Places and cities aren’t giant, complicated machines that can be controlled and managed only by knowledgeable experts.
We’ll explore this contention in the article below and provide an alternative concept based on systems thinking in a second blog post next week.
Thinking of Places
Places and cities aren’t giant, complicated machines that can be controlled and managed only by knowledgeable experts.
We’ll explore this contention in the article below and provide an alternative concept based on systems thinking in a second blog post next week.
Thinking of Places as Machines is the Standard Approach
The scientific and industrial revolutions considered the world as a being like a huge, complicated, but ultimately understandable clock. The whole could be understood by breaking things in to pieces, studying each part intensely to better understand it and aiming for control and consistency.
A factory production line is a good representation of this worldview. A factory requires expert knowledge to design, build and operate and then produces relatively consistent, standardised outputs based on raw materials or unprocessed inputs. It is logical, linear and generally predictable. A key aim of a factory is to maximise efficiency through process optimisation.
“This worldview has profoundly transformed humanity in the last two centuries, bestowing upon us unprecedented levels of prosperity and life expectancy. The possibility to imagine “what if” has also freed us from the oppression of caste systems and religions and replaced feudal governance with the rule of law and democracy. This worldview dominates management thinking today”.‘Reinventing Organizations’ by Frederic Laloux
The Role of Government in the Machine Approach
The role of governments in this approach is similar to a factory manager. Given the machine is very complicated, places should be controlled and managed by knowledgeable experts employed in service-delivery silos in centralised bureaucracies. You need an engineer to design a bridge or a road. You need an urban planner to zone land, manage regulations and process applications. You employ a works crew to maintain parks and streetscapes etc.
“Many governments around the world have embraced a service delivery mindset inspired by management practices from the private sector.
By examining the evidence of what works and what doesn’t, designing services based on this understanding, and managing those services efficiently, the logic runs that we are likely to achieve better outcomes for citizens.
The delivery mindset holds that citizens can be thought of as customers of public services, and the same tools of process optimisation can be applied to a welfare service, for example as to a bank.”‘Enablement: how governments can achieve more by letting go’, by Adrian Brown – https://bit.ly/2Ykwkjf
The Centre for Public Impact summarises the key characteristics of the Places as Machines or service delivery model:
- Aim to maximise efficiency through process optimisation
- Outcomes are the result of clear, predictable linear processes
- The customer is to be serviced and should be the focus of the process
- Centralisation manages risk and delivers economies of scale
- Control who can do what via strict hierarchies, plans and regulations
- Aim for best practice via benchmarking and ‘scorecards’
- Deliver consistency, predictability and accountability
- The organsiation is typified by expert-led, service-delivery silos
This approach works well with logical, engineering-based services such as sewerage systems, roads and rubbish collection. Given the lack of these basic services 100 or even 50 years ago, the past dominance of this approach to deliver necessary services to people is understandable.
But, the machine or service delivery model doesn’t work very well with more complex issues, such as:
- Loneliness and social isolation
- Loss of community
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Climate change
- Environmental degradation
- Placemaking (defined as per the Project for Public Spaces definition)
These kinds of issues can’t be solved by one group of of people using logical, linear, predictable processes. They require a far more holistic and integrated approach based on systems thinking.
“The nature of the challenges that the public sector is trying to address is changing. For example, mental health is now a major public health crisis in many developed countries and is linked to other problems such as substance abuse, domestic violence and unemployment. In other words, this is a complex and varied problem that is being poorly addressed by existing approaches.”‘Enablement: how governments can achieve more by letting go’, by Adrian Brown – https://bit.ly/2Ykwkjf
The Place as a Machine Approach to Car Parking
Take car parking an example. In the ‘place as a machine’ approach, the aim is to ‘predict and provide’ – predict how many motorists would like to drive to a place (assuming there are no costs to park a car) and then provide the ‘required’ number of car bays to meet the predicted ‘demand’. Once this ‘scientific’ assessment is undertaken, it is then codified into regulations and applied consistently to all places, without regard to their context.
But, even something as seemingly simple as car parking doesn’t follow logical, linear, predictable outcomes. Because free car parking is basically enforced by regulation, driving is directly encouraged and subsidised, feeding traffic congestion and “parking problems”. Bigger roads are deemed necessary, which feeds further traffic congestion based on induced demand. Motorists think they can drive and park everywhere for free. The people who don’t drive end up subsidising the motorists who do drive. The approach delivers perverse outcomes and usually creates more problems than it aims to fix.
There is plenty of research to s