Planning for a Material World

Laura Lieto, Robert Beauregard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317564461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans.

The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples – ecologically-sensitive, regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe, among others – to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory, each chapter draws on this "new materialism" to acknowledge, in quite pragmatic ways, that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.

1 Planning and the politics of resistance

Robert A. Beauregard

In the mid-twentieth century, and most particularly in the United States, planners had an epiphany. In order to realize their plans, they would have to be more persuasive and, consequently, more political. Expertise and sound planning principles alone were thereafter to be considered insufficient for gathering the necessary support from elected officials, community elites, and citizen groups. If planners were to leave their imprint on the city, they would have to learn new skills, one of which would be to better navigate the political landscape. It was not enough to propose. Planners had the additional responsibility of assuring that their ideas were compelling enough to be adopted and, once adopted, implemented.¹

A good part of being successful as a planner involves overcoming resistance, whether rejection of planners’ advice or of the values on which the necessity of planning rests. Such resistance is often centered in individuals and groups with enough influence over decision-makers to derail what planners have in mind. Consequently, the task is to persuade, negotiate, and make allies so that opponents will either grant their approval or withdraw their objections. Of course, planners should strive to accommodate the concerns of others where possible and to modify advice accordingly: not to impose on dissenters what they believe to be the best course of action (Schön, 1982). In contemporary planning theory, this task is primarily viewed as a matter of communication and collaboration that requires talk. Planners listen and deliberate with dissenters and advocates such that differences are resolved and accommodated (Forester, 1999).

My premise is that being consequential involves more than just talk. Taking a new materialist perspective (Coole and Frost, 2010; Harrison, 2014), I argue that a discursive approach to the efficacy of planning severs planners from the physical world in which they and other human actors are inextricably attached. What planners propose and advise are changes in the built and natural environments; their recommendations are inseparable from the material consequences that they intend. Moreover, planners never act alone but always with material things such as landfills, bus lanes, site maps, affordable housing units, GIS software, and budgets. Political calculations thus must be seen in relationship to and mediated by things.

More to the point, planners always act in alliance with other humans and non-human things (Beauregard, 2012b) with their recommendations dependent on these relationships. Not only does politics have things (for example, governmental buildings, flags) but things, such as metal barriers used to corral protesters, have politics (Joerges, 1999). Alliances with things (and other humans) are what enable planners to act.

When these alliances (or assemblages) become stabilized, when support for them reaches a critical level, planners can then advance their goals. Stabilized alliances, however, are also blockages that stifle planners’ initiatives. Consequently, overcoming resistance not only entails building counter-alliances, but also disentangling and weakening obstructions. Resistance is thus situated not in humans alone but in the assemblages they form with the things of the world. To this extent, things matter and they matter specifically because humans are intent on delegating tasks and responsibilities to non-human things (e.g. alarm clocks, traffic lights) and thus implicating these things in their actions. Resistance is materially embedded and this resistance is what I call obduracy; overcoming it is the politics of things (Joyce, 2003, pp. 184–186).²

Obduracy appears when planners attempt to change the world and the world refuses to be changed. It is a concept that has found much use in science studies and actor-network theory where it is deployed to understand how ideas, technologies, and non-human things become stabilized in assemblages and withstand efforts to rearrange them (Latour, 1999, pp. 113–144; Law and Mol, 1995). One of the most insightful discussions of the concept, and a discussion particularly relevant for planning, is Anique Hommels’ Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change (2005), an interpretation of three efforts at socio-technical transformation in the Netherlands: (1) the physical renovation of a shopping center in the center of Utrecht, (2) the reconstruction of a major highway through Maastricht, and (3) the reconfiguration of Biljmermeer, a large housing development just outside of Amsterdam. For Hommels, obduracy is the resistance that socio-material forms pose to attempts at modification. An assemblage becomes obdurate when associations are brought into play “that last longer than the interactions which formed them” (Callon and Latour, 1981, p. 283). Because numerous actors – associated and thus hydrid – benefit from its continuance, the assemblage resists being dismantled.

The purpose of this chapter is to consider how planners think about and act in relation to obduracy. My argument is simple. To overcome the resistance of others, planners have to attach themselves and other influential actors to assemblages that serve their purposes. Since actors are almost always attached, often to more than one assemblage, this entails detaching them from previously established relationships that defy planners’ interests. The intensity of obduracy and the force of resistance are thus related to the scale and complexity of pre-existing interdependencies. Unpacking and rearranging these interdependencies is the planners’ main task. In short, planners have to engage in a politics of things – both human and non-human – rather than a politics solely involving humans.

To illustrate these relationships, and thus what planners need to learn in order to be successful at what they do, I present two cases that exhibit diametrically opposed understandings of obduracy and planners’ attempts to overcome it. The first case was written by Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) and involved an initiative by planners in Aalborg, Denmark, to redesign part of downtown around a new bus station. In presenting the case, Flyvbjerg treated obduracy (a term he did not use) as wholly a matter of political interests and personal relationships. Even though Flyvbjerg recognized the practical importance of non-human things to the conflicts, he ignored them theoretically. Instead, he focused on people and their social ties. The second case involves a major problem currently besetting shrinking cities in the United States. Faced with large numbers of empty and abandoned buildings and vacant lots, planners, policymakers, and community activists have struggled to eliminate this blight. The resultant planning initiatives give priority to real property and property rights over human relations. The case draws on a program previously undertaken in Philadelphia and one currently planned for Detroit.

I selected these two “extreme” cases so as to illustrate the pitfalls of being blind to either non-human things (as with the Aalborg case) or people and their material associations (as with blight initiatives). In each, there is a failure to consider how humans and non-humans are entangled and always act together, even if not always in concert. The contrast brings into relief the need to acknowledge the materiality of the political action in which planners engage. The chapter ends with a discussion of how planners can act differently in these situations by adopting a politics of things.

Planning as discourse

Currently, the world of planning theory is dominated by an argument that establishes deliberation as the core activity of planning. Although consideration of the local housing market, the likely implications of sea-level rise for land along the water’s edge, and the effects of reducing off-street parking requirements for apartment houses require technical analysis, what makes planners effective is their ability to explain their findings, listen to the concerns of others, and communicate in ways that then lead to productive collaborations. As Innes (1995, p. 184) has written: “planning is more than anything an interactive, communicative activity.” The function of planning is thus shifted from cognitive-based analysis (the defining element of the rational-comprehensive model that once dominated planning theory) to a social function in which planners engage with those subject to their advice in order to talk through their differences. Specifically, planners have to be skilled in listening, persuasion, deliberation, argumentation, and consensus-building (Innes and Booher, 1999; Majone, 1989, pp. 37–41; Shmueli et al., 2008; Throgmorton, 2000).

Such an approach to planning elevates discourse above analysis and assumes that listening and talking are the best ways to address and resolve disagreements. This does not mean that those in power will capitulate to “more reasonable” arguments (an issue central to Flyvbjerg’s case): neither does it mean that talk alone can empower those who have been marginalized. It mainly acknowledges that planners lack independent sources of economic or political power that they can wield to assure that their advice is adopted and implemented. What planners have is knowledge of the city and its development and the ability to connect that knowledge to public and private interests. Those connections, however, have to be fashioned out of more than reports and memoranda. Of particular import are patient deliberations. This means that planners must learn to talk with and listen to elected officials, business elites, neighborhood residents, and advocacy groups about how what planners are proposing can serve them and, if not them specifically, the larger public good from which they will benefit. In this sense, talk becomes action.

The implication is that politics proceeds through deliberation (Bohman, 1996; Young, 2000) and that discourse is the key (at least for planners) to being effective. In this vein, Healey (2009, p. 277) argues that planning involves “imagining and opening up future potentialities for improving the conditions of daily life existence and enrichment for humans in their coexistence with each other and the rest of the animate and inanimate world.” However, she, like most planning theorists, actually excludes the rest of the world – the non-human world – from the deliberations and the social learning that make planning possible and that constitute the core tasks of a discursive planning. Non-human things are important only as objects of discussion. What things do is marginal to persuasion and any hoped-for consensus. This way of thinking about planning is critical for Flyvbjerg’s assessment of the Aalborg initiative.

The obduracy of power

In his book Rationality and Power (1998), Bent Flyvbjerg claimed that the rational arguments of planners will always be defeated by those who have power. Powerful people do not have to listen, deliberate, or be reasonable. Power trumps rationality or, as he eloquently puts it, “[p]‌ower concerns itself with defining reality rather than discovering what reality ‘really is’” (1998, p. 227). Planners, on the other hand, carriers of rationality, are concerned with identifying, evaluating, and improving a reality that can be objectively accessed rather than subjectively produced. In any confrontation between planning rationality and power, however, power prevails. To illustrate this thesis, Flyvbjerg presents, in great detail, the efforts by planners in Aalborg to change the transportation network in the city’s downtown. While they realized various sub-projects, the initiative took much longer than anticipated and its key element – integrated bus services – was rejected. The Aalborg Project was not implemented as planned; disassembled and then implemented piecemeal, the planners’ vision was lost. Flyvbjerg considered this a failure.

The story begins in the late 1970s with the writing of two plans for Aalborg’s downtown, one for land use and the other for traffic and the environment. The plans were organized around the integration of the city’s two bus systems (one local and the other inter-city) and a reduction in automobile traffic. The centerpiece would be a new bus terminal serving approximately 2,000 arrivals and departures per day. The project would also entail the reorganization of traffic patterns for better pedestrian, bus, and bicycle movement that would involve eliminating parking spaces and closing streets. In addition, the planners hoped to prohibit non-retail uses (for example, banks) from occupying ground-level storefronts based on the assumption that they would deaden rather than enliven the sidewalks. The goals were four: to make public transit more efficient, minimize automobile trips, re-design the downtown so that it was more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly, and attract more shoppers.

Typical of large-scale planning endeavors, the Aalborg Project envisioned a multitude of changes to the built environment. It also entailed engagement with governmental agencies, elected officials, business organizations, and citizen groups. Buses, pedestrians, automobiles, vans, and bicycles would all be affected. Streets would be physically modified to accommodate bicycle lanes and allow only one-way traffic. Intersections would have to be re-designed. New directional signs would be erected, curbs would be built to cordon off four-wheel vehicles from bicycles, and paving would be re-done. Different businesses would occupy ground-level space with a corresponding change in the look of storefronts. Air quality would improve. Shoppers, commuters, workers, and tourists would all be affected. Furthermore, for the integrated bus stop to be realized, the technologies for scheduling and routing buses would have to be modified resulting in adjustments in bus tracking systems, timetables, and individual commuting patterns.

Spaces, objects (e.g. curbs, buses, buildings), and technologies were integral to the success or failure of the Aalborg Project. The material world had to change for the goals of the planners to be realized. At the same time, the planners themselves were directly engaged with things: maps, consultant reports, legal documents, national legislation, meeting rooms, photographs, drafting tables, computers, calendars, desks, conference tables, and pens and pencils (Beauregard, 2012a).

While all of these material things are mentioned in Flyvbjerg’s depiction of the case, his focus is primarily on social relations (and on such social facts as power and rationality) and thus the human participants in the process: the mayor, aldermen, planners, a bicycle association, the Chamber of Commerce, the editors and reporters from the local newspaper, bus company owners, shoppers, and commuters. Central to his understanding of the event are planners, elected officials, and business interests. Simply stated, the planners proposed, basing their proposals on a rational analysis of current conditions and future prospects. The mayor and aldermen assessed the proposals and bargained with the planners, engineers, and others around modifications to the project. Business owners and their representatives (the Chamber of Commerce and editors of the newspaper) then responded politically to the impacts that they imagined the project would have.

Flyvbjerg tells the story of the Aalborg Project in terms of the interactions among key actors that occur in public meetings, conference rooms, the newspapers, and private meetings. In all of these venues, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Planning and the politics of resistance
• 2 Things, rules, and politics: blurring the boundaries between formality and informality
• 3 The pedestrianization of the Naples seafront: assemblage thinking as a planning tool
• 4 Translation: William Vickrey and the remaking of transportation knowledge infrastructure
• 5 Re-assembling world and waste: informal practices of waste picking in Naples
• 6 “Recombinant” hybrid ecologies and landscapes: Piana Campana, South Italy
• 7 Minutiae: meeting minutes as actors in participatory planning processes
• 8 Mobilizing policy: microfi nance’s journey from Bangladesh to Washington, DC
• 9 Normative planning research in a material world? Trading zones and assemblages
• 10 Assemblage, assembly, and difference
• Final remarks
• Index