Planning for the Common Good

Mick Lennon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000529876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Appeals to the 'common good' or 'public interest' have long been used to justify planning as an activity. While often criticised, such appeals endure in spirit if not in name as practitioners and theorists seek ways to ensure that planning operates as an ethically attuned pursuit. Yet, this leaves us with the unavoidable question as to how an ethically sensitive common good should be understood. In response, this book proposes that the common good should not be conceived as something pre-existing and 'out there' to be identified and applied or something simply produced through the correct configuration of democracy. Instead, it is contended that the common good must be perceived as something 'in here, ' which is known by engagement with the complexities of a context through employing the interpretive tools supplied to one by the moral dimensions of the life in which one is inevitably embedded. This book brings into conversation a series of thinkers not normally mobilised in planning theory, including Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. These shine light on how the values carried by the planner are shaped through both their relationships with others and their relationship with the 'tradition of planning' – a tradition it is argued that extends as a form of reflective deliberation across time and space. It is contended that the mutually constitutive relationship that gives planning its raison d'être and the common good its meaning are conceived through a narrative understanding extending through time that contours the moral subject of planning as it simultaneously profiles the ethical orientation of the discipline. This book provides a new perspective on how we can come to better understand what planning entails and how this dialectically relates to the concept of the common good. In both its aim and approach, this book provides an original contribution to planning theory that reconceives why it is we do what we do, and how we envisage what should be done differently. It will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in planning, urban studies, sociology and geography.

PART 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155515-2

All theory is to greater or lesser degrees normative.

(Allmendinger, 2017: 17)

Anyone who has ever dipped their toe into planning theory soon realises that it is a flow of crosscurrents that at different times blend, contend or simply ignore each other. Consequently, any hope of an all-inclusive review of this torrent is doomed to failure. Part 1 thereby holds no pretence to an all-encompassing consideration of the topic. Hence, the following discussion is limited to debates related to the focus of this book – namely, planning in modern western democracies. It is for this reason that excellent work in the fields of postcolonial theory (Bishop et al., 2013; Jackson et al., 2017; Porter, 2016), insurgency in planning (Meth, 2010; Miraftab, 2009) and emerging approaches to informal settlements are not addressed (Amin and Cirolia, 2018; Roy, 2009). Moreover, aware that the ebb and flow of debate throws a variety of different perspectives onto the shores of academic attention, the two chapters that follow focus primarily on those theoretical approaches that have demonstrated a certain fixity against the tide of time. This is undertaken to balance the requirements of conciseness, comprehensiveness and clarity. Accordingly, more recent approaches that have yet to achieve broad purchase beyond their principal authors do not receive detailed attention. It is stressed that this is not an appraisal on the merits of such perspectives, as their currency across time will be the ultimate arbiter of their contribution. Rather, it is simply a matter of practicality. In this sense, provocative planning theory mining the oeuvre of Lacan (Gunder, 2016; Gunder and Hillier, 2009), Deleuze (Hillier, 2011; Wezemael, 2008) and Latour (Beauregard, 2015; Boelens, 2010; Rydin and Tate, 2016), as well as interesting work on complexity theory (Chettiparamb, 2014, 2019; de Roo, 2018) and institutionalism (Salet, 2018a, 2018b) are not discussed at length.¹ A growing number of anthologies (Fainstein and DeFilippis, 2016; Gualini, 2015; Madanipour, 2015), companions (Gunder et al., 2018; Healey and Hillier, 2016) and textbooks (Allmendinger, 2017; Beauregard, 2020) provide gateways to some of these new lines of thought should it be sought. It is not the function of this book to provide a similar survey of this ever-expanding corpus. Therefore, a degree of careful selection is required. As such, the following two chapters seek to trace those perspectives in the amorphous field of planning theory that in their traction at particular junctures or across time have had the greatest influence on the course of debate within the discipline.

In following Healey (2006: 336–337), planning theory is here understood as a ‘planning perspective and purposive orientation’ from which the world is apprehended. In keeping with the overall objectives of the book, each ‘planning perspective’ is reviewed in the context of ‘how’ the world is conceived, ‘what’ dimensions of this world are seen to matter and ‘why’ they are deemed to count. Issues of what is to be done by whom, how, when, where, why and with what consequences are discussed to complete the jigsaw of each theory where necessary. Examining this constellation of aspects facilitates working through the statements of leading proponents of each ‘perspective’ to determine and discuss its ‘purposive orientation’ by an examination of how each relates to a sense of the ‘common good’. Achieving this involves discerning the suppositions underpinning each perspective to distinguish if, how and in what ways the concept of a common good sustains that theoretical proposition. This is undertaken to explore and highlight the relevance of the common good as an idea to planning theory, even in instances where this is only implicitly acknowledged, or even explicitly, rejected. Reconceiving this relationship of theory and practice to the common good is subsequently addressed in Part 2 of this book. However, as argued in Part 2, appreciating the role of the common good in planning requires sensitivity to the moral agency of the planning subject. Hence, in exploring the mixed terrain of planning theory, the following two chapters also examine the conceptual constitution of the planner that is detailed, implied or can be deduced from each perspective under review.

While it is acknowledged that structuring the nebulosity of planning theory is a largely artificial exercise that risks silencing the complexity of influences between perspectives, if done carefully it can nevertheless yield the benefit of balancing lucidity, breadth and depth in a succinct manner without compromising an accurate representation of the theories under review (for example, see Allmendinger, 2017; Beauregard, 2020; Gunder et al., 2018; Healey and Hillier, 2016). In keeping with this, the first of the two chapters in Part 1 examines those influential theoretical perspectives that share a tacit or overtly focused approach to the identification of the common good. Hence, Chapter 1 opens by examining attempts to render planning a scientific activity and how the response that this elicited spawned an influential field of theory focused on inclusive deliberation. Whereas at first glance these approaches seem wholly opposed, it is argued that they are threaded together by a supposition that the common good should be an issue of concern and is possible to identify. The theoretical perspectives reviewed in the subsequent chapter take an opposing position. These largely eschew the idea of a ‘common’ good, viewing it as at best a redundant concept and more frequently as one that is inimical to the expression of difference. Each of these perspectives has a particular concern with issues of subject formation, oppression and freedom. It is argued that the explanatory potential of each perspective reviewed in Chapter 2 is hamstrung by either its explicit suspicion of claims to the ‘commonness’ of any good or the difficulties in rendering its concept of the subject operable in a planning context.

So where to start? It can be argued that planning has a deep past stretching back to antiquity and encompassing any occasion in history where people have sought to spatially organise their interactions with each other and their world. However, ‘planning theory’ as an identifiable field is normally considered to have emerged following the Second World War, albeit respectful nods are usually given in books, papers and university courses to the ‘inspirational precursors’ (Hillier and Healey, 2008a) of ‘architecture writ large’ (Taylor, 1998: 159) such as Howard, Geddes and Le Corbusier, as well as to great administrative innovators, such as Selznick and Mannheim. Furthermore, this book focuses on planning in modern western democracies, which themselves are historically specific polities that have largely taken shape after the Second World War. Accordingly, the analytical narrative that follows begins in the 1950s, when the development requirements of a rubble-strewn Europe and booming North America created opportunities for the institutionalisation of new ideas on how planning ought to be done.

Note

• 1 While work using Latour and Deleuze is well developed in geography, such work in planning theory is growing but nevertheless still limited to a small number of authors.

1

A CONCEIVABLE COMMON GOOD

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155515-3

Planning as a Rational Scientific Activity

In an influential paper first published in 1985, Klosterman notes that academic and public attention to planning peaked during the ‘great debate’ of the 1930s and 1940s. He remarks that during this period defenders of free-market ideologies like Hayek and von Mises contended for dominance with the proponents of government planning, such as Mannheim and Wootton. Referencing Dahl and Lindblom (1953), Klosterman infers,

By the 1950s the debate had apparently been resolved; the grand issues of the desirability and feasibility of planning had been replaced by more concrete questions concerning particular planning techniques and alternative institutional structures for achieving society’s objectives. Planning’s status in modern society seemed secure; the only remaining questions appeared to be ‘who shall plan, for what purpose, in what conditions, and by what devices?’

(Klosterman, 1985: 5)

For members of those affiliated with the Chicago School (University of Chicago), which is credited with seeding much thinking on planning following the Second World War, the answers to these questions were clear: planning was to be a technical discipline of societal management conducted for the common good that was characterised by coordinated government intervention and populated by experts (Sarbib, 1983). Taking their cue from fields such as economics and management sciences, champions of such ‘big planning’ like Rexford Tugwell believed that this expert-driven discipline would ‘achieve a clear vision of the future above the din of petty politics, by becoming institutionalized as a fourth branch of government, with its own autonomous sphere’ (Friedmann, 1987: 109). Conceived in this manner, planning was to advance societal development through practices ‘informed by scientific methods of inquiry and conducted in open and transparent ways’ (Healey and Hillier, 2008: 299). This would redress issues of political manipulation too frequently evident in North American urban governance (Meyerson and Banfield, 1955). It is against this backdrop that positivist decision-making concepts emerging in allied professions were imported into planning during the 1960s and flourished in the early 1970s, marking what Taylor (1998: 71) identifies as ‘the high tide of modern thought – the crest of that wave of optimism about the use of science and reason for human progress which had formed the European Enlightenment of the 18th century.’ This reshaping of planning entailed a fundamentally different understanding of the practice than what had come before. As explained by Hall (2014: 295), ‘Instead of the old master-plan or blueprint approach, the new concept was of planning as a process … And this planning process was independent of the thing that was planned.’ To the forefront of such thinking were two distinct theories on how planning should be conceived, which as noted by Taylor (1998) are not, nor were not in the 1960s, always properly distinguished from each other. These are, namely, the ‘systems’ and ‘rational’ theoretical positions.

Systems Theory

The physically and aesthetically focused ‘blueprint’ approach to planning as ‘architecture writ large’ (Taylor, 1998: 159) came under increasing criticism throughout the 1960s due to its perceived inflexibility to an increasing awareness that cities where multifaceted and ever changing. Particular criticism was levelled at planning for its overriding concern with the ‘appearance’ of spaces and the scant regard shown to the mundane workings or experiences typifying these spaces. In this moment of reflection, prominent commentators such as Jane Jacobs appeared to expose the questionable theoretical suppositions upon which planning was founded, thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of its professional expertise (Hirt and Zahm, 2012). It was in this context that a growing number of academics saw in the systems thinking of cybernetics a means to rectify these deficiencies. Indeed, as noted by Brian McLoughlin, one of the most prominent advocates of this new approach,

In medicine and in management, in astronautics and in biology, cybernetics is showing its astonishing powers. It is able to do this because its field is the study of complex and probabilistic systems and their control.

(1969: 91)

Inspired by new understandings of complexity in the emerging field of ecology and influenced by the enviable regard given the engineering-based mathematical models of transport planning, systems thinkers gained ground at a point in the history of modernist enthusiasm characterised by increasing computational power and an associated quantitative revolution sweeping across the social sciences (Giddens, 1990). For such theorists, the relevant dimensions of planning needed to extend beyond the physical and aesthetic to the measurable social and economic dynamics of urban life. This they felt would provide a more realistic perspective of how cities worked and as a consequence facilitate better planning (Forrester, 1969). Hence, behind the appeal to science, systems thinking was as much a normative endeavour as it was a project to furnish a more informed and intellectually robust approach to planning. In essence, it was believed that conceiving cities as ‘systems’ would enhance planners’ capacity to effect change for the common good, thereby securing the position of the discipline as that which legitimately intervenes in the dynamics of urban change.

For systems theorists, urban environments exemplify a complex and fluid set of relationships, which much like ecosystems are nested within hierarchies of interaction. Here, the dynamics of one set of relationships can influence others to generate aggregate forces that alter the trajectory of activity in a city. To proponents of systems theorising, this new urban ontology represented a sea change in thinking that portrayed planning ‘as an ongoing process of monitoring, analysing and intervening in fluid situations, rather than an exercise in producing “once-and-for-all” blueprints for the ideal future form of a town or city’ (Taylor, 1998: 62). From this perspective, planning involves the production of mathematical models that ‘make statements about the environment’ (McLoughlin, 1969: 223), which facilitates the determination of desired development trajectories and the identification of appropriate interventions to realise these. Accordingly, the planner’s role with respect to this reconceived city of dynamic relationships is transformed. As described by Ratcliffe,

It is the planner’s function to comprehend this tangled web of relationships, and where necessary, to guide, control and change their composition. To do this, planning is concerned with prediction, not only of population size and land use in isolation, but also of human and other activities as well. It has been said that planners are now the prisoners of the discovery that in a city everything affects everything else.

(1981: 115)

In this sense, ‘the systems perspective is highly “planner-centric” in that it places a great deal of emphasis upon professional opinion in an abstracted and technical process where goals flow from an analysis of problems’ (Allmendinger, 2017: 64). Planning and planners are located like the brain of a system to which all information flows, is processed, and direction subsequently issues. With a focus on quantitative data, the information collated is used to model possible trajectories and action then taken to calibrate decisions such that plans are conceived as ‘charts of a course to be steered’ (McLoughlin, 1969: 83). This newfound expertise placed planners in an authoritative position of direction-setting justified on the view that

one of the most forceful arguments for placing primary responsibility for goal formulation on the planner … [is] the assumption, traditional to profession-als, that, in some way, they ‘know more’ about the situations on which they advise than do their clients.

(Chadwick, 1971: 121)

No longer bound by quickly outdated ‘blueprints,’ planning was reimagined as an open-ended endeavour of ‘piloting’ wherein the planner both sets the course and corrects for changes along the way. As summarised by McLoughlin,

We can picture the planner now as a helmsman steering the city. His (sic) attention focuses on the plan – the charted course – the future states through which the city should pass – and on the survey observations which indicate its actual state.

(1969: 86–87)

The planner thus tames the fluid complexity of urban dynamics via the power of analysis. Yet, by both charting the course and piloting, this approach smuggles into the seeming objectivity of the process a degree of intersubjective normativity wherein expert decisions on what should be counted, how, when and why ultimately leads to decisions on what amounts to the common good (‘the charted course’), and how this should be realised by ‘steering the city’. Hence, it is unsurprising that this perspective was criticised for the hubristic assumption that it was possible for planners to comprehensively quantify, understand and control the fluid complexity of cities in determining and delivering the common good. Most notable among this reproach was the criticism that extracting planning from the clutter of politics silenced the messiness of real-world urban governance where frequently unpredictable and conflicting imperatives rendered the objectives of a systems perspective unachievable. For some of its contemporary critics, the problem of systems theory thereby lay not in the assumption that a ‘scientific’ approach to planning was at fault. Instead, the primary issue was how the scientific method had been mis-conceived by systems perspectives to incorporate goal specification. Accordingly, another camp of theorists stressed the need to confine the ambitions of planning to the process of effectively delivering on political decisions. This view is most generally known as the ‘rational process theory’ of planning.

Rational Process Theory

Prominent among theorists who believed that planning should be instrumental in serving the implementation of goals rather than in specifying them was Andreas Fauldi (1973). His influential work became a touchstone in planning thinking from the mid-1970s well into the 1980s. Fauldi was enamoured by the scientific method, which he equated with planning. As he exclaimed,

I perceive planning as analogous to that other activity that has resulted in unparalleled human growth: science. Planning and science can be seen as twin sisters born from the same desire of man (sic) to free himself from the strictures of ignorance and fear. Planning and science propel this process of man becoming master over his world and himself along ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• References
• Index