The Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning

Simin Davoudi, Richard Cowell, Iain White, Hilda Blanco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351717397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This Companion presents a distinctive approach to environmental planning by: situating the debate in its social, cultural, political and institutional context; being attentive to depth and breadth of discussions; providing up-to-date accounts of the contemporary practices in environmental planning and their changes over time; adopting multiple theoretical and analytical lenses and different disciplinary approaches; and drawing on knowledge and expertise of a wide range of leading international scholars from across the social science disciplines and beyond.

It aims to provide critical reviews of the state-of-the-art theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical knowledge and understandings of environmental planning; encourage dialogue across disciplines and national policy contexts about a wide range of environmental planning themes; and, engage with and reflect on politics, policies, practices and decision-making tools in environmental planning. The Companion provides a deeper understanding of the interdependencies between the themes in the four parts of the book (Understanding 'the environment', Environmental governance, Critical environmental pressures and responses, and Methods and approaches to environmental planning) and its 37 chapters. It presents critical perspectives on the role of meanings, values, governance, approaches and participations in environmental planning. Situating environmental planning debates in the wider ecological, political, ethical, institutional, social and cultural debates, it aims to shine light on some of the critical journeys that we have traversed and those that we are yet to navigate and their implications for environmental planning research and practice.

The Companion provides a reference point mapping out the terrain of environmental planning in an international and multidisciplinary context. The depth and breadth of discussions by leading international scholars make it relevant to and useful for those who are curious about, wish to learn more, want to make sense of, and care for the environment within the field of environmental planning and beyond.

Part 1
Understanding ‘the environment’

Simin Davoudi, Richard Cowell, Iain White and Hilda Blanco

In this actual world there is then not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstraction of Man and Nature … if we go on with the singular abstractions, we are spared the effort of looking … at the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once our product and our activity.

(Williams, 1980, p. 83)

A key rationale for the opening part of this Companion is to take Raymond Williams’ provocation seriously and explore the complexity and contingencies of social and natural relationships as they are manifested in and performed through discourses and practices of environmental planning. How controversies in environmental planning are dealt with often depends on whose ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ is called into being by planners and other actors and whose is enacted. Environmental planning is a key site of discursive contestation over questions such as: what is nature? and what is the environment? Conceptual clusters that structure environmental discourses influence the processes and outcomes. It is, therefore, crucial that we start this Companion with contributions that focus primarily on unpicking some of the key concepts used in environmental planning and unravel the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie behind them.

The first two chapters engage with two of the most elemental concepts: ‘nature’ and ‘environment’. In their different ways, the chapters explore their multiple meanings and practical applications and warn against naturalising and reifying nature and environment as singular and universal concepts. Instead, Noel Castree, in Chapter 1, urges greater reflexivity and awareness about the basic concepts that structure the discourses of and about environmental planning. He highlights the need for and the value of interrogating the languages used to invoke ‘the nature of environment’ by different actors in the planning process. Revisiting some of the early works by geographers and anthropologists, he shows how in planning, concepts of nature and environment are normalised as the mirror images of a physical reality beyond the human realm. The chapter includes a synthesis of different meanings (the signifieds) of nature (the signifier) under four categories: universal, external, superordinate and intrinsic natures. Castree argues that in the latter three categories ‘the environment’ can be used as a synonym for nature. He also highlights the challenge of deep multiculturalism in planning and the incommensurability of languages used which makes it difficult to give voice to, for example, indigenous peoples in planning arenas. The chapter presents a double critique of: misrecognition – concealing the social character of claims about ‘the nature of environment’ – and hypostatisation – fixing of the meaning of mutable and dynamic social constructs (such as the environment) as a given.

This theme is further explored by Timothy W. Luke in Chapter 2. He flags conceptual and practical dilemmas in scanning the complex and conflictual discourses about the environment and their implication for environmental planning. The chapter presents a critique of ‘who speaks for nature’ and crucially ‘who speaks through nature’ and for what purposes. Which nature, or the environment, is brought into being in discourses and practices of environmental planning and with what consequences is a key theme of this chapter. Luke identifies and critiques four currents of discussion through which ‘Nature’, understood as being shaped discursively and materially by human, is made into ‘the environment’ for human sake. These are: reification and revitalisation, resourcification and regulation, rationalisation and restoration, and ruination and resilience. A striking example of the first current is how environmental planning conceives of whole regions of the Earth in development related terms of: built environment, yet-to-be-built environment or never-to be-built environment. A recurring theme is the critique of modernity and its techno-scientifically driven command and control mode of environmental planning, one that is rooted in an anthropocentric view of nature. For Luke, discourses embedded in such mentality are fraud and lead to degrading of ‘Nature’. To oppose them requires environmental discourses that invoke workable alternatives for implementing fair and democratic politics for their realisation.

In planning, alternative future imaginaries have often been presented in idealised visions of the environment and the place of humans in it. The history of environmental planning, as a future oriented activity, is inseparable from the history of visionary idealism, and none can be fully understood without interrogating the role played by ideology, as suggested by Michael Gunder in Chapter 3. He discusses three pathways through which visionary environmental idealism is materialised. The first and most directly aligned with environmental planning is the creation of eco-cities (environmentally desirable human settlements). The second is through post-political ecological modernisation which seeks to make the current neoliberal capitalist world more environmentally friendly (see also Chapter 5). The third is through radical ‘deep green’ movements that seek fundamental changes to current social and economic systems such as, sustainable de-growth or deep ecology, which are also advocated as the way forward by Naess and Saglie in Chapter 5. Gunder presents a critique of visionary environmental idealism as it materialises through these three pathways. For him, ‘sustainability’, which is a common goal of all three, is an ideological ‘master signifier’ (a signifier without signified) whose meaning (signification) can be understood clearly only when it is embroidered with more explicit signifiers (see also Chapter 4). Drawing on Jacques Lacan (2006), Gunder suggests that sustainability is also presented as a transcendental ideal external to human experience and knowledge, yet one that is nevertheless perceived to be an ultimate desired goal currently lacking in the world. Like several other contributors to this Companion, Gunder emphasises the need for unpicking the specific meaning of and implicit values that underlie key concepts used in environmental planning discourses and the knowledges pertaining to its master signifiers such as sustainability.

Sustainability is indeed one of the most readily recognised and frequently used concepts in environmental planning. Despite or because of this, its meanings have been subject to much contestations among political actors at all levels from the local to international bodies. To shed light on this highly influential concept, in Chapter 4, Delyse Springett and Michael Redclift trace its genealogy, problematise its meanings and provide a detailed account of the international contestations of sustainable development. The chapter focuses on the political economy of environmental conditions and highlights the connection between capitalist liberal markets and cultures and social injustices and environmental crisis. Emphasising the inextricable link between social and environmental responsibilities, the authors show how power and knowledge are used to exploit both nature and people. A key theme is the problematisation of the discursive dominance of Global North over Global South. They argue that the root causes of environmental as well as social problems are economic and cultural globalisation of neoliberal conceptual forces. The overall message, as in several other chapters in this part, is that concepts such as sustainable development should not be taken-for-grated and reified in and through environmental planning processes and practices. Environmental planning concepts are carriers of power and politics; they make certain ideas and interests visible and dominant while masquerading and undermining others.

Chapter 5 by Peter Næss and Inger-Lise Saglie focuses on the concept of ecological modernisation which emerged in environmental sociology in the 1990s in relation to the implementation of sustainable development (see also Chapter 4). The authors argue that contemporary environmental planning is grounded in ecological modernisation and its particular rationality of development. They unpack the core premises of ecological modernisation and use them to critically assess the compact city ideal which has gained hegemonic status as a sustainable urban form internationally. Næss and Saglie draw on their work on Oslo, a city that has rigorously pursued compact city policy in recent decades, to examine whether the policy has fulfilled the ambitions of ecological modernisation. Central to these ambitions is the claim that the paths to sustainability do not require radical changes to current economic and social processes, that economic growth and the use of environmental resources can be decoupled. The Oslo case shows the limitations and weaknesses of eco-modernisation and reveals the inescapable tensions that exist between economic growth and environmental sustainability. While acknowledging the merits of densification strategies versus urban sprawl, the authors argue that environmental planning benefits by looking beyond eco-modernisation and engaging with alternative discourses and perspectives such as ‘risk society’, ‘de-growth’ and ‘eco-socialism’ (see also Chapter 3).

Chapter 6 by Mark Whitehead focuses on one of the most recent concepts that have entered the conceptual repertoire of environmental planners, the Anthropocene. The chapter considers whether and how the Anthropocene is changing our understandings of and approaches to human-nature relations. It also discusses the particular challenges that this new conceptualisation of human-induced changes to global environmental change present to the practices of environmental planning. While acknowledging the multifaceted nature of the concept of the Anthropocene (with ontological, epistemological, practical and moral dimensions), Whitehead focuses on the ontological and moral forms of the Anthropocene which he considers to have most valence for environmental planning. He explores the former in relation to the concept of planetary boundaries and the nine critical areas analysed by scientists to identify the upper limits of human interventions in them. Whitehead argues that the significance of planetary boundaries framework for environmental planning is its representation of the complex and interconnected forms of environmental change and its definition of safe and unsafe operating spaces as the context for establishing policy targets. For him, environmental planning as a facilitator of collective action has a significant role to play in responding to challenges of the Anthropocene. Such a role is likely to be performed through a mix of technocratic (technological and managerial solutions) and eco-centric (nature-based solutions) strategies. Either way, there is a need for major extension of the temporal and spatial scope of environmental planning beyond its current form. There is also a need for deeper understanding of risk and uncertainty in the complex and ever-changing world in which environmental planning operates and by which its scope and principles are defined. The final two chapters of this part of the Companion focus on this theme. Both emphasise the importance of risk analyses as an integral part of environmental planning.

The meanings of risk and risk management are explored in Chapter 7 by Eoin O’Neill. He shows how the concept of risk frequently includes references to other concepts such as danger, hazard or harm and how risk is defined as a combination of hazard, vulnerability and exposure or as the product of probability and consequences. The latter is argued to be the one used frequently in environmental planning practices. O’Neill discusses the different perspectives on risk in relation to people’s different perceptions of risk. Drawing on landmark analysis by the psychologist Paul Slovic (1987), he summarises various factors that influence risk perception such as prior experience, attitude and perceived control. O’Neill flags real and perceived geographical proximity as an influential factor which is directly relevant to environmental planning practices. The chapter highlights some of the key challenges to the implementation of risk-informed environmental planning and advocates a greater stakeholder engagement in decision-making processes.

In Chapter 8, Jon Coaffee draws on Ulrich Beck’s ‘Risk society’ thesis to discuss how the magnitude and boundless nature of the global risks is transforming how risks are imagined, managed and governed and how the concept of resilience has emerged as a key response to risks and uncertainty. Its rapid and extensive inclusion in discourses of environmental planning has led to the suggestion that resilience has replaced sustainability as the master signifier, representing a shift of emphasis from putting ‘the world back into balance’ to looking ‘for ways to manage in an imbalanced world’ (Zolli, 2012, no page). The chapter discusses how resilience processes and practices relate to traditional notions of risk and risk management. Resilience studies reflect the new understanding of risk but interpret resilience in two distinct ways: one is based on an equilibristic view of the world (the socio-ecological model) and the other on an evolutionary perspective. The chapter discusses the implications of these two interpretations for environmental planning and argues that despite the rise of evolutionary resilience thinking, there remains a considerable implementation gap which can only be bridged in environmental planning if resilience is seen as a set of transformative learning processes, and not merely as outputs or outcomes. While there is a growing critique of resilience as a carrier of neoliberal strategies (see Bohland et al., 2018), Coaffee highlights its transformative potentials not least in ‘breaking planning out of its obsession with order, certainty and stasis’ (Porter and Davoudi, 2012, p. 330).

If there is one theme which binds the contributions to this part of the Companion together, it is their emphasis on the importance of concepts in environmental planning discourses. Although concepts are not ontologically fixed, they can be hegemonic in the sense that they can temporari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: environmental planning: meanings, governance, pressures, responses and approaches
• Part 1 Understanding ‘the environment’
• Part 2 Environmental governance
• Part 3 Critical environmental pressures and responses
• Part 4 Methods and approaches to environmental planning