Reviving Critical Planning Theory

Dealing with Pressure, Neo-liberalism, and Responsibility in Communicative Planning

Tore Øivin Sager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136248597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Discussing some of the most vexing criticism of communicative planning theory (CPT), this book goes on to suggest how theorists and planners can respond to it. Looking at issues of power, politics and ethics in relation to planning, this book is for both critics and advocates of CPT, with lessons for all.

With severe criticisms being raised against CPT, the need has arisen to systematically think through what responsibilities planning theorists might have for the end-uses of their theoretical work. Offering inventive proposals for amending the shortcomings of this widely adhered planning method, this book reflects on what communicative planning theorists and practitioners can and should do differently.

PART I
COUNTERACTING NON-DELIBERATIVE STAKEHOLDER PRESSURE

The first part of this book includes the four chapters that deal directly with power, starting with an account of how to legitimize CPT. Legitimation is about the justification of power. In a democracy, public planning needs legitimacy in order to build and retain the authority required to implement plans. Solid anchoring of this authority in democratic institutions is of paramount importance to planners who are trying to restrain those particularistic interests that rely on force to fight solutions that would serve the great majority.

The three other chapters in this part of the book contribute to the debate on how the communicative rationality of ideal Habermasian dialogue can be modified by an infusion of instrumental motivation and action in such ways that the resulting hybrids still deserve the name ‘communicative planning’. I argue that amalgams of strategic and communicative action are required to deal effectively with stakeholders and groups using non-deliberative force to pursue goals that are reasonable only within their own frame of reference.

Chapter 1 explores important motivations for CPT. Emphasis is put on legitimizing features that have received little attention elsewhere, but are nevertheless closely associated with the main attractions of CPT: its epistemological, empowering, and relation-building potentials. More concretely, the legitimizing functions of the Condorcet jury theorem, anti-paternalism, and relational goods are discussed. The jury theorem states that as the number of reasonably informed decision-makers increases, the likelihood of a right decision approaches one. Arguments for public planning can spring from qualities of the process leading up to the plan or from qualities of the substance of the plan itself. Communicative planning as part of deliberative democracy is discussed as a process argument, while ‘the public interest’ is discussed as an outcome-related legitimizing argument.

Communicative planners are often criticized for lacking a credible strategy for dealing with problems of biased power relations. The purpose of Chapter 2 is to make it evident that critical communicative planning has a strategy for handling the problems. To achieve this, the logic of critical communicative planning (John Forester’s ‘critical pragmatism’) is reformulated in terms of transaction cost politics. In Habermasian parlance, the critical planner counteracts systematically distorted communication to promote plans that are not marked by repressive power relations. It is argued here that this is done by augmenting the transaction costs of those trying to influence the planned solution by leaning on their power base instead of on the force of the better argument. Also, the critical planner aims to diminish the political transaction costs of groups standing to lose from the results of power-based argumentation. The idea is to make it relatively more difficult to pursue particularistic interests by means of repressive or manipulative strategies. Hence, the rationality of critical pragmatism rests on power management by deliberate alteration of political transaction costs. Analysis of ‘network power’ shows that the same chain of reasoning is not well fitted to strongly consensus-seeking collaborative planning.

The planner who wishes to raise the political transaction costs of actors trying to exploit the weakness of others for their own gain, can do so by building an alliance with an organization outside the official planning process and make this external actor exert pressure. In order to understand how this kind of co-operation can be established and used for transaction cost alteration, it is helpful to survey the activist modes of planning described in the literature. The purpose of Chapter 3 is to offer such a systematic overview. The various models are displayed in two tables, one grouping the unconcealed and recognized modes of activist planning, and another classifying the concealed or unrecognized modes. Important lines of communication are severed when the planning effort is concealed or unrecognized. Planning modes suffering from such loss of interactive capacity are appropriate primarily in authoritarian societies and in conditions of severe repression.

By deliberately manipulating political transaction costs in an attempt to assist one group at the expense of others, planners are themselves playing power games. This can be justified under undemocratic local conditions. In non-ideal circumstances, trying to achieve ideal ethical action is not an optimal strategy. Communicative planning theorists must nevertheless discuss how the political transaction costs of disadvantaged or marginalized groups, whose living conditions the planners want to improve, can be effectively reduced relative to those of other groups without leaving the domain of communicative planning. The purpose of Chapter 4 is to give content to the role of the activist communicative planner and analyze hybrids of communicative and strategic action that are invariably embedded in activist communicative planning. The best situation for the activist communicative planner is when contact is established with an external activist organization that believes in dialogue in principle, but also acts on the belief that the current economic-political structures of society call for non-deliberative measures in order to redress threatening or repressive social practices.

1
Legitimizing Communicative Planning

Legitimation is chosen as the opening theme, because I consider it easier to argue for the revival of critical CPT (communicative planning theory) when it is convincingly shown that CPT is justified, that it has several desirable qualities and affects knowledge, power, and collective action in favourable ways.

Approaching planning from the angle of justification provides the opportunity to highlight essentials of CPT without reiterating too much basic textbook material. The last few sections bring to the fore some legitimizing features of communicative planning that have for the most part gone unrecognized. Communicative planning has a solid epistemological foundation and is likely to produce certain rewarding interpersonal relationships more effectively than other planning modes. Being the practice of a would-be critical planning theory, it is also crucial that communicative planning affects autonomy so as to empower local publics. Throughout the chapter, legitimation is linked with power, which is the unifying key word in Part I of the book.

The extensive discussion of trust in relation to legitimation is largely left out, although admittedly relevant (Grimes 2006, Warren 1999). Even though ‘trust’ is a factor granting ‘legitimacy’ to governments and political institutions, the concepts hold different contents. Legitimacy stands for someone’s conviction that the institution conforms to the moral principles of that person, her sense of what is right or proper. Trust, however, reflects someone’s belief that the institution performs in accordance with her normative expectations.

Introduction: legitimacy and planning

This introduction starts by explaining some main features of communicative planning and then goes on to define legitimacy and legitimation. These concepts are first dealt with in relation to planning in general, while their meaning and use in communicative planning are taken up in later sections. A plan is broadly seen as a suggestion of how to manage our co-existence in shared spaces (Healey 2006:3).

Various theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing planning as an idea and an activity have been tried in different places and periods, including synoptic (rationalistic) planning, disjointed incremental planning, advocacy planning, and communicative (collaborative) planning (Forester 1989, Sager 1994). These models all purport to enrich democracy in various ways, and thus serve broad interests by improving procedures that lead towards that widely recognized goal. Synoptic planning aims to enhance democracy by using experts and scientific method to enrich the knowledge base of majority decisions. Disjointed incrementalism serves democracy by arranging for every important interest or value to have its watchdog (Lindblom 1959:85). Furthermore:

It reduces the stakes in each political controversy, thus encouraging losers to bear their losses without disrupting the political system. It helps maintain the vague general consensus on basic values (because no specific policy issue ever centrally poses a challenge to them) that many people believe is necessary for widespread voluntary acceptance of democratic government. (Lindblom 1979:520)

Incremental planning avoids bringing democratically made decisions into disrepute by shunning any policies ‘whose scope is such that if they miscarry, the evils will exceed the remedial power of existing institutions’ (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963:239). Advocacy planning makes local popular government less discriminatory by giving voice to marginalized groups whose interests would not otherwise be conveyed to political decision-makers. The democratic aims of communicative planning are outlined below.

Communicative planning

Communicative planning as an approach aims to advance deliberative democracy by exploring the potential for broad workable agreement on planning matters, in any case making deliberation inclusive and thorough before a planning issue is somehow decided upon. This mode of planning also helps democracy produce fair outcomes by striving to reduce the influence of systematically biased power relations on the dialogically determined recommendations. The hope is that a change towards more participative approaches will help to develop social capital and community cohesion, improve service delivery to meet local needs, restore information flows and accountability, and give voice to those most directly affected by public policy (Yetano et al. 2010:784).

While attempts have been made to found CPT on the ideas of John Rawls and other scholars of liberal democracy (Harper and Stein 2006), the variant adhered to here leans more on Habermas’s (1999) theory of communicative action. Several theorists combine this approach with notions from pragmatism (Healey 2009, Hoch 2007, Wagenaar 2011). Communicative planning demands more than talking with stakeholders and an involvement process merely informing the public. This planning mode is commended as a respectful, interpersonal discursive practice adapted to the needs of liberal and pluralist societies that prevent one social group from legitimately forcing its preferred solutions to collective problems on other groups. The aim is to promote the deliberative aspect of democracy and create and protect the conditions for deep and genuine civic discourse.

Communicative planning is seen here as an open and participatory enterprise involving a broad range of affected groups in socially oriented and fairness-seeking developments of land, infrastructure, or public services. It is guided by a process exploring the potential for co-operative ways of settling planning disputes and designed to approach the principles of discourse ethics. The process of communicative planning is open in the sense of being inclusive and transparent; the public can gain knowledge of what is going on. Development efforts are socially oriented when they aim to further the interests of large segments of society rather than the interests of a few stakeholders only. Development is fairness-seeking when it aims to improve the living conditions of deprived groups, and when its substantive results observe the rights of all groups. The principles of discourse ethics state that the communicative process should be open, undistorted, truth-seeking, and empathic¹ – in line with (A)–(D) below (compare Allmendinger 2009 and Innes and Booher 1999a:419):

• (A) Openness as formulated by Habermas (1990:89):
  • 1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
  • 2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
  • b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
  • c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
  • 3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2).
• (B) The communication between participants should satisfy the four validity claims of being comprehensible, factually true, sincere, and appropriate within the normative context of public planning.
• (C) Nothing should coerce a participant except the force of the better argument.
• (D) Participants should be committed to reaching mutual understanding in dialogue free from strategic action.

Dialogue is defined here as conversation with the characteristics (B)–(D), and a planning process with all the above features is communicatively rational. The basic moral principle of discourse ethics – the Universalization principle – states that every valid norm has to fulfil the following condition:

All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation). (Habermas 1990:65, emphasis in original)

The Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ satisfies improbable conditions: ‘openness to the public, inclusiveness, equal rights to participation, immunization against external or inherent compulsion, as well as the participants’ orientation toward reaching understanding (that is, the sincere expression of utterances)’ (Habermas 1999:367).

The idea is that, with communication approaching the principles of discourse ethics, participation would more likely be empowering, and decision-making would be deliberative and democratic. The ideal of deliberative democracy is to reach a decision through debate rather than voting, although practice calls for both modes of making decisions, most often with careful exploratory debate preceding voting (Bohman and Rehg 1997). Inclusion and the giving of reasons are central to the deliberative process, and some empirical results indicate that these characteristics make it more likely that participants will change their positions (Schneiderhan and Khan 2008).

Habermasian dialogue as outlined here has been an important ideal in CPT. It should nevertheless be noted that deliberative democrats are moving away from judging the legitimacy of deliberation only by the standard of the ‘ideal speech situation’. There is increased ‘appreciation for what different forms of deliberation in diverse contexts can contribute to the democratic system as a whole’ (Karpowitz et al. 2009:602). A number of prominent scholars on deliberative democracy ‘contend that self-interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision’ (Mansbridge et al. 2010:64). They include negotiation involving appropriately constrained self-interest in the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. This turn in the thinking about dialogue-like conversation makes deliberative democracy more realistic and can provide CPT with a mooring that is less reliant on Habermas’s theory of communicative action. The hybrids of dialogue and strategy that are explored in Chapter 4 reflect the new acceptance of ‘complementarity rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative’ (ibid.64).

Dialogue has strong democratic properties, although it does not count votes or bow to preferences. Democratic planning means, for example, that planning proposals should not be put forward in a dictatorial manner, and that there should be no censorship on the expression of preferences. Dialogue also fosters truthfulness and sincerity, so manipulation (strategic action), like misleading people about one’s motives, false revelation of preferences, and setting the agenda to fit one’s own interests, is no part of the desired dialogue. It follows that references to ‘dialogue’ throughout the book refer to a communication process that is both democratic and free from manipulation. Dialogue is only a part of the interchange between participants in communicative planning. Debate and negotiation are also inevitable elements in the processes and practices of this planning mode, as underscored by Forester (2009a).

The ‘critical pragmatism’ strand of communicative planning aims to reveal unnecessary and systematic distortions of communication and thus promote equal opportunities and build support for reasonably effective and fair decisions (Forester 1989, 1993a, Sager 1994). This is a critical planning theory. Wagenaar (2011:297) states that ‘Forester’s critical pragmatism rests on two pillars: a theory of communicative rationality that should help planners redirect attention toward a more inclusive form of debate and practice, and tactics of communication and mediation that help actors overcome debilitating conflict’. Planners who follow this up and put weight on social critique in their communicative planning practice are named ‘critical pragmatists’ in this book, while other practitioners of communicative planning are called ‘collaborative planners’. ‘Communicative planner’ is sometimes used as a generic term.

Excellent books with comprehensive explanations of what CPT is have been written by Forester (1989), Healey (2006), and Innes and Booher (2010). The brief presentation here is rather narrowly focused. Even so, the above outline comprises the characteristics of CPT that are needed for the analyses throughout the book. While the need to equalize power in planning discussions and to counteract distortions of the deliberation has a distinct position in this brief introductory account of communicative planning, I do not want to give the impression that this is all that CPT is about.

Over the last three decades, CPT has given attention to a wide range of subjects. It is in the nature of the case that a number of communicative practices have been studied, such as listening, storytelling, rhetoric, and mediation. A rich literature links CPT to descriptions of the communicative aspects of a planner’s day and to a variety ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• The RTPI Library Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Critiques and Evolutions of Communicative Planning Theory
• Part I: Counteracting Non-Deliberative Stakeholder Pressure
• Part II: The Neo-Liberal Challenge
• Part III: Responsibilities
• References
• Index