Encounters in Planning Thought

16 Autobiographical Essays from Key Thinkers in Spatial Planning

Beatrix Haselsberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317248422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Encounters in Planning Thought builds on the intellectual legacy of spatial planning through essays by leading scholars from around the world, including John Friedmann, Peter Marcuse, Patsy Healey, Andreas Faludi, Judith Innes, Rachelle Alterman and many more. Each author provides a fascinating and inspiring unravelling of his or her own intellectual journey in the context of events, political and economic forces, and prevailing ideas and practices, as well as their own personal lives.

This is crucial reading for those interested in spatial planning, including those studying the theory and history of spatial planning. Encounters in Planning Thought sets out a comprehensive, intellectual, institutional and practical agenda for the discipline of spatial planning as it heads towards its next half-century. Together, the essays form a solid base on which to understand the most salient elements to be taken forward by current and future generations of spatial planners.

Part 1
Introduction

1
Encounters in Planning Thought

An Introduction

Beatrix Haselsberger

This book represents an inspiring piece of oral history. It tells a compelling story about how planning ideas evolved, developed, circulated and moved through time and space over the last half-century. The 16 key thinkers in the field of spatial planning who contributed to this book have, over the course of their careers, made significant contributions to spatial planning discourses around the nature, purposes and processes of spatial planning. Together they have built a sizeable body of writings, on which the education of thousands of contemporary spatial planning scholars, students and practitioners is and was based. Most of the book’s authors have elaborated and implemented programmes of study for spatial planning at their home universities. They helped to establish spatial planning as a distinctive discipline within the social sciences. In this book these distinguished spatial planners unpack the secrets of what they have done, why, and when, as they matured and built their ideas in an autobiographical way. None of this personal information has previously been published in such a compact and accessible way. With this book the reader gains new insights into classic planning thoughts, which do not come from only reading scientific articles. The intrinsic quality of autobiographical essays allows the reader to delve comprehensively and with ease into the issues concerned. It is this background information which enables us to better understand planning ideas and consequently some of today’s established spatial planning concepts and theories. But, most importantly, it provides us with a means to understand how planning ideas can be adopted meaningfully in a different time, context and situation.

This book is targeted at readers with an interest in spatial planning, meaning the scientific study of environmentally sustainable development, organisation and functioning of anthropogenic spaces in order to secure sociocultural needs. For those who are newcomers to the field, it provides an easily accessible foundation on various planning ideas and experiences. At times of information overload, it allows young and mid-career planners to gain a better insight into the comprehensive legacy of what has been achieved so far in spatial planning. From a more personal perspective, the autobiographical essays in this book offer valuable insights into what it implies to build a career in spatial planning and how to get one’s voice heard. For spatial planning educators teaching courses on the history and theory of spatial planning, this book provides an enriching teaching resource. It will help and encourage them in their efforts to inspire students of spatial planning. For those from related professional fields, such as geography, architecture, public policy, sociology or ecology, it offers food for thought about potential interrelationships and interdependencies emerging from the interfaces of the differing disciplinary perspectives. In addition, the essays in this book provide some hints as to how far and in which ways the different disciplines can help to enrich each other. For professionals and members of municipal planning departments, it offers a unique and easy-to-read reflective history of spatial planning. This retrospective assessment gives a glimpse of past planning successes and failures, including their long-term consequences, which in some cases are still perceptible today. Finally, for those already established in the spatial planning field, the book seeks to grasp and reinterpret, with twenty-first-century relevance, influential planning ideas by offering intriguing insights into the authors’ lives and the thought processes that accompanied the development of these ideas over the years.

The oral histories of the persons represented in this book offer an understanding of the transformation of spatial planning over the last five to six decades in the context of an ever-changing world. Reinterpreting these oral histories with a twenty-first-century lens requires revealing the original purpose of those planning ideas which triggered and then shaped this transformation. For clarification, planning ideas are the nucleus of planning’s entire body of thought, and encompasses any space-relevant integrative knowledge, such as planning theory, planning practice, sustainable planning approaches, planning decision-making strategies and so forth. Making sense of planning ideas implies seeing them in context as well as looking at their history and their development over time. This in turn requires looking at the history of the person who generated the idea, as well as the geographical and social frameworks that have influenced the person’s way of thinking (such as particular places, preconceived political frameworks and value systems, national and international networks, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, expectations from institutions, professional experiences, international development, mega projects, and events). The essays in this book are doing exactly this; they unravel planning ideas in context, and most importantly they are written by the persons who have generated or contributed to generating these ideas. Placing the planning ideas of selected planning pioneers into the centre of discussions, as in this book, allows us to better understand the overall resonance of major spatial planning achievements. Together, the essays form a solid base on which to understand the most salient elements to be taken forward by current and future generations of spatial planners.

The second half of the twentieth-century saw the retirement of the first generation of spatial planning educators who led the formation of academic spatial planning into an intellectual field within the social sciences. Encounters in Planning Thought was born out of the need to capture the planning thoughts and reflections from 16 distinguished influential thinkers in spatial planning. The authors were selected based on personal criteria. First, the authors had to have made a significant contribution to discourses around the nature, purposes and processes of spatial planning, which I had come across either in the frame of my spatial planning education in Austria, through reading (mainly in English), or at conferences. Second, the authors had to be older than 62. This is the age when females can retire in Austria. At the time of writing this introduction, the average age of the authors is 75. I am fully aware that within this frame one selection of authors can hardly ever represent a universal sample of key thinkers. There are many other distinguished spatial planners out there who have contributed significantly to enhancing spatial planning over the last five to six decades. But they might not have published a lot in English, or they might have attended other conferences than I, or they might have been engaged in more specific fields of spatial planning, such as urban planning. I am also aware that the selection of the authors is not gender balanced. This results from discrimination against women in academia some five to six decades ago and reflects the time when the authors represented in this book entered the field.

Each author in this book provides a fascinating and inspiring unravelling of his or her own intellectual journey in the context of events, political and economic forces, and prevailing ideas and practices, as well as their own personal lives. The context which the authors provide in their essays allows us to deepen our understanding of the powerful ideas and contributions that these individuals have made, most of which still shape the field of planning and influence other fields and disciplines. While each author tells the story in his or her own very personal voice, all of them write in the first person singular and look back from today’s point of view when explaining what they have learned and discovered over the course of their intellectual journeys. In their essays, the authors portray the evolution of their planning ideas. They unpack why they were interested in entering spatial planning and how they came to write and do what they did. They speak about the challenges they had to face and how they coped with them. They shed light on influences that have shaped their ideas, including personal life circumstances, places, political frameworks and value systems, networks, cultural backgrounds, institutions and professional experiences, linking these to the content of their ideas. Each of these essays reads as a fascinating personal story, often with dramas, setbacks and successes.

The idea for this book was born in February 2012. At that time John Friedmann, a born Viennese, was in Vienna for an entire week. It was the first time that I had met John in person. I had previously known him only through his writings and a handful of e-mail conversations. John’s stay in Vienna left a mark on my perception of spatial planning. In the frame of many fairly personal conversations, I gained a lot of insight into what had motivated him in the different phases of his career. Most importantly, I found that I had to some extent misinterpreted his writings, simply because I was not able to meaningfully transfer his messages into the current time. This was an awkward but enriching experience. The evening before John left, he told me how much he had enjoyed our intergenerational discussions and that for him it was enriching to look back from today’s point of view and unravel how it all came into being. This extraordinary experience triggered my interest and curiosity in exploring more widely what lessons I could learn from past planning experiences for my future role as a spatial planner. With this in mind I elaborated the first-draft concept for this book. The first person I discussed it with was Patsy Healey. Patsy was very enthusiastic about this idea and she motivated me, in her encouraging and supportive way, to go for it.

From the beginning, the book was set up as an intergenerational dialogue, aiming to facilitate an open and transparent dialogue between different generations and cultures. This was realised through two different platforms. First, the entire book project was guided and accompanied by an intergenerational and intercultural editorial advisory board. On this board John Friedmann, Patsy Healey, Judith Innes and Michael Batty represented the views of the retired or soon-to-be retired elders in the field of spatial planning. Paul Benneworth, Laura Saija, Julie Knight and I represented the voices and interests of early-to-mid-career spatial planners. Second, over the last four years the book project involved in a broader intergenerational and intercultural dialogue between its authors and potential readers. As part of this, the Planning Thought Award—dedicated to early career planning scholars—was established. Out of 39 impressive applications, four awardees (Sabrina Lai, Kathrine Quick, Chris Maidment and Juho Matti Luukkonen) were selected and invited to contribute to the discussions at the various book events as well as to act as reviewers for the book essays. All of these initiatives sought to ensure that the authors’ contributions have a resonance, interest and value beyond mere retrospection and provide a solid source of information for current and future generations of spatial planners, as well as enriching the debate about the future of spatial planning.

In May 2014, 14 of the 16 book authors came together for an entire week at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria to present and discuss their first-draft essays, which they wrote according to the guidelines provided by me, the editor. The main objective of the Vienna Symposium was to involve as many different reader groups as possible in this early stage of the writing process. Several discussion formats were used:

• Three evening lectures (with around 200 participants each), where all 14 authors present in Vienna, plus the late Peter Hall via Skype, gave a 20-minute presentation of their essay and then contributed to a lively discussion with the audience. All three evening lectures (which took place on three different days) were fully booked within three weeks of being announced. The audience represented countries such as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Korea, Luxemburg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, the Netherlands and the US.
• A world café with 12 master’s and PhD students from the Vienna University of Technology, six young planning professionals from the Vienna city planning department, the four winners of the Planning Thought Award and the authors. The students and the young planning professionals identified the table topics after having read the authors’ first-draft essays. The award winners moderated the world café tables.
• Eighteen intergenerational dialogues, where students and young planning professionals provided the authors with detailed feedback on their first-draft essays, helping the authors to recognise the difficulties younger generations faced when interpreting their established planning theories and concepts. This exercise helped the authors in preparing the second drafts of their essays.
• Eight workshops, where the award winners challenged the authors to respond to current challenges based on what they had written in their first-draft essays.
• Several book workshops involving just the authors, the editorial advisory board members and the editor, where we reached joint understandings of the purposes of the autobiographical essays and the most effective ways to present the material in later drafts.

A roundtable at the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) 2014 conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands, a roundtable at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) 2014 conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a keynote panel discussion at the AESOP 2015 conference in Prague, Czech Republic, were fruitful follow-up events, triggering lively discussions between selected authors and the audience.

Thanks to the fact that English has become the lingua franca in the scientific world of spatial planning, the intergenerational and intercultural exchange of planning ideas was possible, irrespective of any language barriers. Nonetheless it has to be acknowledged that, on the one hand, this fact should not create an international preference for planning ideas from countries where English is the first language. Spatial planning is contextual and has to remain so. On the other hand, not everything can be easily translated into English, as every country has its own country- and context-specific expressions. Similarly, the way the English language is used in different countries around the globe is not standardised. This can lead, in some cases, to misunderstandings or misinterpretations. Even in those countries where English is the official language, such as the UK and the US, differences in the use of the language regarding spatial planning can be found. All the essays in this book are written in English, but the way the English language is used differs from context to context as well as from author to author. Therefore, most of the essays in this book are rounded off with a terminology glossary.

In this book you will learn more about the many different perspectives on what spatial planning was, is and should be, as each of the authors has worked in different countries, has chosen a different field of specialisation and has operated in different institutional settings. With the help of autobiographical accounts it has been possible to make this wisdom available for a broader audience and in particular for the current and future generations of spatial planners. The innovative working approach applied for doing so is explained by Laura Saija in the subsequent introductory chapter. The 16 autobiographical essays written by selected key thinkers in spatial planning form the core of this book. This core part begins with the essay from the oldest author (John Friedmann) and ends with the one from the youngest (Charles Hoch). Each of the essays recounts a self-contained autobiographical story of the author’s intellectual transformation. Considering that there is no generally valid recipe for tackling particular planning challenges, every single experience and intellectual transformation is worth studying. There is no suggested order which the reader should follow when reading this book. What I recommend, however, is that the reader should look at the terminology glossary for the respective essay before diving into the essay itself. The book is rounded off with my personal epilogue, where I address the question of what can be learnt from past planning experiences for the future of spatial planning. I hope to encourage a debate that enhances the chances of spatial planning flourishing in a world which is constantly changing.

Vienna (Austria), February 2016

2
Autobiography as a Method of Inquiry

Laura Saija

As mentioned in the introduction, this book is a collection of autobiographical essays written by some of the most established and widely quoted planning scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. Our authors’ fame alone would be enough of an argument for publishing a book with their personal accounts of the evolution of their research and ideas. However, this book is more than just a collection of individual autobiographies. Rather these accounts are the outcome of a multistep process of inquiry that began with specific research questions that the editor asked each author to address. Thus autobiography is for us a research meth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Front Cover Image: A Short Description
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 16 Autobiographical Essays from Key Thinkers in Spatial Planning
• PART 3 Epilogue
• Index