The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South

Gautam Bhan, Smita Srinivas, Vanessa Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317392842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South offers an edited collection on planning in parts of the world which, more often than not, are unrecognised or unmarked in mainstream planning texts. In doing so, its intention is not to fill a 'gap' that leaves this 'mainstream' unquestioned but to re-theorise planning from a deep understanding of 'place' as well as a commitment to recognise the diverse modes of practice that come within it.

The chapters thus take the form not of generalised, 'universal' analyses and prescriptions, but instead are critical and located reflections in thinking about how to plan, act and intervene in highly complex city, regional and national contexts. Chapter authors in this Companion are not all planners, or are planners of very different kinds, and this diversity ensures a rich variety of insights, primarily based on cases, to emphasise the complexity of the world in which planning is expected to happen.

The book is divided into a framing Introduction followed by five sections: planning and the state; economy and economic actors; new drivers of urban change; landscapes of citizenship; and planning pedagogy. This volume will be of interest to all those wanting to explore the complexities of planning practice and the need for new theories of knowledge from which to draw insight to face the challenges of the 21st century.

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Part I

Planning and/as the state

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1

Spatial rationalities and the possibilities for planning in the New Urban Agenda for Sustainable Development

Clive Barnett and Susan Parnell

Introduction

This chapter traces the emergence of global debates about urban policy and planning in multi-lateral governance forums that put enormous, possibly untenable, pressure on planners to deliver sustainable development. In the ushering-in of a more city-centric and pro-planning era that has taken place over the last few years we focus in particular on the process through which a dedicated ‘Urban SDG’ was adopted by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) process in 2015 and the subsequent development of a ‘New Urban Agenda’ (NUA) for global development policy, adopted by UN-Habitat’s bi-decennial conference, Habitat III, in Quito in Ecuador in October 2016.¹ The chapter argues that these initiatives are just the start of a process of implementing and monitoring priorities for housing provision, infrastructure investment and land development that have significant potential for reconfiguring the role and understanding of local government in general and the more specific role of spatial planning. Global level agendas, we argue, are key to understanding the contemporary rehabilitation of national and local territorial and strategic planning practice both politically and professionally, especially in rapidly urbanising contexts like Africa and Asia.

To appreciate the importance of the global agenda for the profession over the decades to come, we adopt an expansive understanding of ‘planning’ as a set of practices concerned with “the linking of knowledge to action” (Friedmann 2011: 208). In turn, like Forester, we understand ‘planners’ to refer very generally to “all those who need to learn about their environments – public or private, social or natural – in order to change them” (Forester 2006: 124). Understanding planning and planners in this sense, rather than the narrower certified professionalisation such as that associated with organisations like the Royal Town Planning Institute, helps us frame our account of how the emergence of global urban policy initiatives represents a distinctive reconfiguring of planning, that is at the same time more inclusive and also dangerously all embracing. Insofar as a wide variety of public and private actors are increasingly involved in the production, distribution and application of spatial knowledge about urban processes, the conventional professions and disciplines of (urban and regional or town) planning are now located as just one element in a complex field of knowing and learning about urban settlements ‘in order to change them’. This is the first paradox of our time – that at exactly the same time as planning is receiving an expanded mandate, the definition of who is a planner has become less clear, making it difficult to either educate or hold to account the new cohort of spatial advocates and practitioners.

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There is a second paradox. Having achieved a global commitment to a bold urban agenda, the current formulation of the profession may be unable to deliver on this expectation. To understand the unwieldy scope of the urban agenda and its implications for planning, the chapter starts by identifying how a dedicated Urban SDG was successfully included in the 2015 SDGs and briefly explores how this legacy was then unevenly absorbed in the NUA preparatory process. We then consider the complex processes of lobbying, consultation and negotiation through which urban issues, and by implication also the expectations of planners, have been institutionalised in global development agendas. Appreciating the inherently political processes through which global urban policy is constructed is important to understanding the potential and limits for creative engagement by planning professionals, local state actors, social movements and NGOs with the new opportunities opened up by the SDGs and the NUA in particular. Noting the somewhat chaotic conception of the urban in the NUA, we then discuss the lack of a distinctive meaning of ‘the city’ in the global policy discourse. We suggest that as planners are asked to lead local and national initiatives that engage the new global urban policy imperative, most likely through the mechanism of National Urban Policies, the diversity of definitions of ‘the city’ and ‘urban’ should be treated operationally as different spatial rationalities, crystallising distinctive practical understandings of how managing spatial processes can bring about change. In concluding, we identify key tensions that will characterise the unfolding of the post-2015 urban agenda at a number of scales.

Locating ‘the city’ in the SDGs

The city is a scale of action not hitherto acknowledged by the multilateral community. In September 2015, however, the 69th General Assembly of the United Nations formally approved the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015). Urban issues had acquired heightened visibility during the process of negotiating a new development agenda, overseen by the UN, to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) framework. Among the 17 agreed upon SDGs, Goal 11 declared a commitment to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable”. The inclusion of a dedicated Urban SDG was the culmination of an explicit, public campaign to have urban issues recognised as core to future development agendas, although this campaign drew on a longer history of urban thought in global development policy (Cohen 2016; Parnell 2016). The mobilisation of expertise to secure an Urban SDG in global development frameworks was followed soon after by the formulation of the so-called NUA, led by UN-Habitat, the UN’s flagship human settlements agency. At issue in these and other multilateral agreements (especially the 2015 UNFCCC COP21 Paris Agreement on climate and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction) is how the UN system will frame the ways in which nation-states, city and regional governments, UN agencies, international donors and civil society actors problematise and address urban issues for the following 20 years and beyond.

Although there are now multiple UN policy documents in which the city emerges as a critical site of action, from the perspective of planners the most directly relevant of these is the NUA where there is an overt concern with human settlement improvement and territorial development. The negotiations in 2016 leading up to Habitat III were slow to get going, with delays in releasing drafts and finally outright conflict in the final scheduled preparatory meeting held in Surabaya, Indonesia. The most important tensions to emerge did not centre, as was widely predicted, on the inclusion of wording around the ‘right to the city’.² Rather, they revolved around the role of UN-Habitat and the NUA relative to that of the SDGs,³ in and on the removal of the proposed Multi-Stakeholder Panel.⁴ Despite these disputes, in the bulk of the text of the NUA, where the ambitious agenda of what better planning might achieve is set out (alongside stronger local government and sub-national fiscal and legal reform), there were remarkably few changes made. Accepting that the role of planning would need to be enhanced in realising the 2030 vision was less an endorsement of the profession, however, than it was an argument that flowed directly from acknowledging the city as a driver of sustainable development.

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The campaign for an Urban SDG and the development of the NUA prior to the Habitat III process represent an unprecedented recognition of urban issues in global development policy. The inclusion of a stand-alone urban goal “to make cities safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable” is genuinely path breaking. In important respects, the inclusion of Goal 11 in the SDGs framework reflects a significant, and broadly dispersed, conceptual shift towards thinking of global processes as necessarily working horizontally through places, localities and regions, rather than vertically impacting upon them as external forces (see Barnett and Parnell 2016). The campaign for the inclusion of a dedicated Urban SDG combined four distinct claims about contemporary urbanisation processes, which when combined made a case for the centrality of urban-based action (and by proxy more planning) in relation to the over-arching aims of the new sustainable development agenda. First, there was an empirically led claim that the key problems to be addressed by the sustainable development goals, not least poverty, are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Second, there was a conceptual claim that the dynamism of cities as economic agglomerations of growth and social clusters of innovation presented an opportunity that must be harnessed to achieve the SDGs. Third, cities were identified as pathways of global environmental change. And fourth, there was a claim that cities and other localities represent the most effective political scale for coordination and decision-making to deliver the SDG agenda. It should also be emphasised that the campaign for an Urban SDG and the development of the NUA are not simply a matter of recognising contemporary urbanisation trends and demographic facts of living in an urbanised world. The assertion of an urban frame for addressing development challenges represents a significant shift within UN-level governance processes. It reflects not only recognition that urban settlements are crucial pathways to sustainable development, but also an acknowledgement of the crucial developmental role of sub-national government actors and multi-level governance (see SDSN 2013). In short, what is most significant about these overlapping initiatives is the recognition of local and regional territorial action as an important dimension of global changes. This is a dramatic departure from past development thinking that has tended to privilege national scale actors and strategic and fiscal planning over spatial thinking.

But to fully appreciate the significance of the inclusion of an urban lens in global development policy, it is necessary to recognise the more general significance of the SDGs as a whole. It is these normative changes that planners will be called upon to operationalise in specific places in ways that will make the transformative changes implied by the 2030 agenda. The SDGs represent a fundamental shift in the aspirations and practices of global development policy. There are five dimensions to the shift embodied by the SDGs. First, unlike the MDGs, which focussed primarily on alleviating poverty in the global South, the SDGs are truly global in their ambition, setting out single, minimum standards for all nations. Second, the SDGs are premised on the developmental interdependence of social, economic and environmental values. They give much greater weight than ever before to the ecological limits of human existence and the dangers of climate change. Achieving this integrated vision of sustainable development will require a fundamental transformation of most accepted practices of urban management. Third, the SDGs emphasise reducing inequality as well as poverty. Fourth, the SDG monitoring and reporting framework, enabled by innovations in geospatial science, complex statistical modelling and big data analysis, allows the integration of spatial and statistical analysis and the nesting of local, national and global indicators. This technological revolution in data analysis allows greater flexibility in indicator selection and reporting, and so promises to refashion the measurement of global development and to facilitate heightened importance of cities and localities in these monitoring processes. Finally, the global development agenda is now being debated alongside issues of institutional capacity building and the provision of finance, which again draw into focus the importance of reconfiguring urban scale institutions and infrastructures.

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It is in this broader context of the reframing of development agendas that the heightened significance accorded to cities and urban issues, and with this to spatial planning, needs to be placed. They enable us to see that the assertion of an urban perspective in development policy extends far beyond simply implementing and monitoring Goal 11 of the SDGs. The approval of the Urban SDG and the roll-out of the discourse of the NUA represents just one aspect of the consolidation of a distinctively pro-urban, spatially nuanced approach to issues of poverty alleviation, sustainability and basic needs provision in global governance agendas. It runs alongside, for example, an increasing recognition of the importance of urban-scale responses to climate change issues, indicated by the inclusion of urban issues in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014, and the heightened significance of urban issues in the UN Climate Change Conference, COP21, in Paris in 2015. In these and other global initiatives, cities and urban processes are now routinely framed as bearing a double responsibility. On the one hand, how cities and towns are planned and managed is presented as causes of myriad contemporary challenges (from global warming to obesity, and from financial instability to social exclusion). On the other hand, they are also presented as providing opportunities to act in response to those challenges (see Birch and Wacheter 2011).

The idea that urban areas are the locations of all sorts of problems is of course an old, established theme in social thought and public policy. In no small part, modern urban and regional planning has its origins in this idea. But urban issues have traditionally been thought of as symptoms, as the place-specific manifestations of more general processes. By contrast, in the twenty-first century, urban processes are now ascribed causal significance in generating global challenges including ecosystem degradation, climate change, peak oil, systematic inequality and persistent poverty, food insecurity and energy transitions (see Swilling 2011). These challenges are now understood to have their roots in specifically urbanised patterns of accumulation, consumption and interaction. But at the same time, cities and localities are now presented as having all sorts of opportunities and potentialities for reconfiguring those global processes. With the elevated status of the city the responsibilities of the planner grow exponentially.

The campaign around the Urban SDG and the elaboration of the NUA is one example of broader process of the urbanisation of responsibility (see Barnett 2012). Placing these debates and initiatives within this broader understanding is important as it allows us to see how ideas about the tasks and agents of planning are currently being transformed. The role of cities and urban processes is no longer confined to an image of spatial planning as a residual field for managing the externalities generated by more general processes. What is distinctively new about the contemporary ascendancy of place-based, city-centric policy visions at national and international levels is the proposition that urban-scale institutions, infrastructures, and communities of interest are now empowered to creatively shape multiple global challenges associated with the growth in the size and complexity of urban settlements, the increase in urban populations, and the generalisation of conditions of urban living (Gordon and Buck 2005). The conceptual shift that lies behind the campaign for Goal 11 of the SDGs, and is explicitly asserted in the NUA in particular, involves thinking of global processes working horizontally through places. And it is associated in turn with the idea that cities and regions are the sites for the experimental development of new models, practices and solutions to global problems that can be translated to other places.

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We have identified a series of conceptual shifts lying behind the assertion of an urban imagination in global development policy and with this the amplified role of planning. While these shifts are informed by academic fields of inquiry, it is important to recognise that their significance for fields of practice such as planning relies on a wider complex of knowledge and thought coordinated by UN agencies through which global urban policy has emerged. Before considering the spatial rationalities underwriting the NUA’s assertion of the importance of city-level action on global issues, it is therefore important to consider the institutional dynamics through which this sort of global agenda is developed.

Making global urban policy

We have suggested that the inclusion of Goal 11 in the SDGs and the development of the NUA can be seen to mark a decisive shift in the status of ur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Planning And/As the State
• Part II Economy and Economic Actors
• Part III New Drivers of Change: Ecology, Infrastructure and Technology
• Part IV Landscapes of Citizenship
• Part V Planning Pedagogies
• Index