Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements

The Rugged, Dialectical Path from Knowledge to Action

Richard S Bolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315309194
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements explores the long-held idea that urban planning is the link in moving from knowledge to action. Observing that the knowledge domain of the planning profession is constantly expanding, the approach is a deep philosophical analysis of what is the quality and character of understanding that urban planners need for expert engagement in urban planning episodes. This book philosophically analyses the problems in understanding the nature of action — both individual and social action. Included in the analysis are the philosophical concerns regarding space/place and the institution of private property. The final chapter extensively explores the linkage between knowledge and action. This emerges as the process of design in seeking better urban communities — design processes that go beyond buildings, tools, or fashions but are focused on bettering human urban relationships.

Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements provides rich analysis and understanding of the theory and history of planning and what it means for planning practitioners on the ground.

Part I

Knowledge and Expertise

2 The Knowledge–Action Problem

Many kinds of intelligence are integral to the work of urban planners—much more than simply the formalized, established doctrine or ‘knowledge’ of the professional planning specialty itself, and much more than “local” knowledge. At the same time, what the expert planner needs to ‘know’ and what he/she needs to ‘know how to do’ is considerably more diffuse and less systematically organized than formal textbooks or other organized accounts of planning knowledge. In this chapter, what is laid out is a complex hypothesis that postulates how ‘knowing,’ as such, is linked to the process of deciding ‘what to do’—deciding on action. In what way does knowledge contribute to judgments about an appropriate course of action, and what are the limits of such contribution? This chapter will offer a sketch of what is involved, and subsequent chapters will go deeper into the fundamentals of each element of the sketch.

Urban planning has been traditionally seen as a “design” profession. Planning curriculum in the past featured “studios” similar to those found in schools of architecture and landscape architecture. Consequently, there has always been an innate thrust of creativity in urban planning problem-solving. While the architect focuses on the shape or form of a single building or group of buildings, urban planners are concerned about broad-scale urban landscapes and the overall experience of urban life. This broader task orientation led to the perceived need to bring in the social sciences. Deciding what to do in urban planning episodes therefore has become extremely complicated. Today, many (if not most) such decisions are controversial in nature. Thus, planners today find themselves enmeshed in complex political-economic-social environments marked by controversy—making the problem of linking knowledge to action even more daunting.

My concentration will be to elaborate in more detail exactly how linking knowledge to action takes place for urban planners. Seldom is expert planning practice the pure application of specialized formal professional knowledge. Rather, it is a complex process that incorporates the entire range of conscious faculties of the planner, including the accumulated experience, social-perceptual skills, emotional awareness, tacit knowledge and various talents for aesthetic creativity employing the full range of human awareness, understanding and ‘knowing how.’ Moreover, planning practice is never simply an encounter between lay clients (and their community problems) and a certified professional planner with expert knowledge applicable to the problems. A planning episode is a situated field of action—comprising a total social process (Schön, 1983)—or what Friedmann argues is a mutual learning process (Friedmann, 1987). Such episodes may be characterized by ‘rational’ thought and discourse on the surface, but they are underlain with latent emotional or tacit meanings, symbols, rituals, beliefs, historical experiences, statuses, power relations, motivations, needs, psychological affects (affection, respect, hostility), and other elements that make up a total “shared consciousness” (Schutz, 1962, 55–56).

The problems involved in the relation of knowledge and action will be developed with a focus on knowledge in Chapters 3,4,5 and 6. After this, Chapters 7 and 8 review and develop the range of thought that has been concerned with the notion of human action or human agency. Understanding human action extends beyond social science. The dominant influence, and apparent usefulness, of the mechanistic root metaphor of science (discussed in Chapter 3) has conveyed the implicit assumption that competent expertise is directly derived from mechanical application of ‘scientific,’ static, mathematical models of social life. In simple terms, the supposition is that primary laws of cause and effect provide the basis for rational choice decision-making. In this chapter, I will first explore a brief background of rational decision-theory together with an explanation of why traditional decision theory does not cover the complexity of the path between knowledge and deciding what to do. Then I will outline a primary sketch framework, or hypothesis, of the basic elements I postulate concerning the knowledge-to-action process.

Rational Decision Theory

The traditional rational choice theory for urban planning is outmoded today and has been for some time. Were one to consult standard dictionary definitions, one would find that to rationalize is to reason, to calculate, to cause something to seem reasonable. Each of these definitions of course begs the question: What is reason, or what are the characteristics of being reasonable? To reason properly, or to be reasonable, involves standards or norms and thereby implicate a value stance.

Rational choice decision theory had its origins in economic theory where it was assumed that all participants in economic life are rational beings. From this, economic science argued that everyone acts in a manner in which rational choices are made to maximize utility—for both buyers and sellers.¹ Rational choice for urban planning meant that faced with a problem (or opportunity), the planner would gather all the information and/or evidence pertaining to the situation. He/she then develops a list of optional means of achieving the goal (in planning agencies, goals were assumed to be set by elected officials—planners accepted the goals and then used their professional skills to determine how best to achieve them). Planners analyzed the options regarding their difficulty and costs to arrive at a single optimal solution (often using cost–benefit and/or risk assessment study). Herbert Simon (1947) early on recognized the practical limitations of this and argued that “satisficing” was a more realistic means of deciding. Charles Lindblom also recognized the limits of rational choice theory, suggesting that in public policy-making we “muddle through” using “disjointed incrementalism” (Lindblom, 1959).

The critical problem with rational choice theory lay not only in its practicality but, more importantly, its failure to provide a means of ethical or normative analysis regarding the selection of goals. The theory failed to consider the problems of reasoning about values.² Max Weber, early on, identified four distinct types of rationality, two of which focus on the practical interests of securing the needs and wants of life, while the other two focus on value and meaning springing from the problems of human association (Kalberg, 1980, 1151–9). These four can be described as follows:

1. Practical rationality pertains to the thought processes associated with the pursuit of pragmatic and egoistic interests. It is the means by which individuals take account of the world as it exists and calculate the most expedient means of dealing with it (this is the heart of rational choice theory, particularly in economics).
2. Theoretical rationality is a process in which humans seek mastery over the world through the attribution of causality developed by increasingly precise abstract concepts (one example is physics: see Chapter 4).
3. Substantive rationality is a form of rationalization that embodies not a purely means–ends calculation but rather the development of patterns of action based on value postulates or clusters of values. Substantive rationality is that reasoning through which values, in and of themselves, come to be accepted. Weber states:
   Something is not of itself ‘irrational,’ but rather becomes so when examined from a specific ‘rational’ standpoint. Every religious person is ‘irrational’ for every irreligious person, and every hedonist likewise views every ascetic way of life as ‘irrational,’ even if, measured in terms of its ultimate values, a ‘rationalization’ has taken place.

   (quoted in Kalberg, 1980, 1156)
   Thus, in Weber’s terms, differing lifestyles or life worlds defend their own values as “rational” and label others “irrational.” Weber also argues that there is, thus, no absolute standard for substantive rationality. The best contemporary case is found in political ideologies where progressive left ideology sees conservatism as irrational and conservative right ideology sees progressivism as irrational.
4. Formal rationality relates to those thought processes that seek to codify practical rationality with reference to a substantively rationalized worldview of value. The result is formal laws, rules, regulations, and formally structured institutional patterns of domination and administration. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 5.

I argue that all four types, at the minimum, are engaged in rationalizing at all levels for both individual and collective decision processes. Thus the reference points for the mental processes associated with rationalization include: interests, wants, desires, values, worldviews, and institutional norms, laws, and regulations. Purely means–ends calculations are but a single manifestation of these multiple processes. All four types become involved in decision-making in what I term as “adaptive rationality” (Bolan, 1999). Thus, what I present here is an effort to provide a more comprehensive perspective of the path from knowledge to action as a conduit that embraces all forms of reasonable or reasoned decision-making.³

Outline of the Problem

A. A Cartoon of the Knowledge–Action Problem

Figure 2.1 offers a ‘cartoon’ framework from which I proceed. The diagram can be thought of as abstractly representing a decision situation faced by any professional practitioner—a lawyer, a city manager, a clergyman, an urban planner. Within the framework of this decision situation, there exists a history of prior experience in the biography of each actor involved in the decision, and this is represented by the block at the base of the diagram. Thus, every decision situation rests on a ‘foundation’ of accumulated history that exists within the memory of the actors immersed in the situation. It is a foundation of past socially constructed institutions, practices, norms, rituals, language, etc. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Searle, 1995, 2010; Elder-Vass, 2012). It is important to note that this foundation operates within a remembered stock of experience; ‘prior conditions’ does not refer to everything that has occurred before but only that which has abided or persisted and is still a working part of the current stock of what is known—or the ‘working memory.’ Clearly a wide variety of memory traces may emerge here, including some that may be seemingly unconnected but yet offer analogic, or metaphorical, potentialities to decision processes. Moreover, the specific memory traces applicable to the situation may be quite different for each individual participant in the situation.

From this, the platform of the decision situation is guided by three different ‘vehicles of apperception’ of the world. These different modes of ‘knowing’ help to raise the decision-maker’s ‘threshold of understanding’ and have a significant effect on how a decision-maker perceives, defines, or delineates a decision situation. Each offers pre-thematic contributions to a diagnostic process that provides a sense of the dimensions and characteristics of dominant themes within the decision situation, as well as a sense of the “frame” of the horizon (Goffman, 1974; Watzlavick, et al., 1972). Much of this understanding will be tacit; the decision-maker, if pressed, could not easily or quickly articulate exactly everything that fills consciousness as the themes and horizon of the decision situation take shape.

Figure 2.1 The Knowledge–Action Problem

What is important, however, is that each vehicle of apperception—history, science, culture, and self—contributes to determining the ‘threshold of understanding’ shown in Figure 2.1. While the diagram as drawn suggests that each might contribute equally, specific weightings of contributions for specific individuals will vary considerably as shaped by prior experience, training, and modes of understanding characteristically amenable to the particular talents, skills, emotions, and other predispositions of the decision-maker(s). Each of the modes of understanding, however, represents a limited abstraction of comprehensive concrete social reality. Thus these different strands of meanings and concepts necessarily interweave and intermix in any given decision process.

Figure 2.1 depicts the decision situation with a combination of prior conditions in the different types of knowing and constitutes a ‘threshold of understanding’ that contributes to shaping, both explicitly and implicitly, the themes and horizon of the decision situation. The diagram also suggests, however, that, in spite of these conscious perceptual processes, there still remains a ‘gap in understanding’ filled with uncertainty. Thus, the decision itself is a step into the unknown—an act of faith—a ‘bet’ that whatever mode of reasoning was used or predominated in the decision process (its understanding of causality, its beginning assumptions, its history of past interventions, its goal values, and any creative incursions) are correct.

Finally, with the ‘gap in understanding,’ the diagram depicts the ‘field’ of ‘alternative possibilities’: the recognition that the decision-maker is a human being in a human situation—a situation thus open to the future and endowed with contingent choice, ambiguity, emotional value, and including the capacity for transcendence, as will be detailed in Chapter 6 (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 162–163; Sartre, 1963). Indeed, this latter capacity is explicitly suggested on the diagram. The commitment to a decision—to a goal—lies above a ‘level of transcendence’; and the space depicted between the ‘threshold of understanding’ and the ‘level of transcendence’ diagrammatically represents the chasm between what we actually do ‘know’ in a given situation and that which we would truly need to ‘know’ if we were to possess total accurate foresight such that a given decision and its implementing actions would turn out exactly as desired with no unintended consequences. Finally, the commitment to a decision, the commitment to throw mind, body, and soul toward a specific course of action. A specific goal is not only a leap into the unknown—it is, as well, a striving for transcendence, an effort to ‘surpass’ or ‘go beyond’ the given situation. This will be more fully examined in Chapter 6. At this point, it is important to examine fully the nature and origins of the ‘gap in understanding’ depicted in Figure 2.1.

B. Origins of the Gap in Understanding

There are three primary thrusts in grasping the ‘gap i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Knowledge and Expertise
• PART II Knowledge and Action
• PART III The Nature of Professional Action in Urban Planning
• Epilogue
• Index