Michael Hibbard

Hibbard works on a blind spot. Planning is taught, funded and debated with the city in mind, while rural territory and small towns are left out: no technical staff, no plan, and at the mercy of decisions taken in the capital about roads, reservoirs, forests or wind farms. The result is that the communities with the least capacity to influence outcomes are the ones that receive the most change.

His test for a regional plan is direct: efficiency and sustainability are not enough, you have to ask which groups gain and which lose, and whether the losers had a real voice in the process. Applied to rural development plans in the American Northwest, that test exposes much of what was presented as technical consensus.

Professor emeritus of planning and public policy at the University of Oregon, Hibbard has spent his career on regional planning in the Pacific Northwest and on the gap between Portland and the rest of the state. Toward One Oregon (2011) analyses that urban-rural divide, which is economic but also political and cultural.

His other line of work is planning on the lands of American Indigenous nations, where tribal sovereignty, federal trust ownership and state regulation overlap in ways almost no planning textbook explains. There he has argued that planning is not a neutral procedure applied to a territory but a way of distributing power over it.

The divide he studied in Oregon has since become one of the political fault lines of the United States and much of Europe: metropolitan areas that grow and vote one way, and rural areas and small towns that lose services and vote another. Hibbard's work suggests that the gap is not closed by one-off transfers but by giving the communities that now receive decisions taken far away a planning capacity of their own.