The Dilemmas of Growth - “minimizing the maximum regret”

World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change published last week by the World Bank looks at development in the context of a changing climate. It argues that future strategies for urban growth should take account of the idea of “mini­mizing the maximum regret”.

If we unscramble this somewhat opaque expression, we find an important indication as to how economic growth and urban development are now viewed. Maximising growth was once widely accepted as a primary aim for national economies and cities. Not only was prosperity welcome in its own terms, but it was accepted that growth helped urban communities exert more control over their circumstances. As the authors note (p8), “adverse climate trends…. do not discriminate by income, but better-off people and communities can more successfully manage the setbacks”.

Yet elsewhere the report goes on to largely reject this logic. For example, after two decades of impressive growth, China has created significant new infrastructure throughout the country. Yet the Bank questions the benefits of such growth by recalling that many migrant workers were left stranded in the unexpect­edly intense snow storms in January 2008. A similar logic is used to interpret Hurricane Katrina; decades of steady prosperity do not always produce good outcomes.

Today growth is often linked with an increase in cities vulnerability to climate change, and the focus is less on growth than on the “well-being” of current and future generations. For the Bank the development model needs to be reworked as one of creating “resilience”. Planning becomes an exercise in contin­gency rather than optimisation, less concerned with maximising development and more with minimising future risks. The “tolerable windows” approach advocated by the Bank uses “guard­rails” to set limits to development at levels thought acceptable according to expert judgement.

The term “minimizing the maximum regret” is adopted from post-war statistician Leonard Savage. But how useful is this approach for planning cities? While it sounds very scientific, there are arguably two important problems. Firstly, the frameworks which govern the work of planners (or urban statisticians?) necessarily reflect our fatalistic times. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that today “it is not undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism”. The result is a tendency to speculate on worst case scenarios and lower the bar in terms of what is acceptable development. Secondly, urban planning becomes an exercise in deferring to statistics rather than an attempt to develop and then impose our ideas as to how the future should be. Rather than an exercise in statistics, the urban designer Edmund Bacon argued that ‘the city is an act of human will’. Is he right? We will return to this question over the coming weeks and months.