A Metropolitan Dilemma: Regional Planning, Governance and Power in Detroit, 1945-1995

Abstract

Scholars of planning and policy have long argued that metropolitan or regional institutions for planning and governance are needed to address such problems as urban sprawl, central city decline, and inter-jurisdictional segregation and inequality. Yet some form of regional planning and governance is already practiced in every major U.S. metro area under the auspices of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which the federal government has mandated for roughly half a century. Why have these institutions proved inadequate to remedy America’s “metropolitan dilemma” of sprawling, inequitable (sub)urbanization? Are they simply too weak? Have they lacked the political will to challenge this pattern? Or both?

I examine the question through a historical case study, based in archival research, of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), the MPO for the seven-county area that includes metropolitan Detroit. I argue that SEMCOG should be understood in the context of the political history of twentieth-century Detroit and the trajectory of twentieth-century American liberalism. The development of SEMCOG in the wake of the New Deal and World War Two reflected broader liberal efforts to harmonize private choice and public planning, and municipal autonomy with metropolitan interdependence, in an era of federally sponsored, whites-only suburbanization. SEMCOG’s arrested development from the 1970s onward mirrored the broader unraveling of postwar American liberalism as the inherent tensions in the project became increasingly evident.

In the twenty years after World War Two, Detroit pioneered the development of regional institutions for planning and governance: a Regional Planning Commission (RPC) and a Supervisors Inter-County Committee (SICC). These institutions were initially intended not to challenge but to facilitate the prevailing patterns of outward development and the proliferation of independent suburban communities, both of which placed escalating burdens on the central city of Detroit and black Detroiters in particular. The RPC and SICC were merged to form SEMCOG just as the political transformations wrought by suburbanization, segregation and the African American freedom movement shook the foundations of the liberal political order in which regional planning and governance had evolved. As metropolitan politics grew increasingly racialized along city-suburb lines, and the federal government retreated from regional initiatives, SEMCOG survived the 1970s only by vowing to defend local control and eschewing a role in resolving issues of racial segregation and inequality, while accommodating the prevailing pattern of sprawl and disinvestment. When SEMCOG staff questioned this course, they were forced to back down in the face of opposition from the now-dominant suburban growth regime.

For advocates of regional planning and governance, there are sobering lessons to be drawn from the history of SEMCOG. In Detroit, institutions for regional planning and governance have failed to resolve the problems of sprawl and inequality, and in some respects exacerbated them, since these institutions are embedded within a larger political system that has been dominated by suburban development interests and defenders of racial and economic segregation. Although MPOs can help to bring important metropolitan issues before policymakers, and structural reform of MPOs could increase their capacity and willingness to do so, solving the metropolitan dilemma will ultimately require the development of a new multi-racial metropolitan politics that builds grassroots power for “reparative regionalism” across city-suburb boundaries.