Gone Awry

At once mundane and visionary, city planning shapes cities in ways that few people realize as they walk or drive around town-indeed, what they think of as their choice to walk or drive was in many ways already made for them in city plans.

Books on planning often just focus on an inner city or provide a rarified view of the process of planning. "Gone Awry" gives a uniquely unvarnished look at how city planning is actually done by telling of the experience of one region, San Diego, California. It's a broad synthesis of the forces that influence the writing of general plans, from the very human foibles of the people involved to the legacies of British colonization to the rise of the environmental movement and the backlash that sparked among landowners.

What happened in San Diego had little to do with the neat rational process of planning as described in textbooks. Simultaneously, the City of San Diego and the County, which controlled the mostly rural lands outside of the local cities, decided to update their general plans in the late 1990s. Together, the plans could have put San Diego on a new path of revitalized urban areas and protected backcountry. Instead, the plans erupted into a series of controversies as draft proposals antagonized homeowners, environmentalists and landowners, often for contradictory reasons.

"Gone Awry," much of which was written in all but real time and then revised with the advantage of hindsight, describes the colorful sausage-making of city planning at its most honest.