Domain of planning theory

1
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
• 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?

2
Baseline - modernism

• form
• purpose
• design
• hierarchy
• mastery/the word/logos
• totalization/synthesis
• centring
• meta/grand narratives
• determinacy
• transcendence
• metaphysics

3
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)

4

• 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).

5
Survey-Analysis-Plan

• 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)

6
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).

7
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

8
Physical planning

• Later criticised for
• Hubris
• Poor quality
• Social blindness
• Physical determinism
• Lack of empirical grounding
• Naivete

9
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
• 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

10
Rational systems

• Parts-whole-connections-interdependence
• 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
• Kuhns 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

11
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)

12
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).

13
Backlash

• The best plan is not always the best plan
• Failure of modernism - gt urban protests - gt
  challenge to utilitarian prescriptions (Benthams
  felicific calculus) and lack of distributive
  justice
• Ideology behind science
• Realisation/Admission of the politics inherent in
  planning

14
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).

15
Planning, choice and advocacy

• Reaction to rational and systems planning
• Choice theory of planning (Paul Davidoff and
  Thomas Reiner)
• Plannings 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

16
Planning, choice and advocacy

• Davidoffs 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 Arnsteins ladder of citizen participation

17
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

18
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).

19
Radical alternatives

• 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).

20
Equity planning

• 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

21
Communicative action - or what happened to
implementation?

• Plannings limited success - the implementation
  deficit
• Misconstrual
• Planning comes before action
• Planning is not action
• (A weakness of the policy cycle more generally)
• Friedmanns theories of communicative action
  (praxis?)
• The problem of action
• The problem of the quality of action
• Rational action?

22
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

23
Communicative action and then...

• Habermas - theory of communicative action
• Effective communication
• 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 ...

24
New right - No plan

• 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

25
(Post)modern refrains?

• Move from grand narratives to problem centred
  planning
• 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?