Forty Years after Lee's Requiem: Are We beyond the Seven Sins?

Abstract

CommentariesForty years after Lee's Requiem: are we beyond the seven sins? In his 1973 seminal paper "Requiem for large-scale urban models", Douglass B Lee formulated his main task " to evaluate … the fundamental flaws in attempts to construct and use large models and to examine the planning context in which the models, like dinosaurs, collapsed rather than evolved" (Lee 1973, page 163). This paper ended an initial period of wide enthusiasm in attempting to realise the potential of computer innovations to revolutionise urban planning (Harris, 1960). It was an era when both the planning and the computer domains were strongly influenced by strong positivist ideas about the nature of scientific progress. Planning was mainly a comprehensive-rational, linear but also cyclical process in which experts examined all possible (or politically defined) problems and relevant solutions, which in turn would lead to optimal decisions (Faludi, 1973). Even then this was extensively questioned in academic research that emphasised the limits of human cognitive capacity: that is, information processing (Simon, 1969).Increased computational possibilities in the 1960s fed the belief that this limitation could be compensated by linking planning practices to improved analytical, quantitative-based computer instruments (supported by funding schemes to develop appropriate solutions). Lee identified two main goals in this development: improving objective ex ante plan evaluation for planning professionals, and learning effects for model experts and decision makers. Lee's (1973, page 163) verdict about these aims was unambiguous:" none of the goals … have been achieved [and] for each objective offered as a reason for building a model, there is either a better way of achieving the objective (more information at less cost) or a better objective (a more socially useful question to ask)." In 1994 the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) issued a special edition reflecting on the twenty years of developments in urban modelling and planning practice since Lee's Requiem. As guest editor, Richard Klosterman (1994, page 3) explained that "Given these changes in society, planning, and technology, it seems appropriate to re-examine the use of computer models in planning." In his contribution, Lee (1994) expressed his doubt about the utility of large-scale urban models (LSUMs) in planning practice, asking rhetorically: "That LSUMs are alive and well may be fine for the modellers, but is it of consequence to anyone else?" The late Britton Harris (1994) was explicitly critical of Lee's Requiem in his contribution, stating that Lee conflates an evaluation of large-scale models with an evaluation of comprehensive planning as such: "Lee made use of the apparent connection between planners' dissatisfaction with rigid and excessive comprehensive planning, and with temporarily over-ambitious models, to tar them both with the same brush" (page 33). Put differently, when readdressing Lee's critique, the analysis should not limit itself to the ...

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