Nimbyism

Definition

Nimbyism is the planning profession's name for residential resistance to development — "an approach that resists any development with the slogan 'not in my backyard'" (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015, p. 572). The 2015 article documents the concept as a contested label rather than a settled fact. In the professionals' mouth it is the "main stumbling block to housing growth": "Until you incentivize the local residents, there'll always be … nimbies… Many people, many residents are not equipped to see the [positive] impact that a development [may have], all they can see… [is] more traffic, infrastructure impact… I don't think they are equipped, you know, to look at [wider issues]" (p. 572, planning professional). The developers' version is nakedly self-interested projection: "God forbid anyone who wants to build on a field near me, it might affect my view, or I may have to wait longer at a traffic light. That is the Nimby factor."

But the article's decisive move is the residents' reversal. Community actors — themselves living in new houses — reject the label's implication of hypocrisy and convert it into a claim of standing: "We did not feel we could oppose housing as such because we lived in new houses… we were told… we were being nimbies because we were trying to retain the park for ourselves but this was not true, we felt it was a good compromise." And then, the turnaround: "It's my back yard. You can't be anything but a nimby. If it's not your back yard, it won't affect you" (p. 572). Nimbyism is thus claimed as a strength: being a nimby means being the person for whom the place is not abstract — the local knowledge the quango-level planning system lacks ("Is it fair that a quango should dump 2,000 houses and ruin a village environment? Everybody knows everybody in villages").

The concept is constitutive of the growth politics of the (sub)urban region: opposition is "localized, varying from place to place depending on economic, political and social circumstances" — fierce in prosperous quasi-rural South Northamptonshire, absent in growth-ambitious Daventry and Corby (pp. 572–573) — and the Sustainable Communities Plan was designed in part "to undermine the arguments of the 'nimbies'" (p. 573).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the first ingest of the suburbanism batch.

Key Thinkers

• cochrane-allan, colenutt-bob, field-martin — the concept's documentarians: nimbyism as contested label, professional frame, and claimed strength
• Peter Hall et al. (not yet paged — see log) — the structural predecessor: containment protecting "the property values, amenities and lifestyles of those who were already privileged" (1973)

Related Concepts

• suburbanism — the growth politics nimbyism polices: who may build what at the (sub)urban edge
• home-ownership-democracy — the property-interest substrate of nimby resistance: "having bought into an area, they have a commitment to maintaining their own position"
• housing — the delivery problem the label polices: housing-led growth without infrastructure
• post-suburbia — the condition whose growth nimbyism resists and accelerates
• ground-rules-and-social-maps — Ardener's analytic for who sets the rules of a territory: the nimby contest as a fight over the ground rules of the (sub)urban edge

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the definition (p. 572); the planning professional's and developers' statements; the community organization's rejection and turnaround ("It's my back yard"); the place-specific distribution of opposition (South Northamptonshire vs Daventry/Corby); the Sustainable Communities Plan's design "to undermine the arguments of the 'nimbies'" (p. 573)
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the edge-defense register: "planning and zoning board members often give in to pressure from citizen groups or individuals who attempt to block any new housing growth in the interest of protecting their own property values" (p. 37); the psychology of the edge — "nobody wants to lose the open space that is next to them. Never mind that it belongs to someone else, private property rights, etc.—they just want to see the land remain undeveloped" (p. 76); and the growth-mandate capture of planning boards ("Many planning board members are appointed in a politically charged atmosphere with either a growth or no-growth mandate—hardly an atmosphere that encourages implementing well-designed communities," p. 37). Where Cochrane et al. give nimbysm's national-policy register, Wentling shows its board-level operation as the housing industry's principal cost driver (see suburban-governance, housing, elective-belonging).

Open Questions

• Is the nimby the villain of growth (the planner's reading), the subject of local democracy (the community actor's reading), or the symptom of a housing system that makes every household a price-taker (home-ownership-democracy)? The 2015 article holds all three without deciding.
• The article notes "it is also often the new suburbanites who are most active in engaging with the development process… although they may also recognize the contradiction between their own move into the area and their mobilization to protect it." Is nimbyism therefore the suburbs' own founding contradiction — the last-in mobilizing against the next-in — built into home-ownership democracy itself?
• The planner's complaint that residents "are not trained to visualize, how improved the environmental quality of their neighbourhood would be" is a representation problem. Could the design disciplines re-visualize growth in a way that dissolves nimbyism — or does the label name a material conflict that no visualization can dissolve?