Values and Planning

Huw Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351876162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

This book brings together a group of distinguished international authors to analyze and comment upon the various roles of evaluation and valued ideas, in planning and education of planners. Topics covered include the nature of aesthetic judgement and of practical judgement, the implications for planning of various theories of environmental ethics, and the significance of key concepts such as heritage, justice, professional ethics and the public interest in orienting planning practice. Contributors relate their ideas about planning to a wide range of philosophical and social theories and debates, including feminist writings, discussions of post modernism, critical theory and the work of Anglo-American analytical philosophers. These essays will prove stimulating not only to planning theorists and practitioners, but to anyone interested in the way evaluations and key concepts contained in them can and should influence public policy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Huw Thomas

Evaluation permeates the practice and rhetoric of planning, yet professional and academic discussions of values and value judgements in planning remain underdeveloped. Although there are some excellent discussions of particular aspects of evaluation it could hardly be claimed that discussions of values, and their role in planning, have traditionally been a significant item on professional or scholarly agendas. The explosion of interest during the 1970s in substantive questions in moral philosophy has caused some ripples among planning theorists (e.g. Faludi 1989; Harper & Stein 1992), yet it is astonishing that Nicholas Low’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 6), for example, is one of so very few which have explicitly considered the relevance of the vast literature on competing theories of justice to planning. However, times are changing, and the significance of evaluation to planning is receiving increasing attention. One important aim of this book is to review significant theoretical discussions outside planning which can assist with developing a discussion of the role of values and evaluation within it.

The historical indifference to value theory is the result of the ways in which both the profession of planning and the academic study of it have developed. The exclusionary strategy of professionalisation of an occupation involves the creation of barriers to entry and the colonisation of a particular sphere of activity. The winning of acceptance that the profession has some kind of specialised technical expertise is a fundamental component of controlling entry to it. The planning profession worldwide has sought to do just this. Inevitably, in so doing, it has shifted the focus of professional attention – in discussions and literature – towards topics which lend themselves to being presented as ‘purely technical’ matters.

In the UK, in particular, this tendency has been reinforced by the bureaucratisation of the profession through employment in local (and to a lesser extent, central) government. The tradition that technical officers should serve the government of the day ‘impartially’, whatever its party, has strengthened the incentive to try to divorce ‘planning’ from ‘politics’, though as Eric Reade (1987) has pointed out, this has not prevented planners from smuggling in evaluation under the cover of ‘technical’ discussions.

Charles Hoch’s argument in Chapter 10 of this book suggests that, in academic life, too, there have been material interests which have been served by denying recognition to the significance of values to planning. The quest for academic credibility – and with it academic survival – has pushed planners in academe into viewing themselves as social scientists, and accepting a considerable amount of ideological baggage as a result, including, at certain times, a concern for ‘value-free’ analysis. Hoch writes of the US experience, but it has clear resonances in UK planning education over the last thirty years.¹ Until the 1960s British planning education was heavily influenced by the ideologies of professional practice, not least because there was a well-established tradition of part-time teaching by (often distinguished) practitioners. Only in the late 1960s did career academics begin to work in British planning education in any numbers, a consequence of an expansion of education which also saw an increase in undergraduate education. Many of the courses were established in the new polytechnics, which had to seek external validation of them. It was the search for a respectable underpinning for new courses which seems to have been especially influential in pushing much of British planning education towards social science and general theories of planning imported from public administration. The effect was the same as in the USA, however – a concern for analysis, technique and procedure, but little room for discussion of value judgements.

Of course, the ideological impulse to avow a divorce of the technical from the evaluative did not mean that the practice of planning was somehow purged of values. On the contrary, in the early 1970s Jon Gower Davies (1972) produced an incisive, and justly celebrated, critique of the submerged value systems of planning.² A central feature of the ideology he unearthed was the value ascribed to ‘progress’. This was rarely rigorously defined, but implicitly endorsed the continued exploitation of scientifically-based technologies and accepted a crude (but potent) distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ways of life, with the latter seen as desirable, and exemplified by a range of dichotomies – notably: Western capitalist societies, as opposed to ‘tribal’, ‘backward’, ‘developing’ countries; and, within Western societies, progressive metropolitan social formations and ways of life as opposed to a variety of socially, economically and geographically peripheral ways of life (Hall 1992).

However, the acceptance of progress fell far short of an acceptance of the avant-garde. Jonathan Raban’s (1974, p. 160) analysis of contemporary urban life concluded that: ‘The idea that the city is in essence a rational structure, and that evidence of irrationality is a sign of decadent deviation from its intrinsic cityness… accounts for the curious sense of unreality that pervades so much of the literature of town planning.’ Such critiques reminded observers that far from being value-free, the intellectual underpinnings of analyses and prescriptions in planning adopted (generally unwittingly) the values of the post-Enlightenment modernist outlook with its focus on human control of nature and society (McLennan 1992), such control being executed through projects rationally conceived and executed. The attitude towards nature and society which has dominated the theory and practice of modern town planning is one which locates the planner, as analyst/intervener, outside the phenomena she or he seeks to understand and influence. From this vantage point the planner first understands the object of attention (society, nature), and then controls, orders, shapes – in general, changes it – as appropriate.

This approach contains epistemological principles which have distinctive implications for discussions of values. It involves a model of how knowledge is obtained which stresses the importance of very specific modes of acquiring and validating evidence, of a separation between knower and known, and of the irrelevance of all but a few of the personal characteristics of the knower – the relevant few including, for example, certain intellectual capacities.³ From this picture of understanding as, in essence, impersonal in its operation, and of the knower as inhabiting a position outside the phenomena being understood, certain characteristics of knowledge and its acquisition follow. Importantly, there can be no differences which are irreconcilable in principle, because the relevant point of observation can be taken up by anyone (since it is an intellectual position not dependent on any personal characteristics) and methods of acquiring evidence can be replicated; secondly, the model introduces a distinction between gaining knowledge or understanding and undertaking some form of engagement with a phenomenon. Moreover, this model carries with it an emphasis on the alleged essential similarity of all human beings, by virtue of their having the capacity for knowledge acquisition (their rationality), as opposed to an emphasis on their differences (such as culture or gender); this is one major support for the view that moral and political judgements and standards must be universalisable (i.e. must be, in some sense, applicable to all people and all societies). All these characteristics, in their own ways, have served to discourage the discussion of the role of values in planning.

In the UK, for example, the empiricist interpretation of the Enlightenment view of knowledge has held that evaluative judgements cannot constitute knowledge. At most they might have a factual component (see e.g. Hare 1952), but their distinctiveness, as evaluations, is their non-factual, emotive, or subjective element (the term used varies from one writer to another). As Mackie (1977, p.38) puts it, speaking of the possibility of ‘objective values’: ‘if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty… utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else’. He concludes that there is no evidence of any such faculty, nor of ‘objective values’. For professionals or academics influenced by such views, and keen to emphasise their technical expertise and proficiency, there was little to gain in concerning themselves with the bases of value judgements. And even those adhering to a different intellectual tradition, in which it was claimed that value judgements could be rationally grounded, still faced the awkward fact that, apparently, the resolution of disputes over questions of value did not lend themselves to widely supported procedures, in the way that disputes in science did. For those establishing professional or intellectual credentials, therefore, dabbling in value questions held little attraction because, however sophisticated the discussion, there seemed no way of forcing people to acknowledge the technical or intellectual superiority of the planner in that sphere. So planners eschewed any significant discussion of questions about values while generally accepting without question key modernist tenets regarding the essential perfectability (through the application of reason, science and technology) of society, and (in practice) the universal applicability of the mores and technical principles they were imbibing and developing in the West.

This rather comfortable position has been undermined as intellectual critiques, embedded in real changes in social life and popular perceptions (Giddens 1990), have accumulated. As Squires (1993, p.2) has put it, the ‘post-modern condition’ has involved: ‘The rejection of all essentialist and transcendental conceptions of human nature; the rejection of unity, homogeneity, totality, closure and identity; the rejection of the pursuit of the real and the true… the celebration of fragmentation, particularity and difference; the acceptance of the contingent and apparent.’ One result of this intellectual ferment has been to raise politically and morally significant questions about hitherto generally accepted key dimensions of the practice of planning. The relationship of humanity to the physical environment, what constitutes the public interest, and the nature of rationality are three important examples of aspects of planning which are considered in this volume (by Beatley, Taylor and Milroy, in Chapters 2, 5 and 7 respectively), where debates have been sharpened by critiques of modernism.

Another consequence have been attempts to establish principled evaluative positions in aesthetics, ethics and politics – to establish that not ‘anything goes’. Punter, Low and Forester (in Chapters 3, 6 and 9 respectively) are especially concerned about this question. Whatever the merits of individual attempts to address the problem, it is quite clear that questions about the nature of values, and how we conceptualise and find out about them, have become more than footnotes to an epistemology whose central concern is with intellectually underpinning Western science.

These debates are continuing in a wide range of academic disciplines worldwide, and are informed by the insights, arguments and experiences of those who have experienced the oppression legitimised by the products of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, and are clearly beginning to impinge on planning theory. Beauregard (1992, p.9) sums up the position: ‘As planning theorists we seem suspended between outmoded and bankrupt positions [of] functional rationality, critical distance, universalising stances, totalising perspectives of apolitical practices and a variety of challenges emanating from postmodern, poststructuralist, hermeneutic, deconstructionist, post colonial and feminist perspectives.’ However, as the contributions to this book show, the intellectual terrain remains contested, and its implications for discussions about value and planning ambiguous.

Chapter 7 by Milroy and Chapter 9 by Forester exhibit in a particularly direct fashion the ways in which the debates and perspectives to which Beauregard refers are influencing discussions in planning theory. Milroy, drawing on an evolving corpus of feminist critiques of post-Enlightenment epistemology, focuses on the implications for planning, and evaluation within it, of the demise of the disembodied rational subject (which, she argues, is an image which coincides with the conventions of masculinity).⁴ She concludes with a range of prescriptions for professionals and academics which include constructing a ‘feminine genealogy associated with design’, and refusing ‘complicity in exploiting the motherhood function of women in all designs for structures and processes’. She also concludes that planners must find ‘a new place from which to speak’, one which does not assume an intellectual or practical supremacy, in so doing echoing a theme in the critique of the forms and intellectual underpinning of modernity which theorists such as Giddens (1990) have highlighted – the exposure of the experts’ feet of clay.

Forester, influenced by the same general intellectual thrust, argues, in Chapter 9, for a ‘discursive ethics’ which recognises, in civic and political association and activity, the actual material perspectives, values and judgements of a diverse populace. What is striking about Forester’s essay is the very deliberate weight attached to the public character of the planning process, of its being – in reality – a process of state involvement in the development and use of land with a variety of consequences for different publics.

It is this public character which has made the public interest such a potent notion in planning, yet, interestingly, Taylor’s argument for a defensible and usable conception of the public interest, in Chapter 5, portrays it as, in some way, a common denominator among individual interests, with the latter abstracted, to some extent, from their particular circumstances. In that sense, the public interest, as Taylor portrays it, is something which might well be calculable without recourse to the discursive techniques advocated by Forester. And Low, in discussing justice and planning, makes no critique of the use of ‘disembodied individuals’ – of the kind frowned upon by Milroy and Forester – by theorists such as Rawls.

It should be clear, therefore, that this book is a product of a period of intellectual and professional ferment in planning, and presents no unified intellectual programme or prescription for action. The brief for contributors was that their discussions of aspects of the interpenetration of planning and evaluation should connect with relevant debates and schools of thought outside planning itself. Each chapter, therefore, presents a distinctive perspective in a continuing debate, as well as allowing interested readers a guide to further explanation of the issues, often with the benefit of a summary of key texts or ideas.

As the preceding discussion has hinted, the richness of the individual chapters has meant that they relate in a number of ways, allowing a correspondingly large number of ways of grouping them. A simple,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Environmental ethics and the field of planning: Alternative theories and middle-range principles
• 3 Aesthetics in planning
• 4 Values in the past: Conserving heritage
• 5 Environmental issues and the public interest
• 6 Planning and justice
• 7 Values, subjectivity, sex
• 8 The moral mandate of the ‘profession’ of planning
• 9 Political judgement and learning about value in transportation planning: Bridging Habermas and Aristotle
• 10 Values and planning education
• Index