Transcript Domain of planning theory

Domain of planning theory
• Deals with ideas and arguments related to the conduct of
planning
• Aims to provide some overall or general understanding of
the nature of planning
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What sort of activity is planning?
What should it aim to do?
What are its effects on social life?
What are its effects on urban morphology and function?
What are the components of good quality urban environments?
Under what conditions are these qualities most likely to be
realised?
– What part can planning play in creating better/liveable cities?
Baseline - modernism
form
purpose
design
hierarchy
mastery/the word/logos
totalization/synthesis
centring
meta/grand narratives
determinacy
transcendence
metaphysics
Utopian comprehensiveness
• planning as a physical and
technical act, an extension of
architecture and civil
engineering
• master plans (e.g. UK Town
and Country Planning Act
1947; Tasmanian Town and
Country Planning Act, 1945
• key concern with aesthetics
(set of principles of good
taste and appreciation of
beauty)
• “the art and science of ordering the use of land and the
character and siting of buildings and communicative routes
… Planning … deals primarily with land, and is not
economic social or political planning, though it may
greatly assist in the realisation of the aims of these other
kinds of planning” (Keeble 1952, 1).
Survey-Analysis-Plan
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Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)
Garden City advocate in Scotland
Cities in Evolution, 1915
“called for the completion of a
complex city survey of local and
regional conditions (including
physical, social, cultural and
historical) that should precede any
planning efforts by local government
boards” (Le Gates and Stout 1996,
360)
Survey-Analysis-Plan
• “In short, passable Town Planning
Schemes may be obtained without this
preliminary Survey and Exhibition which
we desire to see in each town and city; but
the best possible cannot be expected. From
the confused growth of the recent industrial
past, we tend to be as yet easily contented
with any improvements; this, however, will
not long satisfy us, and still less our
successors. This Act seeks to open a new
and better era, and to render possible cities
which may again be beautiful: it proceeds
from Housing to Town (Extension)
Planning, and it thus raises inevitably
before each municipality the question of
town planning at its best - in fact of city
development and city design” (Geddes
1915, in Le Gates and Stout 1996, 363).
Physical planning
• Reflected certain values
underpinned by
– utopian
comprehensiveness
– Anti/pro urban
aestheticism in tension
– highly ordered view of
urban structure
– assumed consensus over
the aims of planning as
technical exercise
Physical planning
• Later criticised for
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Hubris
Poor quality
Social blindness
Physical
determinism
– Lack of empirical
grounding
– Naivete
Rational systems
• Late 1960s - new systems approach
• Planning - systems analysis and control
• Environment - interconnected system of parts
– Capable of being organized
– Capable of being optimized
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Indebted to cybernetics (science of systems of control
and communications in animals and machines)
McLoughlin 1969, Urban and Regional Planning - a
systems approach
Chadwick 1971, A Systems View of Planning
Faludi 1973, Planning Theory
Bruton 1974, Spirit and Purpose of Planning
• Parts-whole-connectionsinterdependence
• Location theory
• Dynamism and change not
master plans and blueprints
• Indebted to
– First principles based on pure
reason
• Clean sweep
redevelopment, especially
housing, industry, roads
– Kuhn’s ideas about paradigm
shifts
– Changes in land use and
transport activities
– Globalization and the rise in
power of the MNCs/TNCs
– Demography
– Ecology
– Quantitative revolution
Rational systems
Rational systems
• Systematic planning
was substantive
planning
(environmental change)
• Rational planning was
procedural planning
(processes of going
about planning)
• Both indebted to
scientific method (after
Karl Popper)
Define goals/problems
Find alternatives
Evaluate alternatives
Implement plan/policy
Monitor effects
Rational systems
• Means not ends - thus instrumental not “a model of
substantive moral reasoning” (Taylor 1998, 71)
• Corrupted - based as much on persuasion as procedure
• Alternative view/critique - Lindblom - disjointed
incrementalism only possible approach”
• “…in most situations, planning has to be piecemeal,
incremental, opportunistic and pragmatic, and …
planners who did not or could not operate in these
ways were generally ineffective” (Taylor 1998, 71).
Backlash
• The best plan is not
always the best plan
• Failure of modernism > urban protests - >
challenge to utilitarian
prescriptions (Bentham’s
felicific calculus) and
lack of distributive
justice
• Ideology behind science
• Realisation/Admission
of the politics inherent
in planning
Backlash
• “The question is not whether planning will reflect
politics but whose politics it will reflect. What
values and whose values will planners seek to
implement? … In the broadest sense [plans]
represent political philosophies, ways of
implementing differing conceptions of the good
life. No longer can the planner take refuge in the
neutrality of the objectivity of the personally
uninvolved scientist” (N. Long 1959, 168).
Planning, choice and
advocacy
• Reaction to rational and systems planning
• Choice theory of planning (Paul Davidoff and Thomas
Reiner)
– Planning’s ends are goals for the future
– These goals are determined via the identification of alternative
futures
– These ideal futures are narrowed down to plausible and possible
futures
– This narrowing is inherently political
– Planners should be involved only in the technical elements of this
work
• Davidoff’s recant Advocacy model of
planning (democracy as
pluralism)
– Civil society depends on an
informed public
– Informed public derives from
public consultation
– Public consultation
galvanises social movements
• Levels of advocacy
– Community forums/public
meetings/focus groups …
– Planners as translators
• Levels of participation
– Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of
citizen participation
Planning, choice and
advocacy
Citizen control
Delegated power
Partnership
Degrees
of citizen
power
Placation
Consultation
Degrees of
tokenism
Informing
Therapy
manipulation
Nonparticipation
Rapprochement or
resentment
• Political claims accommodated
procedurally via consultation
• “if the planning powers involved in
plan preparation and plan
implementation … are essentially
powers to prevent … then the
actual development which does
take place depends on the …
‘developers’ (Pickvance 1977, 70)
• Still criticized (eg Hall,
Friedmann) for
– Tokenism
– Paternalism
– Incomplete analysis
Capital
The state
The planner
The people
Radical alternatives
• Marxist/leftist views of the political economy and
planning
• Historical materialism
– Modes of production (private ownership of means of production
and exchange)
– Social relations of production
– Social rules and laws (informal institutional rules)
– Systems of power and politics (formal institutional rules)
• Power as hegemonic (Gramsci, Foucault)
• Radical planning theorists viewed “capitalism as an
(imperfectly) integrated economic and social system, in
which the state and planning were part and parcel” (Taylor
1998, 105).
• “Planning is necessary to the ruling class
in order to facilitate [capital]
accumulation and maintain social control
in the face of class conflict. The modes
by which urban planners assist
accumulation include the development of
physical infrastructure, land aggregation
and development, containment of
negative environmental externalities, and
the maintenance of land values … Urban
planners specialize in managing the
contradictions of capitalism manifested
in urban form and spatial development”
(Fainstein and Fainstein 1979, 148-9).
Radical
alternatives
• “those who consciously
seek to redistribute power,
resources, or participation
away from local elites and
toward poor and working
class city residents”
(Krumholz in Sandercock
1998, 93)
• With John Forester,
Making Equity Planning
Work (1990)
• State and capital
reconstituted as capable of
capture by those interested
in distributive justice negotiated settlements
Equity planning
Communicative action - or what happened
to implementation?
• Planning’s limited success - the
implementation deficit
• Misconstrual
– Planning comes before action
– Planning is not action
– (A weakness of the policy cycle
more generally)
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Friedmann’s theories of
communicative action (praxis?)
– The problem of action
– The problem of the quality of action
– Rational action?
plan
action
Communicative action - or what happened
to implementation?
• Public policy
implementation
– Ability to identify actors
needed
– Capacity to establish
contacts and networks
– Capacity to negotiate given
multiple [and often tacit]
agenda
– Policy resides within action
• Communicative action as
multiple flows rather than
linear stages of
consultation
plan
action
Communicative action and then...
• Habermas - theory of communicative action
– Effective communication
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Comprehensible/intelligible
Truth/veracity
Sincere
Legitimate
• Normative ideal for participatory processes in planning
• Note basic agreement among all the foregoing about
social democracy … and then ...
New right - No plan
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Decentralization
Privatization
Market
Minimal government
No society only individuals
No planning - the common law,
private covenants and notional
land-use zoning (e.g. UK
Enterprise Zones)
• Regime and regulation theories
• Micro- and macro- economic
reform
• Efficiencies, competitive
neutrality
(Post)modern refrains?
• Move from grand narratives to problem centred planning
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Inner city decline - urban regeneration
Economic boom - social inequalities
Ecological crisis - sustainable development
Urban ugliness - urban design
State control - public participation
• Two major shifts
– Design - science
– Planners as technicians - planners as (social) scientists
– Were these paradigmatic shifts, however?