The City Planners & the Planners

Explore the Ways in Which the City Planners & the Planners Powerfully Convey the Negative Impact of the City Planning Upon the Environment?
In, both, City Planners and Planners, the concept of the redesigning of personality, past, and environment as a whole, is very much a theme – ‘so history is new again’ – and, indeed, thought of in a negative light. Through this idea, both Kim Cheng and Atwood explore whether nature will, conclusively, be a stronger force than the planners and, essentially, an artificial society – ‘the houses, capsized’ – and, perhaps, suggest that the planners’ attempts to ‘sanitize’ the world are futile, regardless of their mathematical ‘grace’ and utilization of, effectively, brainwashing – ‘they erase the flaws, the blemishes of the past’. This is elaborated, particularly, in the City Planners, in which Atwood proposes that this form of society is temporary, whereas nature is long-lasting and, therefore, nature is more powerful than the planners.
The idea of a lack of personality is particularly stressed in the City Planners – ‘what offends us is the sanities’ – which negatively acts upon the environment. The fact that ‘these residential Sunday streets’ are so devoid of personality and difference unsettles the speaker and makes her feel conscious of her imperfections – ‘the planted sanitary trees […] rebuke to the dent in our car door’. The way she judges, or views, perfection is clearly very contradicting to that of the planners; individuality is very much frowned upon by the city planners. Atwood also hints at the theme of history (which Kim Cheng expands in the Planners) – ‘houses […] will slide obliquely into the clay seas’. As the sea is described as ‘clay’, there is an impression that, once bellow the seas, the house won’t be seen, or heard of again, much like the planners’ eradication of history in the Planners. The planners in Kim Cheng’s poem drill ‘through the fossils of last century’ to eradicate history. History is,

References: to maths and science, too, suggest that the planners are well-educated as, both maths and dentistry, are very academic professions. However, the final stanza contradicts all the above points concerning the planners’ powers. The fact that Kim Cheng’s heart does ‘bleed poetry’ shows that, regardless of initial power, the planners cannot prevent Kim Cheng staining their blueprint. He undermines all that the planners have achieved in creating perfection – such as creating ‘buildings [which] are in alignment with the roads’ . Therefore, in conclusion, not only do both poems convey negative impacts of the city planning upon the environment through stating how it destroys personality and history, but also by declaring that the planners are weak and, essentially, just temporarily preventing the overriding force of nature and, meanwhile, repressing nature from its natural behaviour. In neither poem does the final stanza conclude that the city benefits from the planning and, therefore, the planning has a negative effect on the environment.