Insurgencies: Essays in Planning Theory

John Friedmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136834059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

For nearly fifty years John Friedmann's writings have not just led the academic study of the discipline, but have given shape and direction to the planning profession itself.

Covering transactive planning, radical planning, the concept of the Good City, civil society, rethinking poverty and the diversity of planning cultures, this collection of Friedmann's most important and influential essays tells a coherent and compelling story about how the evolution of thinking about planning over several decades has helped to shape its practice.

With each essay given a new introduction to establish its context and importance, this is an ideal text for the study of planning theory and history.

1
The transactive style of planning

The book from which this chapter is taken was written at the end of one of the most turbulent periods in American history, a decade marked by the Vietnam war, the civil rights struggle, burning cities, political assassinations, and the first intimations of the “limits to growth” that for many people was to become a central issue by the end of the millennium. Its larger argument was that the kind of planning we were teaching and practicing at the time was based on an out-dated worldview that needed to be rethought from the ground up.

The old view of planning was of a relatively static world in which planners were objective analysts who had access to pertinent knowledge about the future and could effectively communicate what they knew to political decision-makers through written documents, such as policy drafts or a plan. The articulation of values implicit in this view was not the planners’ responsibility but politicians’. Planning was understood to be essentially a technical, value-free activity in the public realm.

The new “transactive” model I proposed was based on a different epistemology (see Chapter 2). Its starting point was that the future can neither be known nor designed, that the world is a slippery place (as the pre-Columbian Aztec poet tells us), that risk is inherent in action, and that to be effective, planners must get as close as possible to the action itself. (Later I changed this to acknowledge planners not merely as advisors but as actors in their own right; see Chapters 4 and 6.) Still missing from this early version of a transactive style of planning is a critical understanding of rationality in relation to action and of the ways inevitable value conflicts must be acknowledged and dealt with in planning practice (see Chapter 10).

Planning in this chapter is treated broadly as the linking of knowledge to action, with the proviso that action feeds back into knowledge as recursive social learning. But what sort of knowledge is pertinent to action? In this first formulation, I distinguish between the planner and an unspecified client-actor, arguing that whereas the former is in possession of certain kinds of “processed” knowledge – abstract, formal, and often quantitative – the latter has usually unarticulated knowledge based on personal experience. In problem-solving, I argue, the power of knowledge is significantly raised when processed knowledge is joined to experiential knowledge in the course of the action itself. Further, the most effective way to join or rather meld these two ways of knowing is through a chain of interpersonal transactions or, more succinctly, through dialogue (see Chapter 3).

From this perspective, the central issue in planning is authentic communication between planner and client-actor. This calls for each to reach out to the other, to attend carefully to what is being said as well as the reasons behind it, and then to respond, in a series of ongoing, open-ended conversations about the problem at hand. This is the essential message of transactive planning and, if carried out in good faith, transforms what we used to understand by “planning” into a collaborative effort that bridges the communications gap between planner and client-actor.

In formulating this model I drew upon my extensive experiences as an advisor to governments, both national and foreign, at the executive level. Twenty years later, the transactive model reappeared in a new form as communicative action, influenced by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, but was applied chiefly in local community settings (Forester 1989, 1999; Fischer 2009).

Finally, a note on language. The following text was written at a time when using the male form of the personal pronoun to stand for humanity in general was still the normal way of writing. I hope the reader will bear this in mind and not accuse the author of unintended gender bias. Essays written a decade later already reflect the new gender awareness which was then coming into widespread use. But in the early 70s when the present chapter was written, this was not yet the case.

Bibliography

Fischer, F. (2009) “Discursive planning: social justice as discourse”, in P. Marcuse et al (eds) In Search of the Just City, London; New York: Routledge.

Forester, J. (1989) Planning in the Face of Power, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

——(1999) The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging participatory planning processes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

From Retracking America

Originally published in 1973

Bridging the communication gap

Transactive planning changes knowledge into action through an unbroken sequence of interpersonal relations. As a particular style of planning, it can be applied to both allocation and innovation. This chapter states the principal conditions for transactive planning and explores its major implications.

Transactive planning is a response to the widening gulf in communication between technical planners and their clients. To simplify the discussion, let us assume that planners as well as clients are individual persons rather than institutions, and that clients generate streams of action on which they wish to be advised.

This assumption is not altogether unrealistic. Institutions do not relate to each other as wholes, but through a complex series of exchanges among individuals. Although these individuals behave primarily according to their formal role prescriptions, each role masks a singular personality. Roles are defined by a set of abstract behavior patterns, but the person assuming a particular role may be straightforward or devious, disposed to be tranquil or angry, approachable or remote, eager for power or reluctant to assume responsibility. The planner steeped in the practice of the transactive style will try to reach out to the person who stands behind the formal role.

Planners and clients may experience difficulties communicating valid meanings to each other. The barriers to effective communication between those who have access primarily to processed knowledge and those whose knowledge rests chiefly on personal experience are rising. We have seen that this problem is not unique to America; it is found to some extent in all societies that seek the help of technical experts. Messages may be exchanged, but the relevant meanings are not effectively communicated. As a result, the linkage of knowledge with action is often weak or nonexistent. This is true even where planning forms part of the client system itself; even there, actions tend to proceed largely on the basis of acquired routines and the personal knowledge of the decision makers. Planners talk primarily to other planners, and their counsel falls on unresponsive ears. As we shall see, however, the establishment of a more satisfactory form of communication is not simply a matter of translating the abstract and highly symbolic language of the planner into the simpler and more experience-related vocabulary of the client. The real solution involves a restructuring of the basic relationship between planner and client.

Each has a different method of knowing: the planner works chiefly with processed knowledge abstracted from the world and manipulated according to certain postulates of theory and scientific method; his client works primarily from the personal knowledge he draws directly from experience. Although personal knowledge is much richer in content and in its ability to differentiate among the minutiae of daily life, it is less systematized and orderly than processed knowledge. It is also less capable of being generalized and, therefore, is applicable only to situations where the environment has not been subject to substantial change. The “rule of thumb” by which practical people orient their actions is useful only so long as the context of action remains the same. Processed knowledge, on the other hand, implies a theory about some aspect of the world. Limited in scope, it offers a general explanation for the behavior of a small number of variables operating under a specified set of constraints.

The difficulties of relating these two methods of knowing to each other reside not only in their different foci of attention and degrees of practical relevance (processed knowledge suppresses the operational detail that may be of critical importance to clients), but also in language. The planner’s language is conceptual and mathematical, consciously drained of the lifeblood of human intercourse in its striving for scientific objectivity. It is intended to present the results of his research in ways that will enable others, chiefly other planners, to verify each statement in terms of its logic, consistency with empirical observation, and theoretical coherence. Most planners prefer communicating their ideas in documents complete with charts, tables, graphs, and maps, as well as long appendices containing complex mathematical derivations and statistical analyses. The concepts, models, and theories to which these documents refer are often unfamiliar to the clients to whom they are supposedly addressed.

The language of clients lacks the formal restrictions that hedge in planning documents. It, too, employs a jargon to speed communications, but the jargon will be experience- rather than concept-related. Client language is less precise than the language of planners, and it may encompass congeries of facts and events that, even though they form a meaningful whole in terms of practice, are unrelated at the level of theory. Planners may therefore seize upon a favorite term from their client’s specialized vocabulary and subject it to such rigorous analysis that what originally might have been a meaningful expression to the client is given back to him as a series of different but theoretically related concepts that reflect a processed reality.

Housing administrators, for example, have long been accustomed to derive quantitative program targets from what they call the housing deficit, which is calculated on the basis of new household formations, a physical index of housing quality, and an estimated rate of housing obsolescence. Planners have recently replaced this concept with what they believe to be a theoretically more valid model for establishing the housing needs of a population. They postulate an effective housing demand that arises in the context of particular submarkets organized according to major income levels and locality. Each submarket has unique characteristics with respect to the type of housing offered, the credit available, and the degree to which it is able to satisfy the social – as distinct from the economic – demand of each population group. Aggregate housing demand, therefore, is seen to evolve not only in accord with the differential growth rates of the affected population groups but also in relation to changes in the growth and distribution of personal income and in the structural characteristics of each submarket.

I do not know how housing administrators will react to this conceptually more satisfying model for calculating housing requirements, but I suspect that they will not be overly pleased. They may even accuse the planner of purposefully misconstruing the “real” (i.e. experiential) meaning contained in the traditional and administratively more convenient term of housing deficit.

The language of clients – so difficult to incorporate into the formalized vocabulary of the planner – is tied to specific operational contexts. Its meanings shift with changes in the context, and its manner of expression is frequently as important as the actual words employed. This is probably the reason why planners prefer written to verbal communications, and why the latter tend to be in the form of highly stylized presentations. Tone of voice, emphasis, subtle changes in grammatical structure and word sequence, so important in the face-to-face communications of action-oriented persons, are consistently de-emphasized by planners. Whereas planners’ formal communications could be translated by a computer into a foreign language without substantial loss of meaning, a tape-recorded conversation among clients could not.

Planners relate primarily to other members of their profession and to the university departments responsible for the transmission and advancement of professional knowledge. Clients, on the other hand, relate chiefly to organizations of their own kind. The reference group of each acts as a cultural matrix that helps to confirm and strengthen differences of approach and behavior.

Reference groups are powerful institutions for molding behavior. This is especially true for the planner, whose situation tends to be less secure than that of his clients. His professional association not only keeps him continuously informed through newsletters, specialized journals, and conferences, but also confers on him the dignity and status of formal membership in a profession. The association reassures him when his competence is being challenged by outsiders and provides support when it is needed. In order to receive these benefits, the planner must conform to the norms of professional conduct. There are countless planning documents whose content is not primarily addressed to clients but to other planning professiona...

Table of contents

• THE RTPI Library Series
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The transactive style of planning
• 2 The epistemology of social practice
• 3 Preface to The Good Society
• 4 The mediations of radical planning
• 5 Rethinking poverty: the dis/empowerment model
• 6 The rise of civil society
• 7 Planning theory revisited
• 8 The good city: in defense of utopian thinking
• 9 The many cultures of planning
• 10 The uses of planning theory
• Epilogue: citizen planners in an era of limits
• Name Index
• Subject Index