Planning Futures

New Directions for Planning Theory

Philip Allmendinger, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Philip Allmendinger, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134490592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Planning theory is currently in a confused state as a consequence of a number of changes over the last ten years in planning practice and social and economic theory. Even prior to these events, planning theory was an uncertain discipline, reflecting planning's precarious position between and resting upon a range of professional subject areas and philosophical roots. Planning Futures is an attempt to pin down the constantly evolving landscape of planning theory and to chart a path through this fast changing field.
Planning Futures is an up-to-date reader on planning theory, but adds something more to the subject area than a mere textbook. The contributors have attempted to bridge theory and practice while putting forward new theoretical ideas. By drawing upon examples from planning practice and case study scenarios, the authors ensure that the work discusses planning theory within the context of present planning practice. Case studies are drawn from an international arena, from the UK, Europe, South Africa and Australia.

1
The Post-Positivist Landscape of Planning Theory
Philip Allmendinger

INTRODUCTION

The leitmotif of planning and social theory over the past two decades or so has been post: postmodern, post-structuralist and postpositivist. Whether one argues that planning theory has developed within this spirit (e.g. postmodernism) or in constructive opposition to it (e.g. communicative planning) its influence cannot be denied or ignored. Here, the term ‘post’, as in the debates over ‘post’-modern, does not necessarily follow the strict definition of ‘after’. ‘Post’ is just as likely to mean a development of that is significantly different from the original. In this respect, the ‘post’ of planning theory discussed above (under a wide definition) has been part of and has been heavily influenced by wider shifts in understanding and sensibilities in social theory and the philosophy of science. Planning theory is deeply embedded within social theory generally – communicative planning and critical theory are an example of how both normative and empirical/positive theories have been fused into planning thought. This shift in social theory has involved a questioning of the logic of positivism and the basis to scientific knowledge generally, which sought the discovery of a set of general methodological rules or forms of inference that would be the same in all sciences:

‘Post-empiricism’ signifies a loss of faith in this essentialist epistemology as the proper guide in the philosophy of science, and calls into question the very idea of such a ‘logic’, as well as all those distinctions – hermeneutic or positivist – which rested upon it.

(Bohman, 1991: 17)

While debates between, for example, positivists and materialists in planning theory naturally continue (see, for example, Farthing, 2000), there have been new developments in old thinking and the emergence of new paradigms, as Muller (1998) has termed them, that have been heavily influenced by such a shift. Like the definition of ‘post’, whether this amounts to a new paradigm or not is open to question (Taylor, 1999).

In addition to the problems of using the term ‘post’, one must also be cautious in being too deterministic and remember that shifts in theory may be and often are unrelated to the practice of planning. The feeling that we are living in New Times, as critics of postmodernism point out, has been omnipresent for at least a thousand years. I have argued elsewhere (Allmendinger, 1998) that it is too simplistic to present planning as being either modern or postmodern. The terms themselves do not help in understanding planning practice and miss the rich context within which planning operates. Is a search for consensus ‘terroristic’ in Lyotard’s (1984) terms or a true reflection of genuine sameness or agreement?

With the caveats regarding the meaning of ‘post’ in mind, three questions arise: why has this shift to ‘post’ come about, what does the ‘post’ shift mean, and how can planning practice adapt to meet these new ways of thinking?

WHY ‘POST’?

The history of social theory generally has been characterised by debates concerning the differences between the natural and human sciences and distinctions: in method, explanation and understanding; in domain, objects and subjects or nature and culture; and in purpose, technical control and increased understanding (Baert, 1998). The naturalists and positivists, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic or ‘interpretative sociologies’ understandings, on the other, both existed in isolation. Both broad schools were convinced that they offered a privileged insight into knowledge of society.

Planning has a history of practices and thinking that relates to philosophies, epistemologies and theories broadly associated with modernism and positivism (Goodchild, 1990: 128–129; Low, 1991: 234; Healey, 1993b: 234). One consequence of this, as Sandercock points out, is that this association has crowded out other approaches:

The social sciences have been dominated by a positivist epistemology which privileges scientific and technical knowledge over an array of equally important alternatives – experiential, intuitive, local knowledges; knowledges based on practices of talking, listening, seeing, contemplating, sharing; knowledges expressed in visual and other symbolic, ritual and artistic ways rather than in quantitative or analytical modes based on technical jargons that by definition exclude those without professional training.

(1998c: 5)

Such approaches became hegemonic and, according to Taylor (1998), few planners or social thinkers queried the plans or the character of knowledge with which they dealt particularly if they emulated the methods of natural science – naturalism, or the unity of method between the natural and social sciences, was accepted as given. As Beiner points out, ‘Hobbes saw classical mechanics as supplying the proper ‘‘abstractive’’ method, while Durkheim preferred the holistic features of biology’. Nevertheless, such naturalism, which dominated the social sciences and planning for most of the nineteenth century, began to breakdown in the 1960s and 1970s.

Two reasons can be identified for the shift in thinking away from positivist epistemologies. First, under the new insights provided by philosophers of science such as Kuhn, Hesse and Feyerabend, the positivist understandings of the universalisation of conditions of knowledge, the neutrality of observation, the givenness of experience and the independence of data from theoretical interpretation began to be questioned as did, consequently, the distinctions between the natural and social sciences (Bernstein, 1983; Baert, 1998). In its place, data, theories and disciplines themselves began to be understood as belonging to larger social and historical contexts in which they were applied, changed and developed while social reality came to be understood as a social construction. Such changes in thinking have broadly led social theory to what could be termed a postpositivist position.

A second and additional motivation for planners and others to turn away from naturalism and naïve empiricism emerged because they found techniques and methodologies had not ‘improved’ practice including the ability to predict behaviour (Hemmens and Stiftel, 1980). The 1960s had been the ‘high water mark’ of modernist optimism and methodologies typified by rational planning methodologies and reinforced by the quantitative emphasis of comprehensive planning and computer modelling (Taylor, 1998). Such attitudes not only led to a disenfranchised populace but physical, social and economic legacies as great as those that planning had sought to address:

Evidence of this seemed to be everywhere, from the disaster of high-rise towers for the poor to the dominance of economic criteria justifying road building and the functional categorisation of activity zones, which worked for large industrial companies and those working in them, but not for women (with their necessarily complex life-styles), the elderly, the disabled, and the many ethnic groups forced to discover ways of surviving on the edge of established economic practices.

(Healey, 1993b: 235)

Future directions began to be explored though ‘further digging among the social sciences or returning to planning’s design origins seemed less likely to bear fruit than exploring other domains especially in the humanities’ (Moore-Milroy, 1991: 182). Attention both in the social sciences and planning began to turn to context, practices and histories to explain what counts as knowledge, thereby questioning universalising assumptions, naïve realism and the correspondence theory of truth (Hesse, 1980: vii).

One such focus of attention involved questioning Enlightenment or modern ideals and positivist epistemologies through new postmodern understandings (Best and Kellner, 1991).

Postmodern’s principal target has been the rationality of the modern movement, especially its foundational character, its search for universal truth . . . The postmodern position is that all meta-narratives are suspect; that the authority claimed by any single explanation is ill-founded, and by extension, that any such attempts to forge intellectual consensus should be resisted.

(Dear, 1995a: 28)

Another postpositivist route related to the postmodern attack on totality and structuralism has been termed post-structuralism. Post-structuralists emphasise the variant and fluid relationship that exists between objects (signified) and words (signifiers). Meaning is not stable but is changing and incapable of being pinned down. Truth, in the post-structuralist sense, is replaced by interpretation, objectivity with subjectivity.

So the plethora of ‘posts’ – post-positivism, postmodernism and post-structuralism – have questioned and in some cases undermined accepted notions of society and theory often displacing conventional understandings that derived from modernism. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the term ‘post’ usually implies something ‘after’, but it would be more accurate in the sense that it is used here to emphasise development or evolution rather than ‘break’. Post-positivism does not mean turning away from experience but it does mean a more contextualised and historic appreciation of how that experience is interpreted.

WHAT ‘POST’?

Notwithstanding the postmodern and post-structuralist challenges Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) set the bearings for post-positivism approaches to social theory (Hesse, 1980). In place of positivist and Popperian perspectives that emphasised rigorous scientific method in the search for ‘truth’, Kuhn sought to place scientific activity within a social and historical context dominated by paradigms of accepted knowledge.

Kuhn and others who have taken up broadly similar positions (e.g. Feyerabend, Lakatos, etc.) were specifically making reference to the natural sciences. However, the idea of paradigms has been taken up by planning theorists (e.g. Alexander and Faludi, 1996) and the relevance of the idea of paradigmatic development in planning theory has been broadly accepted (Taylor, 1998). Not only has the idea of paradigms been accepted, Kuhn’s analysis has been highly influential in encouraging new directions in social and planning theory. In keeping with the postpositivist emphasis upon social and historical contexts, Healey argues that:

Every field of endeavour has its history of ideas and practices and its traditions of debate. These act as a store of experience, of myths, metaphors and arguments, which those within the field can draw upon in developing their own contributions, either through what they do, or through reflecting on the field. This ‘store’ provides advice, proverbs, recipes and techniques for understanding and acting, and inspiration for ideas to play with and develop.

(1997a: 7)

This position is in strong contradistinction to the more positivist, instrumentally rational perspectives of planning theory characterised by the approach of, among others, Faludi, for whom planning was ‘the application of scientific method – however crude – to policy making’ (1973: 1).

Post-positivism is characterised by:

• a rejection of positivist understandings and methodologies (including naturalism) and an embracing instead of approaches that contextualise theories and disciplines in larger social and historical contexts;
• normative criteria for deciding between competing theories;
• the ubiquity of variance in explanations and theories;
• an understanding of individuals as self-interpreting, autonomous subjects.

Postmodernism is a more diffuse phenomenon and in many ways is linked to tenets of post-structuralism. Post-structuralism seeks to problematise ‘truth’ by exposing it to scrutiny and by being aware of the role of power in influencing forms of social control. Postmodernism as social theory seeks similar objectives. Though broad and contradictory in places, a general characterisation of what postmodernism as social theory is could be organised around five principles:

1. the break-down of transcendental meaning;
2. the discursively created subject;
3. the role of cultural influences in ordering society;
4. fragmentation and dispersal;
5. Foucault and Baudrillard’s power.

The break-down of transcendental meaning

This is not a new or particularly postmodern theme as it goes back at least as far as Nietzsche. However, Lyotard (1984), Baudrillard (1968, 1970, 1975, 1976) and Foucault (1965, 1970, 1972, 1973) all built on the post-structuralist rejection of stable signifiers and emphasise instead the infinity of meaning. But in Lyotard’s case this lack of transcendental meaning also manifests itself in what he terms an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’ or grand theories. For Lyotard, reductionist theories no longer (if they ever did) represent the world. Grand narratives of science, reason and progress have been replaced by a plethora of goals, styles and methods. However, Foucault is more open-minded on this, preferring ‘suspicion’ to an obituary he still seeks to ‘problematise’ rather than dismiss them entirely. Fredric Jameson’s (1984) postmodernism still has a place for the grand narratives though he accepts the need for a more pluralistic and flexible interpretation. For all this suspicion, there is still no convincing theory of why such narratives have lost their meaning and force. This is compounded by the ease and comfort with which they rush to fill the vacuum created by the death of such over-arching theories with ones of their own.

The discursively created subject

Foucault’s brilliant exegesis of madness (1965) exposed its lack of a pre-social essence. In doing so, he questioned scientific rationality and Enlightenment ‘truths’. History and the self are more likely to lie outside linear and teleological perspectives of the self and history that favour rational, autonomous individuals. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) base their own radical politics on a similar basis though add other more structural influences to make up for Foucault’s failure to see the influences of the non-discursive such as the state or economy. The influence of non-discursive spheres is one of the main weaknesses in the discursive perspective on history and the self. One way Foucault and Baudrillard try to explain it is through the existence of an amorphous cultural map labelled the ‘code’, ‘episteme’ or ‘archive’. However, Jameson (1984) plumps instead for old-fashioned economic determinism and thereby denies the discursive–non-discursive link.

The role of cultural influences in ordering society

Baudrillard’s code and Foucault’s episteme are tools to help explain why, in such a fragmented and discursively created world, there are still common threads and values. The episteme is a set of discursively created rules that explain why one way of thinking or saying has been chosen over another. The influences upon these rules vary and can (and have) changed over time. But their main role is to limit possibilities and maintain discipline. These two functions were developed in Bau- drillard’s code that he argued created stability within an increasingly unstable world. These sets of rules look uncomfortably like the kind of reductionist logic and meta-narrative they all seek to question. The influence upon such codes is predominantly cultural and media driven which leads to the development of a symbiotic relationship emerging: society created the media and through the predominance of signs the media is increasingly influencing and creating society. Less and less connection and engagement with a world outside of media images is made, as external reality, according to Baudrillard, is lost.

Fragmentation and dispersal

Postmodern thinkers point to an increasingly fragmented and dispersed world where the ‘old rules’ no longer apply. This is linked in many ways to the New Times theses though less specifically. Lyotard’s new times are based heavily on the ‘information society’ ideas of Daniel Bell (1973). But the theory of fragmentation is most forcefully advanced by Baudrillard to the poi...