Transportation Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

THE STATE-OF-THE-ART OF "COMPREHENSIVE" PLANNING*

JOHN T. HOWARD

Professor of City Planning, M.I.T., U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

"Planning" occurs as a part of governmental operations wherever "decision- making" happens. For US metropoli tan areas, the locuses of decision-making are multiple, ranging in scale from very small jurisdictions up through the hierarchy to state and federal levels, and in function from general governments to many special- purpose agencies - transportation, health care, education, etc. Almost all might affect or be affected by urban transportat ion decisions and actions. Since no one of these units of government is comprehensive in authori ty and activity, there is no single, centralized planning operation that is truly "comprehensive." "Pluralistic planning" is increasingly trying to foresee and to accommodate the interactions among the various levels and functions. Instead of fragmenting, with the fragments pulled apart and insulated, we need to move toward partitioning, not merely to delimit boundaries but also to identify interfaces. This movement is hampered by the differentials in the development of the "state-of-the-art" of the technical planning process now used by the several levels and functional units of government. This is most advanced, and most effective, for small, homogeneous suburban jurisdictions primarily concerned with guiding and controlling physical development ; it is in disarray in central cities trying to cope with social and economic problems as well as with physical deterioration; at the metropoli tan scale it is highly developed technically but not very influential. There is a trend toward a network of planning activities that recognizes and facilitates interrela- tionships and interactions, both vertically among functional boundaries and horizon- tally across geographical-scale distinctions - a trend toward the "comprehensive" - but we have a very long way to go.

T h e r e is n o t a n d c a n n o t be a n y single, c e n t r a l i z e d p l a n n i n g o p e r a t i o n

w h i c h dese rves t h e l a b e l " c o m p r e h e n s i v e " , - a t l e a s t n o t in o u r s o c i e t y

u n d e r o u r f o r m o f g o v e r n m e n t . T h e r e is b e g i n n i n g t o e m e r g e , h o w e v e r , a

s h a d o w y s t r u c t u r e o f p l a n n i n g a t m a n y d i f f e r e n t levels a n d sca les w h i c h is

c o n c e r n e d w i t h m a n y d i f f e r e n t f u n c t i o n s . T h e i n t e r a c t i o n a m o n g al l

* Paper prepared for the Highway Research Board Conference on Organization for Continuing Urban Transportat ion Planning.

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these plannings is still incomplete, and ~structure" is too strong a word to describe them. But there may yet evolve a set of interrelated planning activities sufficiently systematic to be called "comprehensive."

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of the several kinds of planning within and for metropolitan areas that may or should interact with transportation planning and with each other, if the goal of com- prehensiveness is to be approached. We are concerned with planning which will actually influence decision and action; with activities which are to some degree the responsibility of government; and further with activities which might affect or be affected by urban transportation decisions and actions.

Consider first the varieties of scale. There are governmental decision- makers whose scope is quite local - a small suburb, a ward or other part of a big city - local in the sense that the decisions do not extend into other territories, or in the sense that the "electorate" (whether elected or not, the power-base that legitimizes the decisions) lives entirely in a small locality. There is a strong trend recently to expand the role of such local decision-makers, especially in inner-city poverty neighborhoods.

Then there are general governments attached to municipalities, where the key decision-makers are city councils and mayors. But at this scale there tend to be also special-purpose agencies with independent powers - school boards, housing authorities, ,and so forth. County governments, which in some places act as general governments and in others overlap the municipalities with special functions, usually have territorial jurisdictions that are smaller than the metropolitan area.

At the scale of the metropolis itself, there are frequently special- purpose independent agencies: transit authorities, park boards, sewer or water authorities, and many others, At this scale, which is the unit of urbanization with which urban transportation planning normally deals, there is typically in this country no general-purpose government at all.

But this is not the end of the ladder. Even though we still hold ~ur attention to the metropolitan area, there are also decision-makers in both state and national government - legislative bodies, chief executives, and bureaucrats - who make many decisions about and of concern to metro- politan areas, either all urban areas, or one or some specific urban areas.

This, then, is the range of the geographic scales of governmental decision-makers on urban matters. Now, how about the range of the urban matters themselves? The functional elements of the urban scene which involve direct or indirect reponsibilities of one or more kind or level of government - and thus of one or more of the types of decision-makers sketched above - are also multiple and various.

Any at tempt to group these functional elements under a few major

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headings is bound to be arbitrary and clumsy. Nevertheless, I will try to apply the familiar categories of economic, social, and physical. I will also suggest as examples of these only elements that might affect or be affected by transportation decisions and actions. Almost all of these examples are objects of concern - and of decision-making - at every one of the geographic scales that I have spelled out.

Under the heading of "economic elements" come all of the purpose- ful attempts to intervene in the workings of the economy to bring about some change the benefits of which can be measured in direct economic terms. (Let me note parenthetically that the reasons for all governmental actions are in the long run '"social"; that does not rule out the utility of this three-way split.)

There is the concern with the total economy of the metropolitan area or the city - its capability to produce wealth in the form of goods and services, and to distribute the benefits among its inhabitants. An economic policy may seek to expand the opportunity for profitable economic enterprise. This, in turn, may be aimed at either (or both) increasing taxable wealth in order to pay for more costly governmental services, or increasing employment and earning opportunities directly. A less broad concern might be to improve the efficiency of economic activities, thus to enhance their profitability and their capacity to employ, to raise wages and to pay taxes. Another might be to improve employ- ment opportunities specifically for unemployed or underemployed special groups or kinds of people. The instruments that one or another level of government might use to implement such economic-change policies are many: tax policy, subsidy, regulation, direct investment, job training, and so forth. But manipulating the transportation system would be on any such list.

The "social elements" heading seems fuzzy, especially if we try to omit any element that is also primarily economic or physical. "Law and order" might be one. I suggest several others, mostly aimed at '"social justice" - a necessary aim, whether motivated by moral indignation or by enlightened self-interest. These would include opportunity for self-respect ( through employment, through other measures to achieve small-scale group self-governance and self-determination); access to housing, with choice; access to good education; access to health care services; access to recreation and culture. Here, again, the relevance of the transportation system is obvious; transportation is necessary, though clearly not suffi- dent .

The "physical elements" set is of couse the easiest to illustrate, because it has had our attention for longer and its components are already built into the methodology of urban transportation planning. Here the

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concern is with the spatial arrangements of facilities to accommodate human activities. Here is Land Use - primarily the uses made of land by the private sector, for residing, manufacturing, buying and selling, storing, servicing - but also the systems of spaces for communi ty services such as schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and of networks of water and sewer lines. Here also is the interaction between the man-made world and the "natural" world - the whole ecology issue; the pollution of air, water, land; the problems of depletion of natural resources. Beyond this, the interaction of Man - as an individual and in groups - to his environment, both man-made and natural; the effect on mind and spirit, as well as upon eyes, ears, nose, and bodily health. The relevance of the transportation system is even more obvious to every one of these.

Now, looking back at the multiplicity and the variety of decision- makers and of the objects of their decisions, my point must be clear. There is not now any plan, any planner, nor any planning agency which could claim to be called "comprehensive" in relation to all of these scales and elements. In the present state-of-the-arts, either of planning or of government, I do not think there could be "comprehensive planning" in the sense of a centralized, integrated process, equally responsive to the needs and pressures of the whole spectrum of "publics" and their pro- blems, and significantly influential in guiding the decisions necessary to implement such a "comprehensive" plan. Indeed, if we are not only to maintain the illusion but also to enhance the reality of democratic self-government and the primacy of the individual in our society, I think there should no t be any such centralized and genuinely comprehensive planning. I mistrust the technical capacity of any of the kinds of planners who might compose such a centralized planning team - be they land use planners, transportation planners, economic planners, or social planners. More than that, I mistrust the wisdom of assigning to any single political unit, decision-making power that could be called °'comprehensive."

There is a paradox here. We cannot hope to be comprehensive, in the sense of taking in everything, even everything that is important to urban man (I have not even mentioned the population bomb, the atomic bomb, B. F. Skinner, drugs, X-rated movies, and other contemporary hazards). But nevertheless there are interrelationships among the various scales and elements that I have recounted - interactions that can be perceived, evaluated, to some extent foreseen. To that extent they can be planned for, in order to increase total benefits, to distribute benefits fairly, and to decrease adverse effects.

Indeed, most of the kinds of decisions-makers mentioned have plan- ning agencies attached to them, with various kinds of planners not only trying to formulate schemes for the at tainment of the objectives of their

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own decision-making realms, but also trying to deal with the decisions and actions of others - to foresee, to accommodate, or to modify. What we have in our metropolitan areas, then, are systems of "pluralistic planning" (a concept increasingly recognized, for example in Professor Bernard J. Frieden's article in the Journal of the American Institute o f Planners September 1967).

But as of now, such systems are n o t very systematic. The various pockets of planning operate at widely differing levels of knowledge- ability and of technique. The interactions are sometimes formalized by some sort of set law or regulation, but more often they are haphazard, lucky or unlucky, and dependent on personal interconnections or power plays rather than upon rationality.

We clearly need some effort at rationalizing this unsystematic system of pluralistic planning. This, ! believe, can be done without sacrificing very much of the independence and self-determination of the various decision- making realms. What seems to be needed is a partitioning of the various semi-independent activities (each involving planning, decision and action). The partitions should serve not only as delimiting boundaries, but also as identifications of interfaces - invitations to interaction and cooperation. What we now have too often is fragmenting with the fragments pulled apart and insulated from each other.1

It would be a major contribution of this Conference on Continuing Urban Transportation Planning if it could make some progress toward formalizing and rationalizing the components of the pluralistic planning - to reduce the fragmentation, to identify efficient and effective frame- works for the partitioning. The constraint should be to avoid strait- jacketing what is now chaotic but also dynamic, flexible, and even vital, by imposing too rigid a structure of "comprehensive planning." (Some- how I do not think there is a serious danger of succeeding too far in that direction.)

At this point let me cite an important wide-spread disillusionment with old-style "comprehensive planning" long felt by practical politicians and during the past decade spelled out also by scholars (such as Banfield and Wilson). The illusion was that a plan could be both comprehensive and long-range, specifying for a city or a metropolitan area an "end-state" 20 or 30 years into the future which would guide every developmental act or decision during that period. The concept was born of a proper disgust with the inefficiencies of myriad ad hoc unrelated actions. The disillusion sprang from the bitter recognition that there are unpredictables that foul

1 I thank Gordon B. Sharpe of the Federal Highway Administration for this concept of a difference between partitioning and fragmenting.

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up long-range plans - ranging from birth-rates to technological innova- tions. The result is an uneasy truce between short-range incrementalism and long-range planning. It is now accepted that a long-range plan must be flexible and very general indeed. But it is also accepted that short-range individual decisions may be helpfully illuminated by regard to their long-range consequences, and also by evaluation of their interactions with functions and conditions which in earlier times were not recognized as relevant. Neither "comprehensive" nor "long-range" have gone all the way to the ash-heap; but the concepts are coming into a more realistic perspective.

Now let me turn to the "states-of-the-arts" of some of the various kinds and levels of planning with which urban transportation planning needs to interact in a positive way. To identify these, it may be useful to step back briefly and consider the possible objectives of the transportation planning itself.

One approach is the comparatively humble one of providing a net- work of routes, terminals and vehicles with capacity to accommodate the projected volumes of person-trips and goods-trips, by all modes of trans- port technology, at least aggregate cost within constraints of safety and comfort. This approach is probably characteristic of most of the trans- portation planning efforts of the last decade or two. I call it "humble" because it accepts the role of subserving the present social, economic, spatial, political and technological "system," rather than questioning that system (or those systems) and seeking modifications.

The other approach would be to try to use transportation changes to contribute to the fashioning of a "better" system of society - to improve the level of social justice, say, or to enhance capability for the pursuit of happiness. One could say that the first approach is not antithetical to this, but merely neutral. But one could also observe that when the first approach has ignored the second, often and especially in recent years the effects of transportation changes have been felt or perceived to be actually negative. The reactions in many cases have been disastrous to the trans- portation plans.

Now I am not suggesting that urban transportation planning should abandon its technical guideposts and set itself up as mainly an agent for deliberate social change. But I am suggesting the practical necessity of the transportation planning process operating in awareness of the values, goals, objectives and priorities of the many Qther kinds of planning and of decision-making that are in a position either to facilitate or to thwart transportation changes. For it is these values and priorities by which transportation plans will be judged.

One of the characteristics of the state-of-the-art of many levels of

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planning is a growing sophistication of effort to project and understand the consequences - intended or unintended - of alternative actions, and to judge policies, programs and projects in the light of their effectiveness in furthering values, goals and objectives. This effort is as yet more hopeful than successful. But more and more kinds of planners are trying to use systems analysis, decision theory, and other such methodologies - whether they use these labels or not. And it is therefore clear that there needs to be interaction between transportation planning and other kinds of p lanning not only at the late time of evaluating specific proposed projects or networks, but at the early time of setting priorities, criteria, and constraints - which is another way of talking about values, goals, and objectives. 2

Let me start at the most local scale, the urban neighborhood or small community that is not a municipal entity, but rather a part of a larger city. Such localities have been the focus of our rising concern with "social justice," expressed as the effort to give substance to our centuries-old rhetoric about equality of opportunity, especially where their populations are poor, in recent years often black, and characterized - among many other disadvantages - as suffering a sense of powerlessness. There has been a strong effort to devolve to such localities and their people responsi- bility and also authority for decision-making on matters that affect them deeply. The effort is comparatively recent (except for a few tentative pioneering probes, such as mine in Cleveland 25 years ago). The instru- ments have been Model Cities programs, Community Action programs, tries at citizen participation in urban renewal - as well as others not sponsored by government but more indigenous, reaching from the NAACP to the Black Panthers. The success of these efforts has been spotty, and from the point of view of those whose expectations were highest, very disappointing. But the efforts will certainly continue, by internal pressure and with external help. Higher levels of government - city, county, state - can expect increased, and increasingly effective, resistance from these quarters to the imposing of externally-initiated change, especially metro- politan-oriented transportation projects. (Be it noted that these are the places and the people who have long borne most of the non-monetary costs of urban "improvements" undertaken for the "general public good," as well as being inadequately compensated for the monetary costs. We are

2 Incidentally, the importance of all this is obviously well recognized in high places. Evidences are the Highway Research Board's work on "Highways and Community Values," and such Department of Transportation attitudes and concerns as show up in Michael Cafferty's article "Urban Goals and Priorities: The Increasing Role of Trans- portation Planning" in the July 1971 Traffic Quarterly.

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very late in broadening our cost-benefit equations to take account of this past imbalance.)

What is the state-of-the-art of planning at this geographic level? No simple evaluation is possible; the variations are enormous. The kind of planning will differ drastically, depending on the perceived problems within or the perceived threats from without. Economic development is an almost universal concern - providing more jobs in the community, improving the job-competency of the people there, improving access to jobs elsewhere. Another is housing - protecting the mere quantity of the present supply (hence the resistance to any major public works project), improving the quality or increasing the quanti ty of the present supply. There are many others, less clearly relevant to transportation planning.

The quality of planning also varies widely, depending in part on the financing. A few such localities have benefit ted from the free services of "advocate" planners - young professionals from various fields, working for little or no pay in order to help those who most need help. In other cases there may be federal, municipal or foundation funding, placed at the disposal of local leaders to hire their own planning staffs.

The only generalization I can draw from this quick look at this sublocal level of planning and decision making, not attached to a unit of government, is that the metropolitan urban transportation planning process must take it seriously in the future. The seriousness must start with the metropolitan-scale concepts - the choice among modes, net- works, and routes as they have impact upon the location of new or relocated centers of economic activity, and upon the access to these centers by some mode of travel available to potential empoyees from the localities now suffering from unemployment or underemployment. And the seriousness must extend to the location and design of the individual project - its impact upon the quanti ty of housing available to an under- housed population, and its effect on the quality of communi ty relation- ships in a locality whose social fabric is much more fragile than that of lower-density, higher-income neighborhoods. At either scale, the metro- politan or the local, the input of this special kind of local-scale planning is worthy of the attention of the transportation planning process from either - or both - of two points of view. One is the high-minded attitude that transportation changes should indeed serve the societal objective of moving toward realization of the ideal of social justice - and that those who are now the victims of injustice are the best judges of the direction that movement should take. The other - less high-minded, but very practical - is that only those transportation-system changes will be implemented that are politically feasible; and that our urban society is moving to rule out governmental decisions that are negative to social

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justice for hitherto unjustly treated minorities, and to give priority to decisions that favor the correcting of prior imbalances.

The second territorial level to be looked at is the suburb, often as small or even smaller than the neighborhoods and communities just discussed, but with the enormous difference of enjoying full and formal self-government through municipal institutions. The state-of-the-art of planning here is likely to be advanced technically, but - to be gentle - not progressive ideologically. Almost all of the planning is physical-spatial. Most suburbs have not had acute social problems recognized as demanding public action - that is, until the very recent youth-plus-drug problem surfaced. Frantic efforts to cope, so far as I know, have not involved suburban planning agencies at all; indeed, these agencies are not equipped to be helpful either technically or institutionally..Economic objectives of suburban planning have normally been limited to enhancing the tax base, encouraging and providing for commercial and industrial developmen t . The kind of planning employed has been the standard approach of land-use planning, given effect through zoning and subdivision control. These tools have also been those used for residential-development guid- ance to bring about quiet, pleasant neighborhoods with stable property values, served by convenient and generously-sized school sites and play areas.

Judging by the success of its efforts - not in all suburbs, but in the considerable number that have fully applied it - the state-of-the-art of this suburban kind of planning is at a level of development considerably higher than that of any of the other kinds under consideration. This is the product of a number of factors. The problems posed the planner are at a manageable scale, and can be dealt with through techniques long studied and tried out. The client-group is relatively homogeneous, with few internal conflicts of values and goals. The governmental machinery is simple, and the planning operation is closely tied into it.

But the success-story, if that is what it is, is marred - in part by its own success. Among the purposes of suburban planning has been the retaining and building of a social fabric that relies in part on relative cultural homogeneity, in part on relatively slow numerical growth, and in part on relatively small absolute numbers - all this, plus a fiscal situation that can generate a high quality of public services, especially schools, without excessive individual tax burdens. These are certainly under- standable purposes, and would surely be laudable if each suburb were indeed an independent communi ty and could achieve its purposes at no cost to others. But in the metropolitan context, the success of suburban land-use planning has forged a ring around center-city low and moderate income populations. They see their potential jobs migrating or developing

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in the suburbs, but the housing there is beyond their economic ability and the reverse-commute is both costly and inconvenient.

This problem is of increasing general concern, and has given rise to proposals to over-ride local suburban, planning decisions by state or federal action. (To me it would be tragic if this intervention merely makes good suburban places to live into bad places to live, so as to enable poor people to move from one bad living-place to another. I hope instead that state and federal policies move in the direction of land-price subsidy programs, so that houses for low and moderate income families can be built in suburbs without perverting the densities and neighborhood patterns that families of all income levels obviously prefer.) This is an issue which urban transportation planning cannot ignore. Through modal- choice and network-pattern decisions, transportation may be able to make positive contributions.

There is another interface between transportation planning and suburban planning, that of the impact of the route-location and project- design of a metropolitan facility upon a small-scale suburban situation. This is a potential conflict of the same order as was referred to in discussing inner-city local-planning. The suburban planning agency assumes the role of "advocate" planner, battling the metropolitan or state behemoth in the behalf of a relatively few people whose interests are threatened. Whether the impacted group is poor or non-poor, it would seem that "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" would require a transportation planning process that includes consultation with the plan- ners for the impacted group prior to high-level decision-making, as well as throughout the project-design stage.

The next territorial level of planning is that of the major central city. Here the state-of-the-art of planning is clearly in disarray. The techniques of physical development planning which have proven to be capable of successful use in some suburbs were largely developed a couple of decades back by the planning departments of the central cities. These techniques - of planning for land use, for circulation, and for communi ty facilities and utilities - are still available in central cities, still used, and indeed still essential in dealing with the problems of the physical environment for which they were designed. But they fall far short of the range of urban problems with which city governments are now expected to Cope. These are the social and economic problems which our society has always had, but which have surfaced as public responsibilities relatively recently, and even more recently have shifted from tasks for churches and private charity to federal and state, and now municipal, reponsibilities. The key problem-areas are race and poverty. The watchword is "social justice." The new objects of city-planning now include realms of social change and

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economic development: unemployment , under-employment, and job opportunity; education; health services; racial discrimination; housing, in all its dimensions of social, economic, and governmental involvement.

The art of planning, at the level of the city, for most of these factors of social and economic change and development is still primitive - perhaps at the stage where physical planning was three decades ago. The institu- tions for performing the planning are still in early evolution, with ex- perimental forms being tried out in different ways in different cities. The web is tangled, not only by the shifting structure of municipal govern- mental institutions, but also by the dependence for funding in those areas upon state and federal programs, which are also constantly shifting in magnitude, composition and direction.

The connections of these new functional realms of city planning to the older well-established physical planning agencies and programs are in flux. The physical planning agencies, often slow to wake up, tend never- theless to be more aware of potential interconnections than the newer ad hoc economic and social planning agencies, usually set up separately and tending to assume in evangelical zeal that they have access not only to a truth but even to the whole of truth. But in many cities there have been several formal efforts to coordinate municipal planning for physical, social, and economic development, mostly fueled by federal programmatic funding. Historically the oldest would be public housing, then urban redevelopment, urban renewal, and currently "model cities." The very spotty and generally disappointing performance of most of these programs is uncomfortable evidence that the state-of-the-art of the coordination of the planning of these elements as well as planning within each is indeed primitive.

Nevertheless, it is very evident that changes in the urban transporta- tion system - in terms of modes, networks, and specific projects - are relevant, though not central, to the concerns of these new functional areas of city planning. These new concerns are at the critical focus of the acute problems of urban society. The urban transportation planning process has as its over-riding obligation the service of urban society. Linkages must be devised, in spite of the disarray of present-day municipal planning machinery.

The final terrritorial level to be discussed is the metropolitan area as a whole. At this scale, what does "state-of-the-art" of planning refer to? Is it the technical-professional process of preparing plans - designs and proposals? Or is it the process of effectively n__l..-_~ a~,t,,~l-s such plans to the real world?

The art of the technical process is at an advanced state, compared with planning at smaller scales, if only because it is only the metropolitan

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area as a whole that can be treated as an integer, in terms of an economic system, a demographic system, and a spatial system (if not a political system). Systematic analysis can be applied to patterns of population distribution and of density, to economic activity, service facilities for education, health, recreation, and so forth; and to patterns of trip genera- tion, origin, destination and volume. This is the meat and drink of most DOT-HUD-financed metropolitan transportation planning programs - designs, based on projections, based on thoroughgoing analysis of past trends, and on assumptions that future trends are predictable from past data.

The flaw is the link between the past and the future. Granted that our best guide to the way people will behave in the near future is the way they have behaved in t he recent past - one must also grant that people change their minds in unpredictable ways, not only as individuals but also in groups. People in the aggregate make decisions, when institutional arrangements permit, through their elected representatives. But for metro- politan areas in the US, there are no elected bodies with authori ty to make decisions on land use, or patterns of location of economic activities, no r indeed anything else.

There are usually agencies with authori ty to make significant metro- politan-scale decisions - park boards, transit authorities, port authorities, sewer and water authorities - state highway departments come in this category, along with state park, air and water pollution, natural resources, conservation, and other such state agencies. The relationship of these agencies to official metropolitan ("comprehensive?") planning agencies is tenuous. The state-of-the-art of narrow functional planning may be quite advanced; but the relationship to other interconnected functions is more likely to be fragmented than partitioned. This can be blamed (if there is blame to be attributed) more upon the state and federal legislative acts that established jurisdictions and responsibilities than upon the special- purpose agencies and their personnel.

Most metropolitan areas have some kind of general-purpose metro- politan planning agency. The staff, largely funded by federal grants, work at or with transportation planning. Many of them work on regional problems of nature conservation, water supply, sewerage, and solid waste disposal. Proposals for regional land-use patterns are occasional, tentative and timid. There is little attention to regional approaches to the acute economic and social problems that constitute the "urban crisis. ''3

So though most official metropoli tan planning is comprehensive

3 An exception is Dayton, Ohio, where an apparently viable scheme has been proposed for dispersal of low and moderate income housing throughout the region.

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geographically, it is far from comprehensive functionally. This is very understandable. Attention has been to those functional elements that have some hope of being influenced. With our fragmented patterns of decision- making, it is natural that the planning, even that being done by a single agency, is also fragmented.

The structure of metropolitan planning commissions varies widely, from appointed "leading citizens" to ex-officio elected chief executives of consti tuent cities and counties. Regardless of composition, the recom- mendations - the plans - are almost entirely hortatory. They have no legal force, and of course there is no tie to the non-existent metropolitan general government.

This condition of absolute weakness is modest ly ameliorated by the recently established A-95 procedure, under which a wide range of projects partly or fully funded by federal money require review by a metropolitan planning agency. This should produce two very desirable effects: first, the intended one of spotlighting interrelationship among different functional elements - for instance, between choice of a hospital location and routing of a transit line; and second, the broadening of the fields of attention of metropolitan planning agencies, to include a wider range of functional elements - for example, the provision of health care services.

So metropolitan planning, like central-city planning, is changing in terms of content and subject-matter, and thus in terms of the techniques and methods used. It may change even more, if some of the proposals for eligibility for federal revenue-sharing are put into effect. But the pluralism will remain. For example, the concern of a general-purpose metropoli tan planning agency with health care services will not supplant the specialized planning of whatever operating agency or agency-group is responsible for the provision of these services. The same is true for every other function, including transportation.

There is, then, a hopeful trend away from fragmentation, and toward a more knowledgeable par t i t ioning of the whole chaos of planning activities within and for metropolitan areas. The trend is toward a struc- ture which recognizes and facilitates interrelationships and interactions, both horizontally across functional boundaries and vertically across geo- graphical-scale distinctions. Perhaps we can even discern a trend toward a network of planning activities which, in the totali ty of scales and ranges, can indeed deserve to be called "comprehensive." Not that there can be one plan covering everything; rather that each of many plans comprehends - recognizes and responds to - these points of interaction with other plans that are critical. But we have a very long way to go, and this will not ever be the function of a single agency at any level.

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