Tag Archives: planning

groundwater

This paper in Water Resources Research is about global groundwater depletion and pollution, and how groundwater can be managed better.

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multi-agent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

They get something important right here, which is that if you are formulating a question in a way that the answer can be “optimized”, you have probably defined the question much too narrowly. Water resources are one part of much larger complex natural and social systems. Modeling and technical analysis is important to pare the universe of all possible decisions down to a smaller set where each possible decision is close to “optimal” or efficient in the technical and economic senses. But then this information needs to be fed into a stakeholder or political process where a much wider range of factors can be considered and decisions made.

I am concerned that the current laser focus on “science, technology, engineering, and math” in education is pushing people too far down the path of expecting clear-cut technocratic answers to questions that have messy political and cultural dimensions in reality. All these subjects are good to study, but they need to pared with solid education in planning processes and tools, and an appreciation of systems in general.

planning theory

This article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (free for the month of February only apparently) is a nice review of planning theory. It amazes me that the profession of planning seems to be so unsure of itself, and yet has so many important theories and tools to offer to other disciplines. There is a lot of planning going on outside the small field of academically trained urban and regional planning. I like to think of planning as similar to mathematics – it’s a profession for a few, but its theories and tools are used every day by professionals across many fields. Many of us can do moderately complex math by ourselves, and we know we can call on the mathematicians and statisticians for help with the really complex stuff. Similarly, a lot of professionals like engineers and economists are entrusted with the keys to the planning machine. But often, we do it badly because we are not well trained in the theory and tools of planning.

Almost all professionals – planners, engineers, and economists at a minimum – would benefit from better education in general systems theory – what the building blocks of systems are, how they interact with their boundaries, and how their behavior over time is driven by their structure and interaction with boundary conditions, and how they can be manipulated to achieve desired outcomes. Among the professions, engineers and economists probably have the best understanding of systems today, but we tend to define the system boundaries, and the range of desired outcomes that can be achieved, much too narrowly. That is one place planners can come in – facilitating the interaction between technocratic problem solving being done by engineers and economists with the larger socio-economic and environmental context.

What I call “technocratic problem solving” here is essentially what the planners call “rational-comprehensive” planning. In my view, it works very well for the elements of systems that we understand well (managing water resources, food production, and employment, for example). Where it has come under criticism (for example, the failed “urban renewal” programs in the U.S.), I believe the problem is not in the approach, but rather applying the approach to systems we do not understand well has given us a false sense of precision and a false confidence, which has led to failure. A hybrid approach that works very well, in my experience with water resource and environmental planning, is to apply the rational-comprehensive approach to the parts of the system we understand well, and then feed the results into a stakeholder or political process that can deal with the social aspects of the system we understand much less well. Planners can play the critical role in making this process reach a functional outcome. This is how I like to think of the planning profession – as the critical glue that can hold together a coalition of engineers, economists, bureaucrats, businesspeople, interest groups, and members of the public into a coherent whole that can set a direction for our society, then continue to guide it with incremental course adjustments as we go forward.