Planning in a Global Era

Andy Thornley, Yvonne Rydin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization was the buzzword of the last decade. Advances in communication technology, computing and air travel have all contributed to the establishment of what has been referred to as a 'network society' that encompasses the globe. Such arguments clearly have a significance on planning - an activity which has been concerned with controlling and shaping the use of space. This volume brings together contributions from across the world in order to address some of the questions that arise from such global changes. The opening section addresses the globalization debate directly, raising some theoretical issues and exploring the planning implications across a range of world cities. This is followed by an exploration of the way the theoretical debate about planning may need to advance to encompass contemporary forces. A number of more specific accounts addressing the need for adaptation are offered. The final section focuses on two aspects - housing and sustainability - which persist as 'wicked problems' and are likely to remain at the top of the agenda in the third millennium.

1Planning in a Global Era

ANDY THORNLEY AND YVONNE RYDIN

Globalisation as a Process

Globalisation has probably been the most discussed topic in the social sciences over the last decade. It has also been popular with journalists and has featured prominently in newspapers and popular press. The demonstrations in Seattle around the World Trade Organisation meeting, and at subsequent similar events, have given globalisation a high profile. These opposition movements have also illustrated that globalisation is an increasingly contested issue. This collection, drawing contributions from across the world, can itself be seen as an expression of such globalisation. The interchange between planning academics and practitioners is becoming more international and expanding networks of research exchange are being established.

However, defining new analytical concepts precisely is often a tricky process, and globalisation is no exception. A typical definition would be the “widening, deepening and speeding up of world wide connectedness in all aspects of social life” (Held et al 1999: 2). This is, of course, pitched at a very generalised level and it is when one tries to debate this process in more detail that differences of opinion arise. We can explore some of these debates under five headings, each relating to a different dimension of globalisation: movement and technology; the economy; culture; the environment; and politics.

One of the most obvious manifestations of globalisation – and one, which often affects us personally – is the increased ease in movement around the world. People – as tourists, workers, family members, refugees – move around the globe with increased frequency and increased speed. The growth in air travel, and the related fall in cost of such travel, is a major factor in this ease of movement, along with other land-based infrastructure projects such as the Channel Tunnel and high-speed rail links. Migration between countries is now also an established fact of social life, and one that has profound consequences for our social lives and the conduct of national politics (Sassen, 1999). Many governments have considerable difficulty coping with the nationalist and racist tendencies that migration can unleash, and indeed may in some cases embody these tendencies. And it is not only people that are moving around the world with greater ease. Globalisation points to the increased trade in goods across nations. Greater freedom of trade is one of the hegemonic features of contemporary international and national economic policy, as embodied in the GATT rounds, bilateral agreements such as NAFTA and the EU project of the Single European Market.

International trade has, of course, a long history. Indeed if one concentrates on trading patterns it is possible to argue, with Hirst and Thompson (1996), that nothing new is occurring. They claim that international trade was already well established at the turn of the century. But there does appears to have been a quantitative and qualitative change in the late 20th and early 21st century, which comes under this banner heading of globalisation. One of the chief concerns of the environmental movement is the hidden environmental cost of this long distance movement of goods and resources. According to some analysts, this means that any product purchased and consumed in Britain, say, carries an “ecological rucksack” comprising the environmental externalities associated with (among other things) its journey to the point of consumption.

But movement does not have to be physical in the sense of people or goods traversing space. While the flow of raw and processed goods and people around the globe has a long history, a new dimension has been added by the contemporary role of technology, particularly information technology. Technology and movement have always been closely linked and increases in the ease of movement are associated with technological innovation. But current technological advances are distinct in that they have enabled and speeded up interactions across the globe without the need for physical movement. Through the use of telecommunications and computers, this has resulted in an increase in the flow of information and an increasing reliance on these flows. Castells (1996) has referred to this as the Rise of the Network Society in which the significance of place has been superseded by the “space of flows”. Taken together with increased labour mobility and migration, this increase in virtual and actual contact also speeds up the flow of ideas and extends their spatial impact. The arguments about “time-space compression” (Harvey, 1989), perhaps suggesting the end of geography, clearly have a significance for planning – an activity which in the past has been concerned with controlling and shaping the use of space.

While the increasingly rapid, frequent and computerised movement of people, goods, information and ideas may be the hallmark of globalisation, many commentators have looked beyond these to the economic and cultural processes involved, and to the cultural and economic impacts being generated. It is generally agreed that these technological advances have had a particular impact on the financial sector of the economy. They have allowed increased concentration of financial activity in a few “command centres” (Sassen, 1991) and the increasing dominance of the so-called “world cities” of New York, London and Tokyo. These centres are seen to be at the apex of a new world hierarchy of cities (for a summary of this analysis see Short and Kim, 1999). The impact of this dimension of globalisation, for example on the demands for suitable financial office districts, airport expansion, hotels, or provision of international standard housing and restaurants, is one dimension of pressure on the contemporary urban planning system. However the impact of globalisation can been seen to some degree in most cities and this raises considerable debate, and scope for analytical research, over the degree to which the process has penetrated all cities and the extent to which variation can be identified due to local circumstances. This topic forms the discussion in the first three contributions to this volume. A framework for analysing the interaction of global, nation state and city levels is suggested by Newman and Thornley in the first contribution. The following chapter by Saito explores the degree to which the “World City hypothesis” of Friedmann (1986) and Sassen (1991) can be applied to an Asian city such as Tokyo. Jimenez et al. then extend this analysis to a range of cities that are more on the periphery of the global action.

However globalisation does not only impact on cities. The new interconnectedness means that decisions over where to locate manufacturing plants are taken by international companies exploring locations on a worldwide basis. The activities of rural areas too are no longer oriented to the local market as agricultural products are sent over long distances to major supermarket companies and often airlifted to other parts of the world. Widening the discussion in this way raises the issue that economic globalisation has to be analytically disaggregated. The different economic dimensions of trade, manufacturing, agriculture and finance may exhibit different tendencies. Many commentators therefore refer to globalisation, not as a single process but one of a multi layered package of processes in which the extent and speed of each process may vary and whose trajectory is uncertain (e.g. Giddens, 1990). One of the important aspects of this multi-layered approach is to emphasise that the process of globalisation does not effect everyone equally. Certain parts of the world are less well integrated in to the global network than others. The communities that are marginal to the globalisation process may be in certain regions of the world, such as Africa, but they can also exist within countries that contain the “command centres” themselves. Thus the impact of globalisation is uneven and inequalities continue to exist. Some authors identify globalisation itself as the cause of increasing polarisation. Thus Castells (1998) claims that “the ascent of informational, global capitalism is indeed characterised by simultaneous economic development and underdevelopment, social inclusion and social exclusion” (p. 82). This means that many of the economic and social processes that planning has long sought to resolve continue to structure the planning agenda, indeed may even do so with greater urgency.

Globalisation is not only about economic processes; it is also a cultural process. Much has been written on the McDonaldisation of the world. The argument is made that through the greater penetration of mass media, especially TV people throughout the world are subjected to the same messages and adopt the same cultural icons. This is not to say that this process does not have an economic dimension – in fact advertising by companies is a major tool in the penetration of these messages. However it may be more interesting to consider cultural globalisation in a broader sense as the transfer of values and beliefs, which implies the destruction of local differences. As with economic globalisation it can be argued that there is nothing new about such international cultural flow; earlier examples can be noted in religious movements and imperialism. Nevertheless it is claimed that the increasing movement of people and the spread of telecommunications has given the process a new contemporary edge in which ideas are transferred more quickly.

Appadurai (1996) has particularly focused on the cultural flows associated with contemporary globalisation. He identifies five dimensions through which global culture can flow and terms these “fluid landscapes”. Ethnoscapes refer to the flow of peoples across the world and the way in which they carry cultures with them and change cultures at their destinations. Financescapes and technoscapes also carry cultural messages, in the ways discussed above. Then there are mediascapes, which refer to flows of information and images, and their more politicised counterpart, ideoscapes, which convey politicised images and ideologies. These various flowing “scapes” interact to change cultural practices across the globe and to impart a distinctively cultural dimension to globalisation.

Of course, globalisation itself is an image, an idea, an ideology. The idea that globalisation is inevitable and that it is linked to laissez-faire economic policy has been a powerful force in itself, propagated by Business Schools (e.g. Ohmae, 1995) in the US and global institutions such as the IMF. However, there are also countervailing interpretations of globalisation, which emphasise its critique. These ideological uses of the concept of globalisation are themselves rapidly transmitted around the world and become part of the power politics of actors on the international scale. That globalisation allows the rapid spread of alternative ideas as has been demonstrated in the rapid growth of opposition to the activities of the World Trade Organisation or genetically modified food practices. Another example has been the rapid globalisation of the political approach called the “Third Way” from its base in Clinton’s Democratic Party and Blair’s New Labour to a world movement illustrated by Gidden’s collection The Global Third Way Debate (2001). This shifting cultural ground provides the backdrop for discussion of planning policy, practice and theory.

But no discussion of global impacts and processes would be complete without acknowledging the environmental agenda. For many, environmental problems are synonymous with issues, which can only be defined at the global scale, such as ozone depletion and global warming. Even regional and local environmental concerns – such as flooding, desertification, air quality – are increasingly seen in relation to the interaction of society and the environment at the global scale. And some issues – such as biodiversity and nature conservation – move effortlessly from the local and site-specific to the global and back down again. The environmental movement itself has a similar character, engaging with site-specific disputes, even to the extent of direct action, and also with international arenas for campaigning and lobbying. Many individual environmental NGOs adopt a double strategy of talking to, or lobbying, major international policy actors, while at the same time staying grounded in grassroots issues. “Think global, act local” is after all the adage of the environmental movement. It is possible to talk of the environmental movement as a global movement, comprising multiple, loose networks and connected by information and communication technology and occasional meetings (McCormick, 1995). One reason for this globalisation of the environmental movement is that it is reacting to the scale at which political action is taking place. The Europeanisation of environmental groups in response to the growing environmental remit of the European Commission is one example (Lowe and Ward, 1998); the same process is occurring with the UNCED process, the follow up to the report of the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987).

The way in which the environmental agenda has both contributed to and benefited from the existence of transnational political institutions highlights the fifth dimension of globalisation – the political. This aspect is crucial to planning as its legitimacy is based upon legislation formulated within the political framework of the nation state, and centrally involved with the interrelationship of different governmental institutions within the nation state. The globalisation debate contains conflicting views over the degree of political influence that can be exerted over the process. These views range from those who believe that there is an inevitable logic that cannot be influenced to those that see globalisation as a myth (see Held et al., 1999, for a detailed discussion of the different views). The former believes in the demise of the nation state while the latter see no reason why political approaches of the past are not still relevant.

However a third view probably has been gaining increasing support (e.g. Giddens, 1990; Scholte, 2000). This view considers that the various processes of globalisation have brought about a restructuring of governance. In this restructuring process we can see a shifting of roles and responsibilities between different levels of government. At the global scale new political organisations are in the making while associations of various sorts are being established at the regional level, such as EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, and these are increasingly taking on new joint responsibilities. A decentralisation of some roles of the nation state to regions and cities can also be seen. Thus we have a more complex and interacting set of governmental arrangements in which the nation state has retained some roles, perhaps developing new ones, while shedding some of its former activities both upwards and downwards. This provides a new institutional context within which planning has to operate, and stimulates an exploration of the relevance of its activities to each institutional level. One of the results of this process has been the increasing importance of the regional level within nation states. Readjustment of institutional arrangement can be seen in many countries reflecting this shift. UK examples of this are provided within the companion volume Planning in the UK – an agenda for the new Millennium (Rydin and Thornley, 2002); in this volume, Oranje discusses these issues in the context of South Africa.

The Implications for Planning Practice

This complex, multi-faceted process of globalisation has profound implications for planning. We explore these in relation to the urban, regional and environmental problems that planning faces, the changes in planning theory and the nature of planning practice and professionalisation.

In one sense, the basic problems that planning has been trying to deal with persist in a global era: economic inequality, social exclusion, poor quality local environments. But the above discussion has suggested that globalisation may also exacerbate some of these basic problems. Globalisation may offer new opportunities for economic physical development; for example, the increasing ease of physical movement around the world has a physical impact in increasing tourism, international business and conference events, and the importance of world-wide mega-spectacles such as the Olympics (Judd and Fainstein 1999). But it also generates pressures on the urban fabric, spreads environmental problems and leaves vulnerable communities in spaces bypassed by globalisation processes, and even makes them more vulnerable. Accepting this perspective it is therefore not surprising that planning is still faced with enduring problems of providing basic shelter and overcoming inequalities. These still continue to dominate the agenda in the South and, even in countries like Britain, social exclusion and affordable housing are major problems.

The contributions in the last section of the book, drawn from a wide range of national contexts, demonstrate the enduring and global nature of some of these “wicked problems” that continue to present such a challenge for planning. The contributions show how housing policy is closely related to the local political and administrative context. However it is also interesting to explore whether globalisation has led to an increase in the sharing of experiences and the transference of solutions – a common search for “best practice”. The first contribution in this section by Aboutorabi and Abdelhalim notes that there seems to be a global consensus that governments should shift from a provision-based housing approach to one that involves communities and strengthens local capacity building, but that this has not happened in Egypt. The second contribution by Tang also focuses on an institutional theme and explores, through case studies of particular initiatives, the shift from privatisation to bureaucratisation in urban renewal in Hong Kong, drawing out the contradictions involved. This is followed by another discussion on urban policy by McCarthy which compares approaches in the US and Scotland, exploring their origins and evaluating their impacts. The reasons for the similarities and differences are analysed.

As indicated above, the environmental agenda, and its contemporary manifestation as “sustainable development”, is now clearly accepted as an issue of global importance. The contributions here however demonstrate the d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Planning in a Global Era
• 2 Globalisation, World Cities, and Urban Planning: Developing a Conceptual Framework
• 3 A Global City in a Developmental State: Urban Planning in Tokyo
• 4 The Global City Hypothesis for the Periphery: A Comparative Case Study of Mexico City, Istanbul and Guangzhou
• 5 Should Provinces/Regions have their own Planning Acts? An Exploration of the Debate using the Post-1994 South African Experience
• 6 Bringing Power to Planning Research: One Researcher’s Story
• 7 Learning from Planning Practice?
• 8 Deconstructing the Built Environment: Design Experimentation Within Public Spaces
• 9 Lefebvre’s Modernities: Informality, Planning and Space in Cape Town
• 10 Conditions for the Integration of Ecological Knowledge in Land-Use Planning – the Local Government Ecologist Perspective
• 11 Doubts and Beliefs in Norwegian Environmental Bureaucracy
• 12 The Ambiguities of Change: the Case of the Planning Profession in the Province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
• 13 Government Approach to Housing the Urban Poor in Egypt: the Need for an Alternative
• 14 From Privatisation to Bureaucratisation: Implementing Urban Renewal in Hong Kong
• 15 Empowerment and Social Exclusion: Urban Policy in Scotland and the U.S.A.
• 16 The Perils of Growth and Decline: Sustainable Development in Edinburgh and Wuppertal (Germany)
• 17 The Development of Sustainable Transport Policies in Warsaw: 1990-2000
• 18 Planning for Sustainability and the Impact of Professional Cultures