The Governance of Place

Space and Planning Processes

Ali Madanipour, Angela Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351888677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

Views on spatial planning and its role have changed significantly over the past few years and the issues it deals with have become increasingly more complex. There are more players involved in the development of a particular area or place than ever before and there is also a greater interest in urban design issues. There are also new ways of conceiving of place, space and society relations. It is therefore necessary that all those involved in the production, consumption and valuing of places and territories develop and (re)learn new ways of analyzing and managing space. This volume provides a platform for such a re-examination. It first discusses how spaces and places are understood and conceptualized, and offers a dialogue between different approaches to the understanding of space, emphasizing the need for a dynamic perspective. The book then goes on to examine the changing governance processes through various case studies, which illustrate a range of innovative spatial planning projects from across Europe and the United States. By bringing together an examination of both space and the process through which the space is created and managed, this volume offers a unique multi-dimensional understanding of spatial planning and suggests new ways of negotiating how society should shape and influence the transformation of places.

Chapter One
Introduction

Ali Madanipour, Patsy Healey and Angela Hull

The Argument

There seems to be common agreement among observers about some of the major changes that have occurred in western societies. Global economic and technological change has caused social and political upheavals at local and national levels, forcing people, organisations and governments to find new responses to these major challenges. As telecommunications and transport technologies enable resources and people to move around the world at ever faster speeds, the institutions designed for smaller scales and slower modes of operation find it increasingly hard to cope. As the growth and decline of economies can depend on the decisions of a global network of investors, national governments and local authorities seem to lose some of their control over their territories. The competition among urban regions in the global marketplace to attract resources and the rising significance of regions in political terms, especially in the European Union, pose a new challenge to national and local authorities. Another challenge to these traditional sources of authority comes from an ever more sophisticated populace, who are concerned for the sustainability of the environment, are sceptical of the rule of experts and demand better services, more participation in their own affairs and are less responsive to the traditional forms of legitimacy and social control. A further challenge comes from those who find themselves increasingly marginalised in the economic and social transition out of the industrial era, as they witness a proportionate deterioration of their living conditions and are unable or unwilling to participate in political decision making processes and in shared cultural experiences. These challenges clearly show that the relationship between the state and society is moving into new, somewhat unknown directions, where voting behaviour is changing and the traditional channels of representative democracy are bypassed. Spatial planning systems, as one of the significant components of the state-society relations, are facing their share of these challenges and have been under pressure for some time to provide a response.

The redefinition of state-society relation has often meant a pressure for the reduction of the role of state in the economy, which had reached its peak in the post-war welfare state with its corporatist arrangements. This pressure for reduction was either out of necessity, where costs were seen to be no longer affordable, or out of choice, to facilitate innovation and renewal. Cuts in public spending and privatisation of public organisations and services are among the familiar measures of the last three decades taken to change the extent of state intervention. The private sector agencies were invited to fill the gap that is left by the withdrawal of the state from some of its traditional spheres of activity. The private sector contribution may be first and foremost in economic matters, but engagement in decision-making can also be politically significant. What was once a powerful government with a high degree of control over the political economy of a specific territory was to be replaced with a fragmented collection of agencies, engaged in territorial governance. The challenge for spatial planning has been to adjust to this change from government to governance, where political and economic power lies with not one powerful government but a multiplicity of agencies and interests.

This dramatic change of political and economic contexts has brought forward the need for spatial planning systems and practices to go through some substantial changes, so as to assert its position or to define a new role for itself. Spatial planning, therefore, essentially faces a main challenge: how to fit in a new political and economic configuration where many new actors are involved, proving that it is not only engaged in regulating environmental change but also positively contributing to economic development and environmental care (Vigar et al., 2000). It has to define its role as well as its area of engagement to be distinctive from those of other actors. The pressure is such that if it does not, it could either dissolve or become marginalised. This role has increasingly been seen as centred on innovative ways of engaging with governance processes and its area of engagement has been seen to be place and territory. It is on these two topics, the need for new approaches to governance and the need for new approaches to space, that this book concentrates.

Spatial planning systems (land use planning, town and country planning, territorial management, whatever they are called) are all about the way the physical resources of places are used and developed. In this sense, they have a strong emphasis on place, space and territory. Two increasingly interrelated notions are now being widely discussed: the rising significance of territory and the need to transform the planning systems built in the twentieth century so that they meet the conditions of the twenty-first century. Much has been said about the need to reflect new ideas about governance in the design and practices of planning systems, and new experiments abound. In public policy, in Europe and the US, there is an increasingly strong emphasis on territory and place as a focus of governance attention. Although geographers have long argued for the integration of space into social understanding (Soja, 1989; Martin and Sunley, 1996), the economists have started to take into account the importance of territory (Krugman, 1995). But so far, there has been only limited discussion in the planning field on how territory and place should be understood and what the implication of this is for the transformation of spatial planning systems.

Our argument in this book is that the new ways of 'doing governance' need to be linked to new ways of thinking about space, place and territory, if spatial planning systems are really to be transformed into valuable governance activities in the next century. The aims of this book are, therefore, to discuss some of the new ways of understanding space; to explore, in an international context, some of the new ways of engaging in governance processes by spatial planning systems; and take some tentative steps towards bringing these two discursive realms together.

Spatial planning systems, along with the other tools of state intervention in social and economic spheres which were devised in the postwar period, are changing fast. After several shifts of paradigm, there are new pressures to give more emphasis to space and the importance of place-making, this time working through different processes and with a wider community of actors. In the context of this change, this book puts forward a new hypothesis: that this renewed attention to space heralds the start of a new understanding, but one which will only be successful if spatial planning is seen as a socio-spatial process. How we as social beings use and perceive space cannot be divorced from the wider structuring networks of property relations, the forces of production and the government apparatus itself. This leads to two further points: there is a need for a) a multidimensional, complex understanding of space, and b) new ways of negotiating how society should shape and influence the myriad of urban actors who mobilise to transform places. These two points are taken up in the two main parts of the book. The first part introduces various perspectives which together enrich our understanding of space, including a case study from Australia, while the second part brings together case studies from the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, and the United States as innovatory benchmarks in our search for new processes of spatial planning in a changing governance context. Together the two parts argue for a new balance between the process and substance of spatial planning.

Spatiality and Spatial Planning

After fifty years as a plainning theorist, in his search for a 'substantive domain' that would secure the holders of planning degrees a legitimate professional place amongst other more established professionals, John Friedman wrote (1998, p.251):

What, I asked, was our unique competence as planners, the body of knowledge which no one else could legitimately claim as their own? If we were unable to identify such a domain, then, indeed, planning, as a field of professional study, was perhaps not worth saving. My provisional answer was that planners have or should have a grounding in knowledge about the socio-spatial processes that, in interaction with each other, produce the urban habitat.

In this assertion, Friedmann was drawing upon Henri Lefebvre (1991), who had argued that the production of space is deeply embedded and centrally located in the overall political, economic and cultural conditions of a society. Space, therefore, becomes a central concept and introducing spatial thinking into planning theory and practice an urgent need. The main message from Ed Soja, in addressing the Association of the Schools of Plaill1ing in Bergen, Norway, in the summer of 1999, was that all planners should think spatial and act spatial. Involvement in all areas, including community-based planning, sustainability and social justice need to be spatialised, to arrive at spatial justice and regional democracy.

A similar emphasis on the need for integrating space into planning was made by Manuel Castells, who, also drawing on Lefebvre, argued that the ' ... defence of the locale, of their meaning, of their uses, is the banner of use value versus exchange value'. That is why the role of planning in a new world would be ' ... making new spaces, meaningful places with connecting capability' (Cuthbert, 1996, p.8). But has planning been here before? Is there a danger in seeing the integration of spatiality into planning as a return to the past, rather than a new development, a step backwards rather than forwards?

Spatial planning grew out of architecture as its branch dealing with urban design. In Britain, in the early days after the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, planning had a clear focus on designed urban spaces, requiring the skills of technical experts (architects and engineers) in built form. This was a process by which the experts' analytical and design skills were seen as being able to improve the living environment and, as a by-product, even the inhabitants themselves. The social legitimacy of this approach hinged on the experts' ability as 'doctors of space' to relieve perceived problems and symptoms, but in a vacuum far removed from the economic and political tensions of the time.

However, large scale, state intervention in the city proved to be a complex process and needed administrative management as well as support from new branches of science and technology. As a result, planning as an independent activity emerged, seeing the city as a site of spatial relationships, rather than merely a collection of artefacts. There was a shift of role for the planning task from design to the 'efficient' resource management of land and infrastructure. The 1970s property boom and concomitant recession questioned the ability of planners to manage growth and spread the benefits. The broadening out of the planning task was accompanied by the rise of community pressure groups intent on affirming the political nature of decisions on space management. The slow down of space production in the 1980s drove attention away from the built environment and its qualities and focused attention instead on the process of decision-making. The planning task was redefined in procedural terms as facilitating the efficient release of sites for development in response to market signals. Community reaction to this led to local struggles to protect places valued for their use value rather than their exchange value.

In the 1990s, more gradual structural economic change toward flexible production has in turn brought about a new cycle of space production and new attention to the marketable qualities of the built environment. The intense competition of cities in the global marketplace, the new patterns of consumption of goods and services (including space), as well as the increasing danger of fragmentation of cities and societies, and the mounting environmental problems all demand a more careful treatment of the built environment. To compensate for the previous neglect of the built environment, public policy attention in Britain has now turned its attention to urban space (Urban Task Force, 1999).

Yet this new-found concern is arising in a governmental context where administrative reorganisations have shaken up local state bureaucracies to take on the new market challenges and form new relationships with the private sector and local communities. British government and European Commission programmes are pushing the detailed working out of spatial strategies down to local level. A diversity of local actors are now interacting in ad hoc networks both to promote the marketable qualities of local places which can be commodified and to protect and enhance the qualities of these same places as 'lived-in' environments for local people. The process by which these two objectives and the claims of different communities of interest can be reconciled has yet to be determined.

There is a danger that the return of interest in space by planners could lead to a simplistic response to the new demands for space being created through the current reorganisation of the economy. The shifts of attention in planning, in response to the various cycles of space production, have created imbalances of focus through their failure to address the tensions between conceptions of space as exchange value and everyday meanings attached to the use of space. Also significant have been the tensions between those who use and manage the existing stock or between the development industry, which has the capacity to bring about radical physical change, and those agencies that seek to regulate the use of land and buildings.

To avoid such a danger, first, it is essential that the concept of space be discussed and developed in its complexity. This is the theme of the first part of this book, which addresses a number of perspectives from which space can be studied, and in particular the different perceptions and heuristic tools available to understand the social and psychological attributes people attach to material space. There is an obvious need now for the built environment professionals to relearn the tradition of analysing space. Second, spatial planning, in moving towards a more successful urban development process, has to ensure the integration of these different spatial concerns in the policy-making process either through the 'technical' analysis of the complex understanding of space or through encouraging 'community' participation in decisions which may affect their neighbourhoods. The second part of the book presents innovatory approaches to addressing this challenge in four different countries to help suggest ways in which planners can utilise different representations, symbolic forms, and embedded assumptions about places in the materiality of future spatial strategies. Such cases help us to comprehend the dynamics of specific places as well as to evaluate the different processes employed in managing the governmental regulatory task. Fragmented responsibilities for administrative spaces and the shifting nature of market relations call for a coherent vision and agenda to steer spatial change in line with a diversity of place strategies.

Concepts of Space

But how are we to understand these spaces and places, if we are to integrate new forms of spatiality into spatial planning, rather than relying on the worn out, simplistic concepts of the past? The notions of space, as we explore in Part One, are complex concepts. Our main argument here is that such complexity requires a dynamic, multidimensional approach, which would capture complexity without the need for excessive reductionism. This was a challenge that Coombes and Wymer faced (Chapter Three) when trying to define localities.

Concepts of space are used in different disciplinary discourses, sometimes used interchangeably, and at times used to mean quite different things. The tradition in the planning field has been to treat space and place as unproblematic, as part of an obvious reality, often as a surface on which things happen, a two-dimensional Euclidean 'mosaic' or 'jigsaw' (Graham and Healey, 1999). Much work in the social sciences challenges this assumption. Increasingly, a distinction is being made between the inherent spatiality and temporality of all relations, and the meanings which are given to particular qualities of specific 'places'. In a diverse society, transected by all kinds of relations, with multiple connections in space and time, places are not 'singular' in the meanings given to them. They are given different meanings in different relational contexts. Place and territory thus relate to both a materiality and an identity, as shown by Hillier (Chapter Four). As Madanipour (Chapter Seven) argues, social reality in the city is a sum total of a congregation of people and material objects that create cities and a rich patchwork of meaning that people assign to this material reality. These representations and meanings, however, are not singular but multiple. They are symbolic representations as well as the product of direct experiences.

As Nigel Thrift (Chapter Two) and Tony Lloyd-Jones et al. (Chapter Five) stress, place/territory as a concept reflects a situatedness and fixity. But in our current era of dynamic globalisation, this fixity is in continual tension with movement and mobility. 'Places' are temporary 'fixes' or nodes in flows of ideas, of goods, of people etc. They also exist in a flow of time. They were like something, they are as something now, they could be something else. So the analysis and practice of spatial planning systems needs to take account of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE: CONCEPTS OF SPACE
• PART II: CHANGING GOVERNANCE PROCESSES
• Index