From Student to Urban Planner

Young Practitioners' Reflections on Contemporary Ethical Challenges

Tuna Taşan-Kok, Mark Oranje, Tuna Taşan-Kok, Mark Oranje

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317538165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

For many young planners, the noble intentions with going to planning school seem starkly out of place in the neoliberal worlds they have come to inhabit. For some, the huge gap between the power they thought they would have and what they actually do is not only worrying, but also deeply discouraging. But for some others, practice means finding practical and creative solutions to overcome challenges and complexities.

How do young planners in different settings respond to seemingly similar situations like these? What do they do – give up, adjust, or fight back? What role did their planning education play, and could it have helped in preparing and assisting them to respond to the world they are encountering?

In this edited volume, stories of young planners from sixteen countries that engage these questions are presented. The sixteen cases range from settings with older, established planning systems (e.g., USA, the Netherlands, and the UK) to settings where the system is less set (e.g., Brazil), being remodeled (e.g., South Africa and Bosnia Herzegovina), and under stress (e.g., Turkey and Poland). Each chapter explores what might be done differently to prepare young planners for the complexities and challenges of their 'real worlds'. This book not only points out what is absent, but also offers planning educators an alternative vision.

The editors and esteemed contributors provide reflections and suggestions as to how this new generation of young planners can be supported to survive in, embrace, and change the world they are encountering, and, in the spirit of planning, endeavor to 'change it for the better'.

1

Why It Is Important to Give Voice to Young Practitioners

Tuna Taşan-Kok and Mark Oranje

Background

This book grew out of a simple set of questions. Their perplexing nature is perhaps as much a function of being pensive middle-aged planning educators as of projecting our own concerns and misgivings about planning practice onto the next generation. How do young practitioners experience ‘planning practice’? How does this experience fit with what they had been taught at ‘planning school’? How has the exposure to practice shaped their views on planning? And where has it left them?

Turning to theory, as those who teach tend to do, we took note of the study by John Forester (2013) on how planners respond to challenging, stressful, and messy situations. The position he derived from his groundbreaking work on planning practitioners was both hopeful and promising. While we were emboldened by his optimism, which incidentally also dovetailed with our view of planning as an ‘organisation of hope’ (Campbell, Tait, & Watkins, 2013), our own interactions with newly graduated students and young practitioners were less uplifting. Instead of triumph over adversity, far more often we encountered frustration, disappointment, and even despair. Especially perplexing was that, despite their deep unhappiness and exasperation, they stayed on and did not quit their jobs or leave the profession. At the same time, we met young planners who, in the spirit of John Forester, were not just getting by but fighting back and bringing the ethos of hope into their workplaces.

Mulling over their disturbing stories, wishing them more fulfilling lives, and discerning a trickle of hope in their actions, we realized that we simply knew too little about how young planners cope and needed to do some research. From this decision to investigate the matter came the presentation of a paper on the subject at the 2013 AESOP Conference in Dublin, Ireland. To our surprise the paper met with considerable interest in the discussion session and a suggestion was raised to write a book – and this is it.

When conceptualizing this book, we were cautious about making generalizations, ever mindful that planning occurs in a complex field of play, that behaviour is contextual, and that the same professional may act in very different ways in similar situations. We also recognized that championing hope and safeguarding the public interest would call for more than technical knowledge and routine action. Instead, passion and the desire to make a difference are often the unseen drivers of progressive planning decisions and schemes – small, individual victories in highly unequal political-economic contexts and within corporate-led dynamics. Closer work with practitioners revealed how much creativity it takes for a planner to have any impact in a sea of bureaucracy, often entailing political choices, proactive roles, or even becoming a short-circuiting activist in the machine (Taşan-Kok et al., 2016). In contrast to the elitist, self-centred view of many a modernist planner, effective contemporary practitioners recognize the importance of collaboration, co-production and negotiation with public- and private-sector actors and social groups. On the flip side, these progressive actions, constructive and effective as they may be, tend to mute the planners’ individual stories of endeavour and hope and mask the role these individuals have played in hard-fought victories.

By producing this book we sought to make a small contribution to breaking that silence by unearthing and revealing ‘what is inside’ and exposing what goes on behind the scenes. It is about giving young practitioners a voice; aside from in a few recent studies with that particular aim, their voice is rarely heard (Fox-Rogers & Murphy, 2016). To that end, the book presents a series of case studies that look into the minds and souls of young planners, documenting how they experienced, battled with, and responded to circumstances in which they found themselves. While its scope is modest – adding a layer in the almost empty vessel of empirical work on young planners’ experiences of and responses to the world of practice – the book also pursues a bigger ambition. Through an emphasis on agency, it seeks to enrich the small body of studies that have focused on the planner as a person, as a human being with feelings, fears, beliefs, disappointments, and passions, some of which are shaped and fuelled by, caught up in, called upon, challenged by, and often required to function within the workplace.

The book also speaks to planning educators. Each chapter explores what might be done differently to prepare young planners for the complexities and challenges of their ‘real worlds’. The aim is not only to point out what is absent but also to offer planning educators an alternative vision. These ideas were generated through: (1) engaging critically with the young professionals’ experiences chronicled in this volume and (2) inviting distinguished scholars to ponder avenues for coping with, querying, and overcoming the many challenges young graduates face. By highlighting omissions in planning curricula and suggesting innovative solutions, we believe that the book will be of significant value (and utility) in courses on planning theory and professional practice.

Contemporary Context of Planning Practice

Economic, social, environmental, and political crises, coupled with the contradictions created by neoliberalization, financialization and the unabated privatization of state functions and responsibilities, have produced the highly challenging context in which planning practice takes place. The economic crisis has also drawn a blind on and limited the development of alternative visions of urban life (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2009). In some cases, the limitations have created boundaries for planners, often ruling out meaningful public involvement or inclusionary planning practices and projects; in others, exclusionary forms of urban development have been spawned by collaboration between large private companies and the state. Most of these new forms are foreign to the progressive ethos taught at planning school. Furthermore, the values, principles and standards that planning education endeavours to cultivate and enhance are often at odds with planning students’ cultural and religious norms and values, clashing with the views and standards fashioned by the highly unequal world they find themselves in. Young planners’ expectations, ambitions, values, and interests frequently play a far greater role in shaping their values, perceptions, and behaviour than their formal education does. The result is a continuous, often tense negotiation between different value sets, in which ‘planning norms/principles’ often lose out to deeply ingrained value sets ‘from home’, on the one hand, and more recent value sets developed in response to ‘the world we are living in and encounters in the workplace’, on the other.

There is a large body of literature on how neoliberalization has influenced planning theory and practice (Fainstein, 2010; Gunder, 2010; Jackson, 2009; Purcell, 2009; Sager, 2009; Taşan-Kok & Baeten, 2011; Waterhout, Othengrafen, & Sykes, 2013); on how changing political contexts affect the context in which planners work (Knox & Schweitzer, 2010); how ethics and values of planning are influenced by external factors (Campbell, 2012); how planning practitioners are affected by the changing political and economic conditions of urban development; and how planners take decisions in conflicted situations and find practical and creative solutions (Forester, 2013). While this material provides useful angles for exploring the world of young planners, it does not help us understand their daily struggles or ‘the planner as person’.

Some two decades ago, amidst a growing concern about the ascent of the New Right and the decreasing effectiveness of welfarist policies, Louis Albrechts (1991) called for a paradigm shift ‘from planning for capital’ to ‘planning for society’. He advised planners not to become entrepreneurs and to avoid merely attempting to ‘steer economic forces’. The call went largely unheeded; planners became facilitators of entrepreneurial, for-profit activities and developments. This turn toward the market has meant that planning schools champion the idea of planners as change agents, future-makers and -shapers, community heroes, justice distributers, deliberative or reflective practitioners, dreamers, and so on. Meanwhile, young graduates discover, often to their deep dismay and disgust, that their actual role turns them into bureaucrats and/or technocrats, badly positioned to fend for the poor, and often on the wrong side of the public interest (Taşan-Kok et al., 2016). This realization, as we illustrate in this book, leads to consternation and confusion amongst young professionals. More importantly, they lack the mental, emotional, and legal-technical preparation for this world, a hiatus that prevents them from taking on progressive roles even when the opportunity does arise.

Over the last couple of years, the critical literature has highlighted the way in which neoliberalization and neoliberal urban development dynamics have impacted the work of planners. Some scholars have suggested that planners are practicing in environments that are increasingly ‘for profit, not for people’ due to the repositioning of cities within increasingly volatile and financialized circuits of capital accumulation. At the same time, theoretical work on strategic, communicative, and/or participatory planning has repeatedly posited that the planner has the mandate, the power, and the ability to play a leading role in multi-actor governance structures. However, the practitioner’s role falls far short of this ideal: it is prone to high levels of political and economic pressure, sometimes inducing planners to skirt the edges of what is regarded as ‘ethically sound’. In some cases, their behaviour borders on ‘corruption’. This growing contradiction between theory and practice, the gap in the literature on planners’ views of their activities, and the role and place of the planning profession in ‘today’s world’ are recurrent topics in this book and together form its guiding theme.

Context of the Book

The book was born from our observations during research into the worlds of young planning practitioners in South Africa and Turkey. That groundwork has been enriched here with the observations, research, and experience of planning scholars from around the world regarding young practitioners in 14 other contexts – Sweden, Bosnia Herzegovina, Israel, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, and Taiwan. In-depth interviews on the reflections, views, and beliefs of young Black planners in South Africa revealed serious doubts about the continued relevance of planning’s original call for ‘a better life for all’ and an equally strong dose of doubt about its ability to deliver on this promise. Strong sentiments, often highly sceptical and cynical, were expressed in both regards. Instead of challenging the world ‘as it is’, most of the interviewees indicated that they were ‘simply going with the flow’, ‘staying out of trouble’, and enjoying their new-found middle-class status. They voiced stronger concern with the immediate, with the ‘me’ and the ‘we’ (i.e., the nuclear and extended family) than with ‘the future/longer term’ and the ‘us’ (i.e., the total South African population or humanity as a whole). Their concern with ‘moving on and up’ in the world that their parents were barred from often found expression in a desire to simply enjoy what post-Apartheid South Africa had to offer and to show off their newly acquired symbols of wealth and status. Many young planners noted that planning enabled them to enter the new Black middle class and enjoy everything that goes with that status, and they expressed a distinct fear of falling back into poverty.

In Turkey, young planners who found jobs in the public sector soon lost their enthusiasm for and faith in planning, as they were constantly confronted with political agendas that forced them to act in ways that contradicted their principles. These deep-seated feelings of discontent and unease have accelerated in the increasingly authoritarian political framework, which ironically derives much of its economic power from privatization and speculation in the urban land market. Within this framework, the positions of some planners, especially those in the public sector, have become very fragile and risky. Some of them, especially those who oppose the current government, have lost their jobs (as did one of the young planners we profiled in the book) based on decrees issued under the State of Emergency after the failed coup d’état of 15 July 2016. Thus, contrary to the expectation of being ‘the conductor of an orchestra’, a metaphor commonly used in Turkish planning education to teach planning students what their role in urban development will be, young planners soon realize that their position is rarely influential in policy-making. Their opinions are not asked, they cannot negotiate with stakeholders, and they often end up as ‘the technical instrument’ effectuating already determined policy. The luckier ones – including those at special planning agencies like the office that Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality established as a private company to prepare metropolitan development plans – end up disappointed because their efforts are consistently overruled by powerful actors in government, especially under current political conditions. As elaborated elsewhere, authoritarian state involvement in urban development overrules local planning legitimacy and principles, especially in places with high land value and speculation (Eraydin & Taşan-Kok, 2014). Young planners in the private sector are divided between those who work for the booming property-development sector and those in ‘classic’ urban planning offices. In both cases, confrontation with the contradictions of neoliberal planning occurs on a daily basis and, like the experience of South African planners, ‘a better life for all’ rings hollow in these settings. However, within this relatively depressive environment some hopeful voices can be heard as well. After the Gezi Movement of 2010 against the authoritarian entrepreneurial state interventions (Eraydin & Taşan-Kok, 2014) in urban space, the collective sprit continued among young practitioners who, in their private and professional lives, face the authority daily. Although the democratic processes to fight against the authority were heavily influenced by the July 2016 ‘military coup attempt’, the latest studies show that young practitioners continue their struggle by joining forces through activism, social movements, or professional networking and lobbying (Taşan-Kok et al., 2016).

Both in South Africa and Turkey, many of those interviewed pointed to a serious tension and even disjuncture between the values taught in planning programmes and those prevailing at the workplace. Some dealt with the dilemma by ‘switching off’, a tactic that, as a few ruefully noted, had put them in a state of ‘moral numbness’. For most interviewees, the tension had led them to question the values of planning. This value-probing exercise was given further impetus by the perceived powerlessness of planning in the face of corporate and political actors and by a general lack of plan implementation. Most expressed the view that the issue of power was either shrugged off in planning curricula or dealt with in an admonishing, intellectualist, and/or ideological way, without providing any real guidance on how to deal with it. Underlying these sentiments was a deeply cynical view of the value and usefulness of social and planning theory in practical settings where serious moral issues were at stake. This lack of guidance from ‘school’ often resulted in a return to and reassertion of the values taught ‘back home’, with a tendency to fall back on ‘home truths’ for answers, and far less so on social or planning theory.

Although the South African and Turkish case studies paint a rather gloomy picture, this book does not dwell at length on the negative aspects of being a young planning practitioner in contemporary cities. In fact, our ongoing research shows that even in the darkest political-economic times, young practitioners find ways to cope (Taşan-Kok et al., 2016). Besides presenting accounts of hardship, we highlight how young planners from 16 countries rise to the occasion re-energized by the challenges. In subsequent sections, the readers hear from planners who are: (1) lost/broken/fallen; (2) ambivalent/oblivious/non-caring; or (3) provoked/re-energized/boundary-pushing. Regarding types of experiences to include, we asked the authors to select stories that fall into the above categories and to define the ‘planner profile’ they wanted to cover in their chapters. Obviously, planners usually embody multiple identities, so their opinions are seldom black and white. Constraints and opportunities go hand in hand, and each professional profile presented here has both a dark and a bright side. As such, the young planners chronicled in this volume rarely have just one identity and exhibit densely interwoven, sometimes overlapping, often conflicting ways of coping with (and overcoming) constraints. Each case study in this book offers a glimpse of young practitioners in the field through the lens of an experience, a reflection (disappointment, not caring, or pushing the ...