Connections

Exploring Contemporary Planning Theory and Practice with Patsy Healey

Jean Hillier, Jonathan Metzger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317161974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Urbanisme et développement urbain

The professional practice as well as the academic discipline of planning has been fundamentally re-invented all over the world in recent decades. In this astonishing transition, the thinking and scholarship of Patsy Healey appears as a constantly recurring influence and inspiration around the globe. The purpose of this book is to present, discuss and celebrate Healey's seminal contributions to the development of the theory and practice of spatial planning. The volume contains a selection of 13 less readily available, but nevertheless, key texts by Healey, which have been selected to represent the trajectory of Patsy's work across the several decades of her research career. 12 original chapters by a wide range of invited contributors take the ideas in the reprinted papers as points of departure for their own work, tracing out their continuing relevance for contemporary and future directions in planning scholarship. In doing so, these chapters tease out the themes and interests in Healey's work which are still highly relevant to the planning project. The title - Connections - symbolises relationality, possibly the most outstanding element linking Patsy's ideas. The book showcases the wide international influence of Patsy's work and celebrates the whole trajectory of work to show how many of her ideas on for instance the role of theory in planning, processes of change, networking as a mode of governance, how ideas spread, and ways of thinking planning democratically were ahead of their time and are still of importance.

PART I
Introduction

Connections: An Introduction

Jean Hillier and Jonathan Metzger

The central concern … is with the nature and potentials of planning as a basis for action … In other words … planning and change. The emphasis [is] … on examining the activity of planners and planning agencies in relation to these problems and to the wider society of which they are a part … within the context of the social and political structure of society. This leads to a consideration of the terms and purposes of … planning.

(Healey, 1974a: 147).

Cited above are the opening lines of Patsy Healey’s first major contribution as a planning scholar, entitled ‘Planning and Change’, which appeared in Progress in Planning in 1974. In hindsight, it also reads as an overarching description of the broad research agenda which she has pursued for more than four decades and through more than 250 scholarly publications, among which are included some of the most influential texts in planning studies — and in this process generating one of the most distinguished careers within this academic field. As evinced by the opening quote, throughout her career, Patsy Healey has always had the practice of planning as her central concern; the nitty-gritty ‘doing’ of planning work. She has always understood this practice of planning as inevitably situated in an institutional and geographic context, which in turn generates a demand for critical attention to the ‘where of things’ and the difference this makes. Further, she has approached the study of planning practice with an understanding of it as being a fundamentally normative activity, even if it is not always recognised as such (a problem in itself according to Healey, see e.g. 1974b), which further means that we always have to keep tabs on exactly which norms and values are being enacted and propagated in the micro of planning ‘episodes’ and the macro of larger ‘endeavours’.

As Healey herself notes in the Epilogue to the present volume, these ideas were painfully out of sync with academic fashions in planning research at the point of time when she started out. But, to a large extent the landscape of this field has shifted significantly, and several of the ideas that were seen as contrarian at the time have been regarded in hindsight as avant-garde and have been accepted into the mainstream of contemporary planning thought. As a consequence of this, Patsy Healey is today one of the most widely cited and translated planning scholars of all times. Her work has been central to the formation of ‘planning studies’ as a distinct academic subject and recognised international field of research. It may therefore seem bizarre to claim that Healey’s work has not yet received the full recognition that it deserves. Nevertheless, this is what André Sorensen does, when he argues (in Chapter 25) that at some future point, it is likely that ‘historians of social science will recognise Healey’s body of work as a major contribution to sociological institutionalist thought’. We agree with this statement and would like to add that there are also other contributions that she has made that yet remain to be fully recognised. Most of the attention to Patsy Healey’s thinking has, as of the present, focused on one text, the seminal, but also somewhat controversial, book Collaborative Planning (Healey, 1997a), perhaps the single most cited book in the history of planning studies with 3462 citations in Google Scholar as of May 2014.

As Healey herself notes in her contribution to this book, ‘[s]ome planning ideas flourish because they are “in their time”’, but this flourishing may well be a mixed blessing as evinced by the sometimes curious ways in which Collaborative Planning was picked up, interpreted and co-opted as support for various and often conflicting projects and ambitions. With Collaborative Planning, Patsy Healey suddenly found herself catapulted into the canon of planning studies. As has been noted by Campbell, Healey’s ‘metamorphosis to being seen as part of the intellectual establishment, and hence fair game for attack by up-coming generations’ must have made for ‘a strange personal journey’ (Campbell, 2009: 148). Her mix of frustration and amusement at this situation can be read between the lines (of, for instance, Healey, 2003), but she also appears to have productively made use of the experience to reconnect to some of her earlier thinking about how ideas and concepts travel across different contexts, and the translations and transformations to which they are subject in these processes (see e.g. Healey, 1974a, 2012a, 2013; Healey and Upton, 2010, Healey and Underwood, 1978).

Seen over the span of her career, Collaborative Planning notwithstanding, Healey’s metaphorical ‘curse’ does not appear to have been that of being ‘in her time’, but rather ahead of it. Nevertheless, read through the present, many of these ideas and insights are still highly relevant for today and the future, and therefore deserve a better fate than to be forgotten. This book, therefore, partly focuses on some of Patsy Healey’s key contributions which predate the publication of Collaborative Planning and which have, to some degree, become overshadowed by the latter. In addition, this volume highlights the many ground-breaking ideas contained in the texts that Healey has published in more recent years, which demonstrate a critical scholarly mind which continues to pick up and reflect on ideas, reworking them in creative ways, connecting and reconnecting both recurring, as well as novel, themes and issues with remarkable intellectual agility. In line with the title of the book, this is perhaps the one trait that stands out most clearly throughout Patsy Healey’s whole career: her penchant for and skill at making connections, as well as studying them. Throughout her work, from her earliest days as a scholar, a fundamental relational appreciation of the world shines through, understanding phenomena as part of a broader fabric of constitutive connections to other places, things, people and ideas. And connections are also what she has so actively generated all along: connections between different people, including academics, practitioners and lay people, between different realms of ideas, different academic disciplines, between theory and practice, between normative and analytical perspectives — between different places, cultures, and generations. All this done with an understanding that the connections we make, and how we make them, make a difference in the world.

Rationale of the Book: Structure and Organisation

In 1974, in one of her first published texts, Healey ominously wrote that ‘planners who merely accept the bureaucratic niche and pay little attention to professional debates or public criticism may find their security given a jolt if a party were elected to power which so undervalued the planning in which most of us are involved that they repealed all the legislative and procedural support which presently surrounds us’, and that in the face of such a situation, ‘practitioners and educators alike’ in the field of planning would ‘be searching … desperately for legitimation’ (Healey, 1974b: 604). With hindsight, we know that this is the situation that played out across much of the western world in the 1980s, putting planning in the doldrums — perhaps particularly in Healey’s own Britain, ‘the poster-child of ‘neo-liberal’ ideology’ at the time. Healey’s persistent labours played a role in searching out new directions for planning thought and identifying potentials for making a reinvented planning practice relevant in the context of the emerging late-capitalist democratic societies; efforts that led to a revitalisation of planning as an academic discipline and societal practice at the end of the twentieth century, even if temporarily in an economic climate dominated by the global financial crisis and individual State recessions. As a consequence, if we trace Patsy’s oeuvre in the form of a heterogeneous network encompassing ideas, practices, texts, etc. it becomes obvious that her achievements stand out as a critical node or anchor point in the broader, and partially overlapping network that could be labelled as the emerging academic discipline of ‘Planning Studies’. It is largely her ‘reticulist’ skills as well as her commitment, engagement and enthusiasm for the subject at hand that have generated and stabilised this network.

As editors, we want to present this book as a showcase for this remarkable scholarly achievement, not as any form of closing of accounts, but rather to stretch this trajectory of thinking further into the future — to provide some potential avenues of exploration that can function to display how Patsy Healey’s work may be able to fuel fruitful scholarly investigations into planning theory and practice for many years to come. By placing her thinking in new contexts, through reconsideration and reinterpretation, connections are generated to the emerging futures of different social, political and cultural contexts of human sociality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on this rationale, the volume contains a selection of 13 less readily available, but nevertheless, key texts by Patsy Healey, together with 12 original invited contributions which take the ideas in the reprinted papers as points of departure for their own work, tracing out their continuing relevance for contemporary and future directions in planning scholarship. The project has been developed in close cooperation with Patsy Healey herself who has been very generous with suggestions and ideas concerning the selection of papers to be reproduced, invited contributions, development of the key themes, as well as with the overall structure of the volume.

The reprinted material has been selected to represent the trajectory of Patsy Healey’s work across the several decades of her research career. In collaboration with Patsy, we have endeavoured to select material which makes an important contribution to the field, but which is less widely available than other, well-known texts. The aim of the original contributions is thus to tease out the themes and interests in Healey’s work which are still highly relevant to the planning project. The authors, who have contributed original texts written specifically for the volume, represent a wide range of scholars from different parts of the world, including global leaders in the field as well as emerging young scholars working with a wide range of research approaches. Some have a background as colleagues and co-authors with Patsy, others have applied or developed her work in various ways. All have been inspired by her. The book is organised into five main Parts, according to main themes of her work running through her whole oeuvre. The first Part is this overall introduction.

The bulk of the content of the book is contained in Parts II-IV, which all include thematically selected reproduced and original papers relating to a specific theme or topic. These Parts are also introduced by original essays contributed by the editors, which situate the selected reprinted papers, as well as the original contributions contained in the Parts, in a broader historical and intellectual context. Part II Normative Perspectives covers approaches to ethics (emphasising decisions in terms of duty, rules, moral standards etc.), the planning profession, the role of politics, and democratisation. Part III Places and Practice consists of two subsections. III. 1 The Planning/Development Nexus: How Places are Produced and Changed, concentrates on issues of land and property development, relations between planning and land and property markets and the implementation impacts of planning instruments. Part III.2 Doing Planning Work is concerned with theory and action both with regard to local planning authorities’ regulatory, local area, development plans and also to broader practices of strategy formation and policy processes. Part IV Transformation Processes deals with issues which have long interested Patsy Healey, including planning culture, governance and institutional capacity. Reflecting both her international research and the international audience for and application of her work, this Part includes examination and reflections on the ways in which ideas travel, ideas pathways and comparative studies. Finally, Part V is an Epilogue in the form of an original paper written by Patsy Healey especially for this volume.

Please note that Patsy Healey’s papers reproduced in this volume have been re-typeset. Quotations from these papers in other chapters cite page numbers from the original publications and therefore differ from corresponding page numbers in this volume.

The remainder of this overall introduction consists of a brief comprehensive academic biography for Healey, placing the various themes of her scholarship in relation to each other in a chronological order. It is rounded off with a short reflection on what stands out — across all the diverse topics she has investigated as a scholar — as something of an ever-present driving force behind her energy and commitment: the energy to make connections across time and place, in pursuit of the caring and nurturing of the promise of a more democratic planning to come.

An Extraordinary Career¹

Early Career: Late 1960s to mid-1980s

Patsy Healey studied Geography at London University (University College) from 1958–1961 where she was inspired by Mary Douglas, a rare senior academic woman social anthropologist, who had undertaken ethnographic research with the Lele people in the Congo, and whose major work (drawing on the pragmatism of William James — a scholar to whom Patsy Healey will return in the early twenty-first century) traced the meaning of dirt in different cultural contexts (Douglas, 1966). On graduation, Patsy Healey studied a Diploma of Education at University College, Swansea and became a secondary school geography teacher, first at a girls’ grammar school in Swansea and then at a comprehensive school in Eltham, London, at the time of major restructuring of secondary education.

At this time the London Boroughs were expanding their staffing after reorganisation of the English and Welsh planning system in 1965. Frustrated by the difficult teaching conditions generated by the turmoil in the aftermath of a thorough (and much-needed) overhaul of the British education system by the Labour government (Thomas and Healey, 1991: xii), Patsy Healey began work with the London Borough of Lewisham (1965–1968) and then with the Greater London Council (1968–1969). In her own words, ‘she found the whole world of local government intriguing’. She was puzzled by the work of the planning authority, having previously assumed that planning was about making the world a better place for people. Yet such considerations seemed to have no connection to the work she became engaged in, namely ‘doing surveys for a Borough Plan’ (Thomas and Healey, 1991: xii). This quotation appears to demonstrate something of a naiveté about the spirit and purpose of planning and how it actually materialises in practice, probably linked to a distinct lack of research critically analysing planning as practised. Yet it is this simple statement that planning ‘was about making the world a better place for people’ which has driven so much of Patsy Healey’s work for the last 40 years or so. It also links her strong tradition of empirical work with practitioners and cases from planning practice, her interest in planning education and the professionalism of planners.

While she was practising planning, Patsy Healey studied part-time, as many people still do, for her Diploma of Town Planning at what was then Regents Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London, before undertaking her PhD at the London School of Economics (1969–1973). As she says, even though she had gained her professional qualification in planning, ‘I still felt I knew little about the planning activity I was involved in. I did, however, come from an academic family, so I thought that by doing a PhD I might get a better idea of the n...