Kristi­na Ford was direc­tor of city plan­ning in New Orleans for eight years before Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na swept across the Big Easy in 2005, bring­ing floods and dev­as­ta­tion on a scale unpar­al­leled in an Amer­i­can city in mod­ern times. Accord­ing to Ford, the hur­ri­cane was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for city plan­ners to do the job they were trained for: “to devise how to use the city’s lands more to the city’s bet­ter­ment.” But this didn’t hap­pen.

Ford’s The Trou­ble with City Plan­ning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us (Yale, £18.00) is a detailed and insight­ful analy­sis of what went wrong and a blue­print for how city plan­ning can be improved in all cities. Cities are con­stant­ly chang­ing and the way land is used impacts the lives of every city dweller. In post-Kat­ri­na New Orleans there was a “bliz­zard of plan­ning”. There were at least five dif­fer­ent plans in all, but the process was chaot­ic and the results large­ly ignored by the city’s elect­ed lead­ers. They also failed to address the thorny his­tor­i­cal issue of why peo­ple (large­ly poor African Amer­i­cans) were liv­ing in areas – such as the Low­er Ninth Ward – which were vul­ner­a­ble to flood­ing. As Ford says, “any street that appeared on a map of New Orleans drawn in the nine­teenth century…probably did not flood”. Plan­ning deci­sions made in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry placed too much faith in the pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy to pro­tect new res­i­den­tial areas. And impor­tant­ly no attempt was made in the post-Kat­ri­na pans to explore, let alone explain, these deci­sions.

Accord­ing to Ford, even today “a plan for rebuild­ing New Orleans still remains a most elu­sive goal”. But the expe­ri­ences of the res­i­dents of New Orleans cast light on the trou­ble with con­tem­po­rary urban plan­ning through­out Amer­i­ca. Ford wants to put city dwellers back at the heart of urban plan­ning: good plans “are made with cit­i­zens and are meant to be used by them”. For a start she wants plans to be writ­ten in plain Eng­lish rather than jar­gon and to incor­po­rate not just facts but people’s expe­ri­ences of how they use the city, what they love and hate about the city, what prob­lems need to be solved and what kind of city they want in the future. Plan­ners need to lis­ten more to the peo­ple who live and work in the city. When she was a New Orleans city plan­ner res­i­dents of New Orleans told Ford that their pri­or­i­ties were easy access to the ameni­ties of the city, neigh­bour­hoods with a strong sense of com­mu­ni­ty, street­cars and cycle lanes. These are the kinds of views that should be at the cen­tre of a city’s plan, argues Ford. A good plan should be “an expres­sion of how the cit­i­zen­ry, work­ing with city plan­ners, believes a city could be made bet­ter”. At the heart of her argu­ment is an impor­tant point that is often over­looked: cities are first and fore­most human envi­ron­ments, not dis­play cas­es for archi­tec­ture.

Ford argues pas­sion­ate­ly that plans need to be “robust and sup­ple doc­u­ments”, which include the voic­es of city dwellers, and are “root­ed in his­to­ry”. She acknowl­edges that the plan­ning process is as much an art as it is a sci­ence. There is even room for serendip­i­ty: “A Good City Plan acknowl­edges that what enlivens any city is fre­quent­ly the prod­uct of the unex­pect­ed.” But as well as lis­ten­ing to the voic­es of res­i­dents, she is also reassert­ing the vital role plan­ners must play in cre­at­ing tomorrow’s cities: “what city plan­ners know is essen­tial to great cities”. By reform­ing the way city plans are cre­at­ed, Ford believes “the trou­ble with city plan­ning” can be over­come. As a result may­ors will be oblig­ed to use city plans rather than polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy as the basis for plan­ning deci­sions. Ford’s ide­al­ism is cer­tain­ly inspir­ing but this is an ide­al­ism ground­ed in a prac­ti­cal under­stand­ing of the chal­lenges of city plan­ning. And in the end, it is this that makes her book so valu­able for cities and cit­i­zens every­where.

[NB. This is a longer ver­sion of my review pub­lished in the Guardian on 12 Novem­ber 2011.]