the rigorous kind of examination implied by the formulation of urban goals necessitates careful consideration of the often uncritically accepted premises of the dominant pattern and values of human settlement today.
(ii) SCOPE
An urban policy is distinguished by its comprehensiveness. Often such policy is thought of more in spatial terms than in a broader construction. But it is a holistic concept. Urban planning will not function properly unless it is framed within a global economic planning policy.
In recent years, it has been recognized that economic planning and socio-physical or, more broadly, environmental planning are merely different facets and different stages of the total planning process. The essence of economic planning whether at a national, provincial, or regional level is that in addition to its concern for capital allocation, it also has a fundamental spatial componenet involving alternative locational arrangements of capital expenditure and functional priorities for current expenditure. It is the failure ot recognize that economic and environmental planning are simply the expression of the same thing, in different ways, and the oncomitant failure to provide a global economic development strategy, that have impeded the formulation of comprehensive urban policies.
In addition to its economic dimension, urban policy has other components. Urban improvement does not necessarily involve urban growth, for there are qualitative as well as quantitative goals. That is to say, cities can easily continue to grow without further improvement if the quality of life within them does not grow as well. Throught he application of public policy, or a process of urbanification, the quality of the environment, economic opportunity, social justice, and public morality become components of urban policy. Similarly, the responsiveness and accessibility of the government, its economy, and its efficiency fall with the general framework.
(iii) INTEGRATION
Implicit in its comprehensiveness is the integrated character of urban policy. All factors in the urbanization process are interdependent. (2) yet the incidence of much public action in urban centres is disjointed, random, and unrelated to specific urban goals. In part, this is attributable to the institutional structure of government as reflected in the dozen or more departments of the Government of Ontario which are directly involved in some aspect of education and training, or the 100 public agencies in the "rationalized" governmental structure of Metro Toronto. But the need for integrated policy is a funciton of the expanding role of government. Whereas public policy was once restricted to relatively narrow, discrete ends, its contemporary comprehensiveness produces sets of complementary services which require coordination if their full effectiveness is to be realized. In no other context is this more apt than the city. In slightly different terms, the Economic Council of Cnada has said that "...the increasing and interdependent demands upon the city all point to the urgent nature of long-range comprehensive planning of urban space. The essential need is for a synthesis, a comprehensive philosophy, a co-ordinated concept of urban development.
(iv) DISCRIMINATION
It is obvious that policy directed at the city must discriminate among other objects of public concern. Yet it is the absence of just this abstraction of urban from other policy that has been so apparent in the past. For a great number of possible reasons, the federal and provincial legislators of this country have been beset by tension between demands for policies of equalization and demands for policies of selective development. The cross-pressures of politicial life have pushed public policy towards the middle ground, militating against specialized treatment of unique cases. Thus, despire the unique material needs of urban centres, they often have been treated as general categories. This approach is bound to be exacerbated and become more anomalous as urban Canada grows.
There are many dimensions to ths question: rural and urban areas are treated as identical categories; policies which might recognize the special cases of say Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal are applied consistently throughout the country as are those which might discriminate between say MOntreal, Quebec City, and Cantons de l'Est as opposed to Hull, Trois Rivieres, and Chicoutimi; the varying needs of specific groups within cities are met by universalistic rather than particular programs. Legislation covering education and health services, for instance, pays scant attention to the particular needs of cities.
Urban policy, then, requires recognition of the unique character of cities and it must be designed to have selective impact.
(v) INSTITUTIONAL MACHINERY
Though institutional machinery is not commonly thought of as a component of urban policy, it undoubtedly should be. In addition to providing answers and specifying instrumental means, urban policy should provide methods by which the right questions can be asked. In other words, a choice of organizationl structure is a choice of which interests or which values will have preferred access or be given greater emphasis, particularly in the meta-policy stage of determining assumptions and setting priorities of policy making. Organization is strategy so that if, for example, urban poverty policy specified participation by the poor in decision making (as it surely should today), institutional provision for this aspect of the program would be essential for its effective operation.
Considered in another way, differences in the appropriate scale of urban policy making and policy application require institutional structures which are congruent with the scale of the problem to be solved. Clearly, the institutional structure of many urban centres cannot meet this criterion.
