Political Economy, Diversity and Pragmatism

Critical Essays in Planning Theory: Volume 2

Patsy Healey, Jean Hillier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754627227
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351910361
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Business

Planning Theory has a history of common debates about ideas and practices and is rooted in a critical concern for the 'improvement' of human and environmental well-being, particularly as pursued through interventions which seek to shape environmental conditions and place qualities. The second volume in this series covers in detail critical political economy, the turn to diversity and critical pragmatism. It provides an authoritative collection, in an accessible form, of the most important and influential articles and papers along with a detailed introduction by the editors. It offers a unique reference resource for planning scholars, upper-level undergraduate and post-graduate students.

Part I
Critical Political Economy

Introduction to Part I

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny the appearance of justice. (LA FONTAINE 1668, cited in GUNDER FRANK, 2005)

We understand critical political economy as referring to a broad stream of thought which developed in the 1970s, particularly in the fields of geography and sociology, and which gradually came to influence spatial planning theory during that decade and after. The term ‘political economy’ incorporates a range of perspectives which have in common the understanding of ‘economy’ as ‘social economy, or way of life, founded in production’. In turn, ‘social provision is viewed not as a neutral act by neutral agents but as a political act carried out by members of classes and other social groupings’ (Peet and Thrift, 1989, p. 3). Such a definition owes clear allegiance to Marxism, which became a dominant, if not the dominant, school of critical thinking in the social sciences in the 1970s.

As John Friedmann remarks, ‘linked to a comprehensive philosophical conception, systematic social criticism, and a utopian vision, the Marxian image of humanity is a powerful, compelling one’ (1987, p. 264). Marxism offers a frame for understanding politics and economics simultaneously. Marxist analysis of capitalism as a historical, yet dynamic system, or mode of production, gave geographers and planners an understanding of why and how capitalists constantly performed processes of innovation and destruction, often leading to fundamental changes in the economic and social structures of places as old industrial processes and sites were abandoned in favour of new, more efficient processes and sites, often in the global South.

The version of Marxism which dominated Western thinking in the 1960s and 1970s travelled, like many other philosophical ideas, from France where the thinking of Henri Lefebvre was theoretically informed by Marx and Nietzsche (Eiden, 2004; Kofman and Lebas, 1996) and heavily politically engaged. Unlike that of Louis Althusser (see below), Lefebvre’s was an anti-structural Marxism: determination without determinism – a revised Marxist humanism (Eiden, 2004, p. 26).

Lefebvre’s work, however, took a long time to be translated into English and hence to influence the Anglo-American academic world, in particular of urban geographers including Derek Gregory (1994), Ed Soja (1989, 1996) and Andy Merrifield (2002, 2006). For instance, The Right to the City, published in French in 1968 was only translated in 1996, The Urban Revolution (1970) in 2003 and The Production of Space (1974) in 1991. Lefebvre’s impact on English-speaking theory has effectively been confined to the period since the publication of The Production of Space, unlike the work of his compatriot, Althusser (1969).

Althusser’s structuralist position held that society was a complex ‘structure in dominance’ in which the capitalist mode of production assigned each social element its place in a hierarchy of dominance and subordination (Peet and Thrift, 1989, p. 10). The spatial organization of society is thus directly related to its class structuring. Theorists, influenced by Althusser, applied his ideas to critical analysis of the state (see, for example, Poulantzas, 1978) and to urban space as in Castells (1977). Castells’ The Urban Question¹ became a seminal text which regarded the urban as the projection of society on space. People, living and working relationally with one another, give space 4 a form, a function, a social signification’ (Castells 1977, p. 115). Castells posed the questions: ‘What is the process of the social production of the (urban) spatial forms of society?’ and, conversely, ‘What are the relations between urban space and structural transformations in society?’ (Peet, 1998, p. 125).

Castells argued that it is the economic system which ‘organizes’ space – the distribution of land uses and the production of goods, including those for collective consumption (such as social housing, schools, hospitals and so on). The spatial distribution of population and its production and consumption behaviours are therefore best explained by the inevitably uneven expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Such organization does not occur simply at local levels, but globally, as capitalists search around the world for appropriate raw materials, labour power and means of production. Places are ‘locationally specific ensembles of “usual effects” or “use-values”, differentially effective with respect to the process of capitalist production’ (Berry, 1983, p. 21).

Given the dynamism of capital through space and time, places must be understood in terms of the historical articulation of modes of production. In Castells’ structuralism, each mode of production, and even each instance of a mode, is related to a different organization of space. For instance, in advanced capitalism, as Peet (1998, p. 126) explains, elements concerned with the administration of labour processes and the circulation of capital are characterized by globalization; the means of production are organized regionally, and the spatial organization of the reproduction of labour power is organized locally. Castells, therefore, describes cities as ‘units of the collective reproduction of labour power in the capitalist mode of production’ (1977, p. 445). Such a description leads to questions of the urban and to spatial planning as a core issue of advanced capitalism: ‘the urban question refers to the organization of the means of collective consumption as the basis of the daily life of all social groups: housing, education, health, culture, commerce, transport, etc’ (Castells, 1978, cited in Peet, 1998, p. 126).

The essay by A.J. Scott and S.T. Roweis, which opens Part I of this volume, develops this point. The authors recognize that planning is embedded in urbanization and that urbanization, in turn, is embedded within the specific global framework of capitalist society. They also acknowledge the increasing politicization of planning practice which serves, as an apparatus of the state, as ‘a channel of appropriation of net income shares’ (p. 32) through allocation of land uses and so on. Scott and Roweis criticize ‘conventional’ planning theories for not coming to terms with these issues and advocate the need for a new, ‘viable’ theory of urban planning which better justifies its existence.

Political economists maintain that property and power are the key elements underlying class struggle. As Sandercock and Berry argue, urban planners:

… are standing on the major fault line of contemporary capitalist societies between what may be crudely expressed as a ‘logic of capitalism’ (social investment, the ideology of private property, etc) and a ‘logic of socialism’ (social consumption, the ideology of social need, etc). (Sandercock and Berry, 1983, p. xi)

Urban planning is thus a4 social event’ (Taylor, 1998, p. 105), embedded within societal political economy. Planning practitioners attempt to deal with the contradictions of capitalism, such as inadequate physical infrastructure, the failure to provide ‘public’ goods (such as pollution-free environments) and the lack of collective consumption goods (such as social housing), as outlined in the essay by Norman Fainstein and Susan Fainstein (Chapter 3).

Fainstein and Fainstein describe planning as organized through the state to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie; as being ‘necessary to the ruling class in order to facilitate accumulation and maintain social control’, as ‘specializing] in managing the contradictions of capitalism manifested in urban form and spatial development’, and ‘depoliticizfing], that is, castfing] in technical terms, the planning activities of the state’ (p. 64). Reflecting the essay by Scott and Roweis, Fainstein and Fainstein’s key argument is that planning practitioners are compelled to intervene in order to resolve the contradictions of capitalism and to secure its continuation. The authors suggest that planners’ attempts to advance the interests of market-disadvantaged groups are thus doomed to failure. In fact, the attempts might even harm such groups because potentially beneficial structural reforms might be forestalled.

The geographer David Harvey identified the annihilation of space by capital and the inadequacy of non-productive urban infrastructure for serving the poor and people of colour as one dimension of, if not the whole, urban crisis. Specifically acknowledging the Marxist urban sociology of Lefebvre, and his reading (in French) of The Urban Revolution, in Social Justice and the City, Harvey argues for ‘a just distribution, justly arrived at’ (1973, p. 97), primarily on the basis of need, while in The Limits to Capital (1982) he offers a Marxist-inspired theoretical account of uneven spatial development.

In the essay reproduced here as Chapter 4, ‘On Planning the Ideology of Planning’, Harvey states that ‘part of the planner’s task’ is to ‘head off’, if possible, an incipient crisis of the built environment and to maintain the conditions for capitalism to continue in its course. Making a similar argument to that of Fainstein and Fainstein about depoliticization, Harvey suggests that political struggles are reduced ‘under the planner’s influence’ to technical arguments for which a ‘rational’ solution can be found.

Christine Boyer, in her dialectical² assessment of the production of urban landscapes from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s, would agree that spatial planning practice has failed to be humanistic, based on human values, and has tended to impose visual streetscapes based on abstract rationality dominated by ‘technical utilitarianism and functional organisation’ (1983, pp. 282–83). Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, Boyer examines, in her Dreaming the Rational City (1983), the structures of power and oppression in the city and how disciplinary management of space influences the ways in which cities and their buildings are formulated and used as tools for social ordering. Under the guise of rational city plans and regulatory control, planning became a major facilitator of the ‘mainstream reproduction of capital accumulation’ (1983, p. 62), mimicking urban design and architectural fashions such that as she concludes in the piece reproduced in this volume as Chapter 5, ‘a plurality of copies stood in place of a unique experience’ (p. 132). US cities ‘became encoded with an ideological message expressing a system of needs well embedded within the economic and political sphere of capitalism: those of nationalist grandeur, economic imperialism and political triumph’ (p. 132). Boyer’s comments would appear to be even more pertinent in early twenty-first century America than they were in the 1980s.

Are planners really, then, ‘doomed to a life of perpetual frustration’, to ‘grubby practices’ (Harvey, Chapter 4, p. 184) in legitimation and perpetuation of capitalism? Or is there hope, as Harvey later argues, for planners to become activist ‘insurgent architects’ with a ‘lust for transformative action’ (2000, p. 244)?

Critical political economy theory was heavily concerned with cities in Europe and North America, yet its origins and applications were far broader than the urban and the global North. The problems posed by capitalism tended to loom largest in the South, where patterns of dependence underwrote development in the North (Berry, 1983). For instance, colonial domination involved the direct subjugation of peoples and territories to the dominant society. Capitalist-commercial domination was imposed through trade relations favourable to the North, and imperialist industrial and financial domination was imposed through the provision of loan capital and the establishment of branches of multinational enterprises, including Northern finance houses (Castells, 1977).

It is no surprise that several influential theorists in the political economy tradition had lived and worked in Latin America where such imperialism was hotly debated and resisted.³ Manuel Castells, André Gunder Frank, John Friedmann, Patsy Healey, Arturo Escobar and Ernesto Laclau, to name but a few, all had strong connections with South America between the 1960s and 1980s. André Gunder Frank’s development of dependency theory and world systems theory in the 1960s used some Marxian concepts, but rejected others, such as the theory that history passed through successive stages (primitive communism, barbarism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism) of historical materialism (Turner, Beeghley and Powers, 1998, p. 116). Gunder Frank’s move to Chile in 1962 and subsequent involvement in reforms in the Allende administration led directly to his observation in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) that ‘[e]conomic development and underdevelopment are the opposite faces of the same coin’(this volume, (p. 41). Just before his death in 2005, Gunder Frank argued the continued validity of dependency theory: ‘so far from dependence having declined as some alleged, the degree of dependence has increased’ (2005, np).

In contrast to Gunder Frank’s fatalism, however, Friedmann and Weaver in (Chapter 8), offer an ‘agropolitan approach’ at a regional level as a means of overcoming dependency. Their concept of a ‘basic needs’ strategy implemented by urban-based rural development includes elements such as ‘enlightened self reliance’, communalism of productive wealth and equalization of access to social power structures. The importance of territorial and functional integration is recognized in Friedmann and Weaver’s principles of self-reliant territorial development: economic diversification, maximum physical development constrained by the need for conservation and expanding domestic markets. Although they severely critiqued the growth-centre doctrine of Perroux (1955) and Boudeville (1972)⁴ in favour of their basic needs approach, many academic ‘gurus’, such as Jeffrey Sachs (2005, 2007), have continued to advocate an economic rationalist form of growth-centre-oriented ‘development’.

Although Jane Jacobs is predominantly known as a critic of spatial planning, and has described herself as ‘a theorist who opposed most theories’ (Ouroussoff, 2006, np), her arguments in The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) are somewhat similar to those of Friedmann and Weaver. Here, she advocates the vital role of import replacement in economic growth and suggests that a dynamic city should transform its hinterland into a city region, in which development works in balance. Jacobs’ anti-planning views appear in her stated belief that ‘a working city region doesn’t need development experts, it develops itself’ (cited in Rosenfeld, 2006, np).

Jacobs is best known for her powerful critique of 1950s urban renewal and seemingly abstract planning under leaders such as Robert Moses. She opposed expressways and other elements of ‘over-designed’ cities which dampened individual inventiveness. In Chapter 6 – an extract from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1963) – Jacobs argues for recognition of the ‘organized complexity’ of cities rather than the ‘disorganized complexity’ which planners perceive as a ‘malfunction’ and are compelled to ‘correct’. She suggests that for ‘common sense and practical realism’ to prevail there was a need to go inside or to ‘look down’ as John Law (2004) would later argue; to work through agency rather than through structural frames; ‘to think about process; to work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse; to seek for “unaverage” clues involving very small quantities’ (p. 149).

Jacobs’ strong support for ‘urban neighbourhoods’ in their traditional form has been highly influential in planning thought and practice. It was revived in the 1990s, in particular by the New Urbanist movement,⁵ which has not only led to rather genteel, gentrified developments in the United States, the UK and Australia, but has also tended to reduce Jacobs’ vision of comer shops and busy streets to ‘a superficial town formula that creates the illu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Critical Political Economy
• Part II The Turn To Diversity
• Part III Critical Pragmatism
• Name Index