Place Identity, Participation and Planning

Cliff Hague,Paul Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134504664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

The central concern of this book is place identity, and its representation and manipulation through planning. Place identity is of growing international concern, both in planning practice and in academic work. The issue is important to practitioners because of the impact of globalisation on notions of place. This book includes comparisons between Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Scotland, focusing strongly on the question of how different spatial planning systems and practices are currently conceiving and affecting issues of place identity.

Part One Objectives, Theory and Concepts

Chapter 1 Planning and Place Identity

Cliff Hague

DOI: 10.4324/9780203646755-1

Introduction and Outline

Cities and regions are facing great challenges as a consequence of globalisation. In many ways cities are the driving force of the global economy. The challenge for the future is to determine how this force can pull with it an entire region without compromising our identity. In other words we must remain locally anchored in a changing global world (Hans Schmidt, Minister for the Environment, Denmark, in Ministry of the Environment, Spatial Planning Department, 2002: 2).

Place identity is attracting increasing interest both from practising professional planners and politicians as well as in social science research. In this book we aim to ask some basic questions. Why has concern for identity moved centre-stage in planning? Who put it there and what/whose identity is being expressed? What spatial planning policies, institutions and practices are prescribed to deliver that identity, and why? What role does public participation play? In raising such queries we hope to bridge the theory/practice divide, and to demonstrate what can be achieved by engagement and critical interaction between the academic community, the community of planning practitioners and the elected politicians whom they serve. We are encouraged to venture into this blurred interface because that was how the NoordXXI Interreg project worked and, as described in the foreword and the preface, that project underpins the empirical part of our book.

The book thus seeks to connect theory and practice. The first three chapters are largely concerned with theory and concepts. This opening chapter will explore the concept of place identity by drawing on a literature from cultural studies and geography. The chapter then addresses the question of what are the implications of changing perceptions of place identity for planners. Chapter 2 looks at the economic and geographical forces that are changing place identities, and develops an analytical framework to differentiate between space, place and territory to assist in the application of theory to practice. Chapter 3 then looks at theories which explain the political context of these changes, and develops propositions about the participation of individuals, actors in civil society and lobbying groups in forms of collaborative planning.

The second part of the book applies and develops these ideas in relation to planning practice. It is European practice that is analysed, both at a trans-national scale through the spatial planning concepts and policy instruments being developed at the level of the EU, and also the national systems and local practices in four countries: Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Thus Chapters 4 to 9 broadly work through a hierarchy of spatial scales. Chapter 4 is concerned with the place identities being created at a trans-national scale, but also introduces the planning systems in each of the four countries. Chapter 5 looks at regions, Chapter 6 is about identity in strategic planning, and Chapter 7 analyses participation and Local Agenda 21 as channels for developing local narratives of place identity. Chapter 8 looks at the planning of urban expansion around and beyond the edge of the city in the context of narratives of compact and sustainable cities. Chapter 9 looks at urban design as a means of creating and sustaining place identity. The final chapter then returns to the main themes running through the book. It attempts to contribute to a necessary critical debate about spatial planning practice and about the involvement of planners in the fashioning of new place identities. In doing this it advances some propositions about theory and the relation between academic research and practice-based contract research.

What Is Place Identity?

As Urry (1995: 1) observed,

The understanding of place is a complex theoretical and empirical task requiring a range of novel techniques and methods of investigation … most social theories deal unsatisfactorily with the nature of place because they have not known what to do about time, space and nature.

‘Place’ is more than a location. Relph (1992: 37) said that ‘place’ meant ‘those fragments of human environments where meanings, activities and a specific landscape are all implicated and enfolded by each other.’ Similarly, Rose (1995: 88) observed that ‘places are infused with meaning and feeling’. In this way we distinguish place from the more abstract and functional notion of ‘space’ and from ‘territory’, which is a politicized demarcation and control of space. These distinctions are developed further in the next chapter. For now we will focus on how ideas of place are formed and communicated.

As the quotations from Relph and from Rose in the previous paragraph suggest, ‘place’ implies some mix of memory, sensual experience (in particular visual, but possibly also aural and/or tactile) and interpretation. We might say that a place is a geographical space that is defined by meanings, sentiments and stories rather than by a set of co-ordinates. Thus 55 degrees 57 minutes north and 3 degrees 13 minutes west is not a place, but when we call that same space ‘Edinburgh’ it becomes a place. Though latitude and longitude identify a location, they do not give identity to a place. It is interpretation and narrative that give identity and it is identity that transforms space into place.

It is not surprising therefore that words like ‘character’ and ‘identity’ are used by planners, especially in respect of conservation and the impact of new developments on existing townscapes or countryside. However, the underlying meanings are rarely decoded, and the presumption is typically that place is defined above all through visual qualities. The concept of place identity that most frequently underpins planning and design is the genius loci view of place (Norberg-Schulz, 1980). This notion implies that there are essential natural characteristics that identify a place, and that, in effect, these are latent and will structure, but also be released by, a sensitive design solution. Of course there are objective physical realities in a place — e.g. slope, orientation, vistas, etc. — and we would also agree that there are personal and highly individual reactions to any place, and that these are triggered not only by physical features but also by less tangible meanings and memories. However, we would also contend that the capacity to see, unravel and impart values and meanings to such aspects is not a purely intuitive, spontaneous and subjective skill, but rather a socially learned and mediated process. In other words the experience — or the design — of place is relational rather than primarily subjective. This means that our capacity to identify a place as a place is shaped by what others tell us about the place, and filtered by our own socialization, as shaped by class, age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, professional education, etc. As Rose (1995: 89) commented, ‘although senses of place may be very personal, they are not entirely the result of one individual's feelings and meanings’. It is this process of receiving, selectively reconstructing, and then re-communicating a narrative that constitutes identity and transforms a space into a place.

The word ‘identity’ is based on the Latin pronoun idem, which means ‘the same’. Thus identity is what is central, real and typical to something or someone (Amundsen, 2001: 5). This usage of the word comes from psychology and psychiatry; for example, an individual unsure of him-or herself might be said to have an ‘identity crisis’. However, even this notion of identity, as core and integrated values and characteristics through which a person defines him-or herself, implies the interaction between an individual and others. The process of developing even an individual identity, while seeming to be quintessentialy subjective, is one that is fundamentally social; that is to say it develops through interaction between the individual and others in the society, both directly and indirectly.

The idea that the meanings and identity imputed to places are relational rather than only subjective means that from an infinity of possible identities for any place, we can discern some shared, even dominant ones. Indeed, as Rose noted, feelings about place are embedded in sets of power relations. This does not mean that those with most power necessarily determine the dominant feelings about a place — such a reading would be a crude version of Marx's famous dictum that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. In societies of difference and division places have a particular symbolic significance, and their fabric, meanings and identities are contested. For example, in countries of Central and Eastern Europe street names or even the names of cities were changed by the Communists when they came to power, and then further changes were made after 1989. In Moravia, Zlin, the planned company ‘town in gardens’ of the Bata shoe company became Gottwaldov, in honour of the Czech Communist leader to whom a statue was erected in the main square. However, Moravians still called it Zlin and the original name was restored (and the statue removed) after the Velvet Revolution. This is just one example of how place identity is contested and linked to power.

Both Rose (1995) and Amundsen (2001) pointed out that a group identifying with a place, and so establishing what they have in common, is simultaneously establishing a relation of difference with other places and other social groups. In place identity there is a relation based on similarity, and a relation based on difference. These are social relations — places, as places, should not be seen in psychological terms. Put crudely, identity is about ‘us’ and ‘them’, or more neutrally about ‘us’ and ‘the others’. ‘We’ share common experiences, cultures, tastes and histories that set us apart from the rest. Identity then is more than a psychological status (important as that is). Also it is more than a passive output from social structures. It is something that is shaped between individuals, groups and others in the wider society, as a basis to claim authenticity, originality and singularity, even ownership. It is thus a dynamic, potentially powerful force that influences policy and practice. Again the example of Zlin/Gottwaldov illustrates the point. For the Communists, the name Zlin was part of the bourgeois identity of the town owned by the Bata company. It was the ‘other’ which would be transformed into Gottwaldov, with the name change, Gottwald's statue, and the practices of ‘actually existing socialism’ all contributing to the new identity and the associated narratives of the Party. After 1989 a similar process restored Zlin in negation of the ‘other’ that had been imposed for 40 years through ‘Gottwaldov’. Thus when we look at place identity, and especially when we explore place identity as an input to policy and action, we need to be aware of ‘the other’, or counterpoint, to that identity. As societies have become more diverse and fragmented (e.g. in relation to gender, ethnicity or lifestyle) the claims to authenticity and singularity at the core of place identity need to be assessed critically.

Amundsen (2001) recognized a tension, even a contradiction, in the concept of identity. Identity implies a form of essentialistic thinking. That is to say that identity is depicted as something that cannot be changed; it is an expression of what you are. In such essentialism there always lurks the possibility for conflict with those others whose identity is radically different from ours. Groth (2002) suggests that there are two strands to discourses on identity. One of these he calls ‘ethnos’; it is about inherited cultures and emotions that bind individuals into a community. This is the essentialistic version of identity. The other strand is ‘demos’, whereby through rational arguments citizens and society enter into agreement about common rights and responsibilities. Identity involves consciousness, knowing and acting on that knowledge, and as it is about the relation between individuals, groups and others, the nature of identity must be social and contractual. This is to say identity is contingent on ideas and interpretations, actions and reactions; it is something that is formed through discourses and can change and be cross-cutting, so that those who share one identity may not share others. Groth (2002: 17) says that in the demos strand ‘identity is likely to be polycentric rather than mono-centric, formed as it is by citizens organizing their own life in their own interests, however within a common legal framework of society'. In other words, the interpretative notion of identity is that ‘essentials’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘distinctiveness’ only become such through interpretation, communication and action within a context, and not in isolation.

The point then is that the basis of claims to authenticity in place identity need critical scrutiny. Authenticity claimed by and through a single place identity based only on ethnos can be exclusionary and repressive. Through demos we would expect there to be multiple identities that may be shared or contested, and such identities would primarily be generated by the everyday life of the people themselves within a framework of tolerance and the rule of law. Again Gottwaldov can serve as an example, though in a slightly paradoxical manner. The paradox is that forging of state socialism in Czechoslovakia had to invent its own authenticity — based on class and class struggle, and to negate more traditional claims to authenticity rooted in the past. This meant rolling out the inherited cultures of the Communist Party as the new ethnos for Zlin, an all enveloping culture which everyone would be expected to follow. In contrast the restoration of Zlin after 1989 was inextricably linked to the reclaim of demos.

Our argument can be summarized as follows. Places are places (and not just spaces) because they have identity. Place identities are formed through milieux of feelings, meanings, experiences, memories and actions that, while ultimately personal, are substantially filtered through social structures and fostered through socialization. Thus place identities are relational — i.e. they are formed in relation to other people, other places and other identities for that place. Therefore, place identities are encapsulated within power relations and are likely to be contested. It follows that it is important to ask ‘Whose place identity is it?’ and ‘How has it been constructed and agreed?’ Claims to authenticity and essentialism are often at the heart of place identities. While such claims often assert legitimacy by reference to history, that is to say that a place is seen as ‘always having been …’, as we argued in respect of Gottwaldov, there can be other grounds. The point is that authenticity is imbued with what may amount to a sense of moral superiority and is seen as non-negotiable and exclusive. Therefore we need to ask whether place identities have been imposed or negotiated, while also being sceptical about the monopolistic claims often associated with notions of authenticity.

Where does planning practice fit into this line of reasoning? We see planning as being about place-making; that is to say that a key purpose of planning is to create, reproduce or mould the identities of places through manipulation of the activities, feelings, meanings and fabric that combine into place identity. Planning is a set of institutions, ideas and practices that sits within a social context and is embedded in power relations. Thus, while place-making is more central to the profession of planners than to most other social groups, the planners do not have a monopoly on the power to determine a place identity. In particular, planners (as agents in planning systems, economic development agencies, etc.) are likely to be used as a conduit through which politicians and economic interests promote their versions of place identity. At the same time planners have to be able to engage with local residents and other members of civil society, for whom places may have very different meanings and identities. In planning practice this process is encapsulated by the term ‘public participation’. Therefore place identity, participation and planning are intimately intertwined, and this book is concerned with understanding their interrelations. We attempt this through developing propositions from an academic literature in this first part...