Learning from Other Countries: The Cross-National Dimension in Urban Policy Making

I. Masser, Mrs Bernadette Williams, R. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135473006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Looking at the lessons we can learn from international research in urban and regional planning, this book explores the challenges in using cross-country studies. The contributors address how to approachresearching planning in other countries, andhow to then diffuse the planning information. Key topics include:

• comparable urban data, and how to use it
• working with international agencies
• methodological issues in cross-country research
• translating theory into practice

Case studies include researching new towns in France and Poland, and problems doing empirical work in Eastern Europe.

PART ONE: The design and implementation of cross-national research projects

1: Introduction

PHILLIP BOOTH

In liberal academic circles there would no doubt be a general assent to the notions that travel broadens the mind and that ‘What should they know of England who only England know’¹. Applied to the field of town planning, this must surely act as healthy counterweight to the insularity which is evident in the tendency to regard the British system as the one against which all others pale in comparison. Cross-national research and study are good, such an argument might run, because they help us to see our system in perspective. But what we may actually mean by this perspective, and what utility there may be in developing it, is by no means necessarily clear.

Two general reasons for entering the field of cross-national research might, however, be identified. The first might be the development of the understanding of what planning is, or could be, about. Town planning, both as a discipline and as an administrative practice, has a curiously chameleon-like quality whose colours depend intimately on the particular social, political, and cultural context in which it is found. We may thus begin to challenge our assumptions about the proper limits of planning, by reference to systems other than our own. On the face of it, research designed to develop this understanding of what planning is about is relatively straightforward: the snags arise in plumbing the depths of the context in which the particular conception is rooted. A simple description of a planning system invariably conceals the assumptions in which it is based.

The second reason might be to learn how practice could be improved by reference to examples from beyond our own country. Here the contextual problem becomes considerably more difficult. The danger of proposing change in practice in the light of experience abroad is that practice may be dependent for its success upon a chain of circumstance which does not apply at home. To cite one instance: the successes and failures of the French practice of conserving historic buildings and areas are dependent on a level of central government involvement (through a variety of organisations) and funding that would require major changes both to central and to local government in Britain to be successful. Comparative research to improve practice need not, however, always be cross-national. Indeed, much research is carried out by comparing case studies within one country, and there may be something to be learnt from understanding the premise upon which such within-national studies are based. In a comparison of, say, Sheffield and Birmingham, a number of constants will apply, in the form of a general understanding of the purpose of planning a generally similar system of administration and a like pattern of statutory controls. Beyond these constants are, however, a range of differences that are dependent on the particular circumstances that obtain in Sheffield, or Birmingham. At least within-national comparative studies allow the researcher to make judgements about the factors in, say, residential development which are the result of the general framework of planning practice and those which are dependent on local conditions. From those judgements stem the possibility of making recommendations for the improvement of practice.

In cross-national research, the constants of culture, administration, and statute do not apply. It therefore becomes vital to find other points of reference that are constants in the countries to be studied. Such points of reference are unlikely to be general ones: they are much more likely to be specific to the subject areas to be studied. Yet the danger of false analogy is great. A project which was floated upon the equivalence of the schema directeur² and the structure plan would very quickly founder on the totally different purposes that the two types of plan are designed to serve. The result is all too likely to be that we shall have learnt only that two countries are different because they are different.

The four contributions that follow attempt to tackle some of these problems in the belief that, in spite of them, cross-national research is indeed worth pursuing. In the first, Sutcliffe sets the historical context for cross-national research and argues for comparisons over time as well as over space. The remaining chapters take up the questions of appropriate methodology and practical difficulties. Masser considering particularly the methodology, Williams looking at the problems encountered in selected examples of comparative research, and Booth focusing on the case of France.

All these chapters add to our understanding of how cross-national studies might most appropriately be conducted. It must be clear, however, that the difficulties in conducting such research must lead us to question very closely our motives for wishing to undertake it. In the end, the desired outcome of the research, whether in terms of improvements to understanding or to the formulation and implementation of policy will to a large measure determine how these problems would have to be surmounted.

NOTES

1. From Rudyard Kipling’s The English Flag.

2. A schéma directeur is an upper-tier land use plan in France.

2: The historian’s perspective

ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE

In the 1980s, internationally comparative research lies towards the top of the agenda in urban, regional, and planning studies, as indeed it does in most areas of social knowledge (e.g. Harloe, 1981). Comparative investigation has been fundamental to the social sciences since they took on their current strongly empirical form in the nineteenth century, but there have been significant methodological shifts within the comparative model. Currently, historico-comparative approaches are in vogue (e.g. Castells, 1983). Laconte, who was one of the most astute observers of the world planning scene, encapsulates this orthodoxy in a recent article (Laconte, 1983). Reviewing some of the published products of the work of the Planning History Group, he describes ‘a long road ahead in planning history’ and identifies a number of methodological issues: ‘The international analysis of planning ideas, policies, systems and of their effects poses far-reaching problems’ (p. 236). This emphasis on history appears to derive principally from the productive opposition to two positions within the planning debate. On the one hand, the ameliorist tradition on which most post-1945 urban and regional planning was based has now generated its own autocritique in which structural and ideological limitations on the role of the planner are stressed. The nature and implications of these limitations are readily identified historically (e.g. Cherry, 1982), particularly as the ameliorist position had previously generated numerous historical studies charting the steady progress of planning towards the creation of a happier and more efficient world (e.g. Pepler, 1949). On the other hand, the neo-Marxist urban critique of the 1970s has created its own internal demand for historical research in order to sustain a theory of urban political economy which has come to be identified as, at best, dangerously deductive (Harloe, 1981, p. 186), and, at worst, utterly specious (e.g. Pahl, 1983, pp. 375–376). However, both the reformist and the neo-Marxist tendencies reflect, and may even be a function of, low levels of investment in the environment during the current world depression. This common experience helps to explain certain superficial similarities, and perhaps even a more fundamental convergence, between the two tendencies (see Sutcliffe, 1983, pp. 235–237). It also provides the context of the current interest in international perspectives.

Historians cannot fail to warm towards this renewed interest in their perception and expertise. Indeed, moves are already afoot within the historical profession, notably in the USA, to emphasise and enhance the potential contribution of history to public policy (e.g. Stave, 1983). This contribution, it is claimed, will be more specific than the common understanding which Warner rightly sees as the most valuable contribution of history to the conduct of human affairs. Since 1975, postgraduate programmes in this applied branch of historical studies have been taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (MA in public history) and at Carnegie-Melon University, Pittsburgh (PhD in applied history). Numerous North American universities are now following their example and the movement has its own journal, The Public Historian, published by the University of California Press. Steps are now being taken, notably by Offer of the University of York, Beck of Kingston Polytechnic, and the present author, to investigate the potential of a self-conscious organisation of applied historical studies in Britain. Similar moves are being made on the Continent. Thus, as planning and urban studies turn to history, they encounter a converging tendency from within that discipline.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CROSS-NATIONAL STUDIES

Historians’ contributions to cross-national research can be valuable ones. Their appreciation of the structural components of currently observable phenomena is likely to modify the social scientists’ perceptions of those phenomena. Historians can contribute, in particular, to the creation of an internationally acceptable glossary of terms and categorisations, without which no comparisons can proceed. At the same time, historians can be annoyingly iconoclastic, refusing to see merit in the battles of abstractions which so often preoccupy social scientists. In their attention toward long-run developments of diachronic contrasts, historians are constantly aware of the relativity and transience of the contextual factors which condition cross-national research. The national state, for instance, whose existence is validated by the very concept of cross-national comparisons, is seen by historians as historically specific and as much a product of the processes they are investigating as an organiser and container of them.

The division of most of the globe into legally independent national states is a recent development, as is the intervention of those states in the ordering of the environment. Both these features, though foreshadowed before the nineteenth century, are essentially products of the world industrialisation process which has also generated the social sciences in their present form. It is customary to divide planning into various national modes, but the environment which we attempt to plan, in the sense of man and his accumulations of capital in their relationship with land, is dismissive of national boundaries. One of the most intriguing factors of the pre-1914 urban planning debate was its links with the Peace Movement (Sutcliffe, 1981, pp. 164, 166–167). Abercrombie was among those people who regarded the International Union of Local Authorities, founded at Ghent in 1913, as an embryonic system of world government. The idea was that cities, as productive and interdependent participants in a worldwide division of labour, could form regional federations which would replace the anachronistic and dangerous institution of the nation-state (e.g. see the editorial, probably written by Abercrombie, in Town Planning Review, 1914, volume 5, pp. 179–180). Paradoxically, the World War which dashed these hopes prompted an extraordinary exercise in international planning, the formulation of reconstruction policies for occupied Belgium by groups of exiles, British, French, and other foreign sympathisers in conferences and discussions held in London, Le Havre (seat of the Belgian government in exile), and elsewhere during the war (Smets, 1977, pp. 90–92). These episodes may appear quaint, but they were echoed between the wars by the efforts of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne to create an international system of urban designs, and after World War 2 by the ekistics movement.

Thus, we can approach the organisation of settled space from three different perspectives. First, we can regard it as a function of productive specialisation with an evolving world economy—what might be called the regional approach in which spatial variations are paralleled by temporal modulations, in that the diffusion of certain institutions and technologies associated with economic advance is complete in some regions but only partially so in others. Second, we can emphasise universal or ideal concepts in which, for instance, fundamental distinctions are made between town and country, and worldwide timeless qualities are attributed to these categories, allowing the formulation of ostensibly universal solutions. Third, we can stress various national peculiarities, including those stemming from national political attitudes and policies.

The existence of these three approaches notwithstanding, when the chips were down and I had to write an internationally comparative study of the pre-1914 origins of urban planning, I plumped for the national approach (Sutcliffe, 1981). This choice reflected the perceptions of the actors in the process I was analysing; not for nothing did Horsfall add the example of Germany to the title of his influential tract (Horsfall, 1904). However, I was fascinated by the interrelationship between increasing national diversification, on the one hand, and the growth of an international plane of activity in the social sciences, on the other. During the nineteenth century the growth of social science, the diffusion and reinforcement of national states, and the development of international organisation proceeded in close association.

Fundamental to all three was the growth of a professional class which served and indeed had a stake in the national systems but which, as a distinct interest within the world system, readily transcended national boundaries. This aspiration to comprehensive knowledge was reflected in the early activities of Le Play and his positivistic supporters, notably in the Association Internationale d’Economie Sociale, founded in 1856, and the Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales, established in 1862. Le Play’s own study of the condition of European workers, Les Ouvriers Européens (1855), led on to another selfconsciously comparative study, La Réforme Sociale en France Déduite de l’Observation Comparée des Peuples Européens (1864). However, such interests were not restricted to the positivists, another mid-century pioneering work in comparative research being Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, first published in the original German in 1845.

What these early comparative workers were doing was to keep track of the implications of industrialisation for human organisation and human happiness. Because that industrialisation was in large measure being diffused from Britain, comparative studies which included Britain had an important political potential. As the century wore on, industrialisation spread further and further outside Western Europe, sustained by outward flows of European capital and labour. This process extended the spatial context of international comparisons which, by the end of the century, had attracted an important North American contribution (e.g. Bliss, 1908). By 1900, international comparisons clearly revolved around a tension between the increasingly international character of flows of capital and technology, and institutional structures which were much less readily diffused yet more endurin through time, in that they were reinforced by the growing maturit of the national states. This tension was reflected in the uncertainty surrounding the role and potential of the International Union of Local Authorities, already described.

As industrialisation proceeded, the institutional structures came increasingly to be dominated by government, and internationa research in the social sciences devoted increasing attention to policy. This tendency was sharply accelerated from the 1880s when Bismarck’s social reforms shifted attention from the original industrial core, Britain, to the centre of an even more dynamic industrialisation. The displacement of attention was also noticeable in urban affairs, with Germany regarded as the source of the most effective and enlightened planning by the early 1900s.

In the twentieth century the role of government has been further enhanced by two World Wars which, paradoxically, have also led to a strengthening of the institutional framework of international cooperation and comparison. Since 1945, we in Britain have been noticeably incorporated into a European network, a process which has been accelerated by British membership of the European Community. This European orientation, of which we are constantly reminded by the contents of the ESRC Newsletter, now complements the special intellectual relationship of Britain with North America which derives partly from a common language. Thus, supranational institutions have again come to complicate but also to enrich the context of comparative investigations.

In terms of material wealth, the basis of British participation in the contemporary knowledge-producing network is very weak, but its potential knowledge input and coordinating power are substantial. From its long lost pioneering position in industrialisation, Britain has derived a strong university system and advanced institutions of government. It also still retains an important fulcrum position in relationships between Europe, North America, and the Third World. The knowledge input would be enhanced by a greater language facility than British researchers normally display, but the main second language in Britain is French, which is a very efficient complement to English which is increasingly becoming the international language of government as well as of commerce.

THE HISTORIAN’S CONTRIBUTION: TRANSFER AND INNOVATION

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Part One: The design and implementation of cross-national research projects
• Part Two: The study of planning in other cultures
• Part Three: The diffusion of planning ideas: the case of new towns
• Part Four: The role of international agencies in promoting cross-national comparisons
• Postscript
• Supplement: Teaching comparative planning