I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and then when it gets down to the gritty job of building new stuff, it's all "we don't like it, because it's not what currently exists!" No surprise that the really big development tends to happen on old industrial lands where there's not enough people around to really complain.

But of course, you can see how the incentives run. If somebody likes their neighbourhood the way it is, and doesn't want change, then if they don't complain about new developments to councillors and planners, they gain nothing. But if they do complain, then there's a chance they can get developments stopped. (Thanks, "community-based planning".) So the cost of complaining is quite small, but the rewards can be quite large.

I was born in Detroit and I follow the city pretty closely. The mayor there recruited a city planner, Maurice Cox, who has been getting all sorts of favorable press.

The broken down state of the city's neighborhoods offers a unique opportunity to redesign them. Things like creating a walking path between two small colleges and creating biking paths from old rail lines. Cox wants to enable each neighborhood to have basic services within a twenty minute walk.

http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/2016/12...

I've had this idle thought of what a game-theoretic solution to the NIMBY dynamic would involve: Some kind of investment vehicle offered to a community as part of a development plan, perhaps? Surely someone has thought of this before. The incentives for residents to cooperate need to be really good, else they'll fall back on a conservative outlook. Especially so as you start looking towards residents towards the old/disabled/sick end of the spectrum, who may be physically burdened by the impact of new construction.

I can say that as it is, the process of development is more like consumer marketing: schedule lots of meetings and interviews that sell people on the idea of accepting development rather than giving them a stake in its success. It encourages confrontational deadlock, a buildup of pressure followed by earthquakes of change, as the developers and government gradually start colluding to strongarm residents when they refuse to budge.

Well, generally the game-theoretic proposals are for some kind of direct compensation for impacts - developers pay the residents directly for new impositions like shadows or traffic. But this really throws the whole notion of "master planning" and "expert opinion" out the window (as it's now a transactional system) which is why people who think of themselves as expert city planners do not like it.

> My personal approach is to build up better and better datasets (simulated, some taken from open datasets like the Building Performance Database) to slowly but surely force some evidence into these discussions.

You'll fail using that approach. The NIMBYs don't make their decisions based on data. They make their opinions based on emotion. If you want to change their minds you need to appeal to their emotions. Run commercials in the NIMBY neighborhood that show poor, disadvantaged low income families who would get to live there if the tower went up. Make them feel ashamed for opposing towers and they'll stop opposing them.

edit: Yes, this is a bad example, but the point remains. You must hit them in the feels.

And mostly, new construction is not for low-income people, just because it's new. Low-income people tend to live in older buildings that have depreciated.

Sure, the idea at least of Section 37 is effectively "local compensation". Too often it's "councillor's goodies for constituents money", and it's not much help when the Section 37 park gets built a kilometer away from the actual development. And often the locals don't want change anyways, so Section 37 stuff is not enticing. Makes sense in theory though.

I'm not sure you can change the NIMBYs minds, but you don't have to. You just have to get the planning commission to stop listening to the NIMBYs. You might be able to do that with enough evidence.

I guess most NIMBYs would oppose low-income families in their vicinity.

> You'll fail using that approach. The NIMBYs don't make their decisions based on data. They make their opinions based on emotion.

Note that this is equally true of both sides. "YIMBYs" are just as guilty of this.

I work in Sydney Australia where we are over this hurdle. Key i think is making it a city wide conversation (where is the best place for new housing and how fast is the city growing. Its not just about the existing local residents but the wider community too), showing good examples where towers are part of a nice environment (not just 1960s public housing estates. Vancouver is a good city example who has adopted towers well) and demonstating the effect of not just 1 development but if all of ita neighbours developed similarly the city would still function.

Of course towers also open up a range of other issues like open space provision, sunlight, separation, street wall heights and setbacks, contributions to improving streets, parks, schools etc. To really be successful it needs an organised planninng approach for each centre

If you are referring to Barangaroo, I beg to differ.

Throwing hotel, casino and residential towers on public land isn't about serving the wider community.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/barangaroo-is-more-insult-than...

Im not referring to barangaroo - thats only one site and has its own very specific range of issues

Im also not saying density is always done well here, just that it is done and fundamentally thats the right thing to do

> We once proposed a 82m tower within a 100m of a subway station in midtown Toronto. The most senior planner at the meeting exploded at us - "Why is there a tower there!?"

I thought the trick to getting an 82m tower built in Toronto was to propose a 182m tower...

I'm not a transit user, but I thought the YUS (North/South) subway lines were (soon to be?) past their saturation point during rush hours.

> My two cents: this incident illustrates the biggest obstacle to progressive urban policies: upper-middle class NIMBYs politics inform city planners, which ultimately results in policies that favor NIMBYs.

Ultimately its council that approves/disapproves development, so I think while you're right here that NIMBYs are dominant at the community consultation level, and can impact design choices here, ultimately this is a political problem caused by the fact that established land owners show up to vote and other people don't.

It's hard to speak to your 82m tower without more details, but there is a lot that goes into these design decisions. You're right that NIMBYism and politics is involved, but there are plenty of other of reasons why a tower of that scale may not be appropriate for that location. I think it's too simplistic to say that we need more residences, so let's max out the density on every opportunity we see. I'm a bit critical of this in fact, because an outcome from this approach is that rich, low density single family neighbourhoods are completely untouched by any development at all, while poorer, slightly higher density areas are constantly razed and gentrified. Inclusive zoning can mitigate some of the harms here, but ultimately this is clearly an inequitable design approach.

My one other thought is that with platforms like twitter urban planners are no longer faceless bureaucrats, so we can listen to them and try to understand what they're up to and what they're trying to accomplish in our cities. Toronto's chief planner is on twitter at https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat

Don't include the tower in the initial reveal. Figure out a way to make it someone else's idea, that someone being the person who can sell it.