From the original inspiration of regulating nuisances in the industrial city , to more contemporary uses of evaluating increased density , promoting transit-oriented development or endorsing low-carbon and human-scale built forms, planning identifies, projects, and aligns relations across the physical environment. These relations are formed between activities and buildings, or more generally planning relates objects. For example, relations are deployed to prevent a residential tower from casting a shadow on an adjacent park, to complement a residential development with a school , to require ample parking for a mixed-use building, or to assess the impact of a new big box store on inner-city retail. The first set of relations between the objects of planning is made possible by a second set: those inside the practice of planning itself. For example, in the regulation of objects, land-use planners draw zoning maps, limit floor-to-space ratios (FSR), study household projections, simulate shadows, and meet with landowners.
With relations in the objects and practices abound, a popular definition of planning states it as ‘that professional practice that seeks to connect forms of knowledge with forms of actions in the public domain’ (Friedmann 1993: 482; emphasis added). This definition is often shortened into the more simple ‘link between knowledge and action’; however, the drawback of this formulation is the loss of complexity to the connection between knowledge and action, leaving it to appear as simply integrated, linear, and logic. This simplistic definition was thought to be true in the early days of planning, but in the last decades the link has been widely considered as complex, uncertain, and messy (De Roo and Silva 2010). Consequently, past adjectives of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ have been superseded by ‘transactive’ (Friedmann 1973), ‘collaborative’ (Healey 1997), or ‘deliberative’ (Forester 1999) to indicate a form of planning that embraces subjectivity, uncertainty , and complexity.
As the chapters in this volume exhibit, in addition to a more contingent connection, the respective forms of knowledge and action are multiplied through international expert workshops (Söderström, this volume), participatory planning processes (Kurath, this volume), governance networks (Torres, this volume) and stakeholder initiatives (Blok, this volume). Consequently, the relations between the objects of planning are increasingly shaped by the adversarial, multiple, and heterogeneous relations inside the practices of planning. The multiplication of forms of knowledge and action transforms the connections between the two into an important research topic. It raises the question of the many trajectories of planning issues and the few planning imaginations that order them. Such a problematization of planning follows the view on space from Thrift (2008) and Löw (2008) as relational and as an assemblage of technical and social practices.
So, for a practice that is already relational by a conventional definition, why in this book do we introduce the qualifier known as ‘relational’? While planning indeed has an almost foundational interest in the relations between objects , the latter have been little theorized with respect to the relations found inside the planning practices themselves (Karvonen, this volume). The chapters collected here illustrate that this kind of relationality can bring valuable insights. In general, it emphasizes how the planning process relies on expert officials and experienced stakeholders to negotiate different assessments and versions of the city while incorporating different entities and concerns in various planning locations. Although relations are not new to the planning studies agenda (see Healey 2006), they have in the most part only been studied in instrumental ways, separating the relationality of objects and practices. This book suggests a more symmetrical analysis of the relations between planning objects and practices in order to explore the trajectories of different forms of knowledge and action.
Unlike what other adjectives of planning might suggest, this volume does not hold relational planning as a paradigmatic change in studying or carrying out planning. Instead, it proposes to study the relationality that is so characteristic of planning, not through an instrumental lens, but more so an empirical one. Consequently, this book attempts to distinguish the relations in planning to recognize how specific sets of object–practice associations relate to space, and to explore the reasons behind how some entities manage to stabilize networks that come to enact a specific place . In other words, it inquires how heterogeneous entities, forms of knowledge, and forms of action are involved and engaged in the planning process . The aim for this inquiry is to think through the formation of new assemblages harnessing the multiplicity of forms, and harbouring the heterogeneity of entities.
The following chapters primarily discuss the turn to the empirical through the writings and ideas of Science and Technology Studies (STS)—a study field surfaced in the 1960s studying the mutual shaping of science and technology on the one hand, and society, politics and culture on the other (Sismondo 2009). In planning theory , several scholars have specifically drawn on STS and actor–network theory (ANT) to account for the non-human entities that occupy the ‘material’ world of planning practice (Beauregard 2015; Lieto and Beauregard 2015; Rydin 2013; Doak and Karadimitriou 2016). This book touches upon this research by studying the material mediations between ‘knowledge and action’. At the same time, it opens up the multiple forms of knowledge and action for analysis within the wider STS repertoire.
Positioned in what has been called a ‘material turn’ in planning theory (Rydin 2014), this book does not set a definite STS agenda for planning research. Rather, it aims to develop an overall sensibility of STS , apt to grasp the distinct relationality of planning. It should be noted that STS is not a clearly defined or coherent theory, as the diversity of concepts and met...