City Planning as Utopian Ideology and City Government Function

William T. Perks was Professor of Urbanism and Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

In this monograph Earl Levin discusses the intellectual and practical arts of city planning in relation to the mandates of city government and how city administrations in Canada actually work. In a case study of Winnipeg, Levin describes that city’s achievements in the provision of services and works, and the transformation from a “metro” system to a “unified city government” (1972), including certain consequences of this local government reorganization as seen, for example, in the failure of citizen participation and in “meaningless planning.” Winnipeg’s “outstanding record” in improving amenities and services, public transportation, metropolitan parks, welfare programs, etc., belongs to the Metro era, 1960 to 1972. In that period, according to Levin, the major comprehensive schemes prepared by the planners were largely irrelevant. It was an “economic and effective” growth management style of local government and development that prevailed. As for Unicity, it is seen as a misconceived idea in the first place, its authors (the NDP government) being more enamoured of the American “counter culture revolt” of the time than equipped with practical-mindedness about how Canadian city government really works and what its limitations for effecting social reform really are.

The Winnipeg account is reasonably informative. On the other hand, it is too insubstantial in both evidence presented and the author’s reasoning to serve Levin’s essential thesis — which is that Canadian city planning, in contemporary and historical practices, in its intellectual foundations, and in the teaching of it throughout the past 30 years, has suffered miserably (and misled its clientele) from an ideology of utopia. Levin attributes to the Canadian planning profession an “almost evangelical faith in the capacity of planning to save society,” and possessing a (false) claim to being a science. An exposition of this thesis forms about a third of the monograph, for which the historical account of Winnipeg’s real and best workings is supposed to supply the supporting empirical argument. The argument is unconvincing, especially when elevated to a generalization about Canadian planning. Since much of the thesis reposes on his view of the historical development of the planning movement, it must be said that Levin’s reading of the early Canadian planning movement is thin and selective. He also confuses the conceptual meanings of utopia, theory, and scientific method.

Levin has not only greatly exaggerated the minor and episodic elements of evangelism in the planning profession, he also ignores a substantial body of writings bearing contradictory evidence to his thesis. Moreover, Levin is simply inaccurate in his general characterization of Canadian planning schools as perpetrators of sterile, nefarious, utopian ideology at the expense of sound understanding of how our public institutions work and how municipal planning actually functions in Canada. The sweeping condemnation Levin levels at our university planning programs is not only misconceived, it is entirely unsubstantiated in this monograph; he cites nothing of the documented studies available on Canadian planning education and no communication with anyone on the topic of our education programs. As a research paper, this essay would hardly fly in a first-year graduate planning course in my university.