Barefoot planning proposes to dynamically organize private development and public goods without a static master plan by employing barefoot planners, a new class of community-level planning practitioners. These ground-level planners would allow communities to self-organize while iteratively adapting space reserved for public goods and incrementally granting land rights to encourage investment across scales and income levels.
Barefoot planners are “primary care”-level planning practitioners that lower the threshold for low-income people to engage with formal urban systems. Barefoot planners provide an interface between the city administration and rapidly growing communities, and they possess the decentralized authority to make spatial decisions about public right-of-way, land tenure, and utility provision within bounds set by a central administration. This enables the community’s needs to be met at a granular level while also ensuring that utilities will be able to be installed as the community grows. To accomplish this, barefoot planners are backstopped by a GIS app on a mobile device and are able to elevate difficult cases to secondary and tertiary planning offices.
Rather than using a master plan, the barefoot planning model uses an adaptive mechanism consisting of a combination of a grid, guidelines, soft law, social enforcement, and property rights incentives. This mechanism is designed to generate an iterative urban form using a system of adjustable rules and incentives that can evolve over time to suit the city’s needs. The set bounds alluded to above may include minimum allowable street widths, maximum distances between streets, and allowable parcel configurations. The fundamental focus is organizing the boundary between private development and public space on-the-fly to balance immediate land use needs with future flexibility. This is achieved by providing incentives for communities to reserve space for public goods, including the right-of-way, by offering subsidized utility connections when the mechanism’s criteria are met. The parameters within the mechanism can be adjusted to achieve the city’s performance objectives, such as an efficient private land market and efficient public goods provision. The rules and incentives can also change as the city scales up and as neighborhoods’ socio-economic dynamics evolve.