Crossing Borders

International Exchange and Planning Practices

Patsy Healey, Robert Upton, Patsy Healey, Robert Upton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415558464
• eBook ISBN: 9781135154677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The complex diffusion processes affecting the flow of planning ideas and practices across the globe are illustrated in this book. It raises questions about why and how some ideas and practices attract international attention, and about the invention processes which go on when external influences are woven together with local efforts to meet local specifics and requirements.

Initiated to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal Planning Theory and Practice in 2009, this book reflects the themes of the journal.

Taking different intellectual perspectives, this collection takes a critical look at the international diffusion of planning ideas and practices, their impacts on planning practices in different contexts, on the challenge of 'situating' planning practices, and on the ethical and methodological issues of international exchange in the planning field.

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

THE TRANSNATIONAL FLOW OF KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE IN THE PLANNING FIELD¹

PATSY HEALEY

TRANSNATIONAL INTERACTION IN THE PLANNING FIELD

This book is about the flow of planning ideas and techniques across national boundaries, and their interaction with practices. Although exhibiting new forms and flows in the present period, such interaction is by no means a new phenomenon. Wherever and whenever elites and activists have been concerned about the qualities of their cities and territories, they have looked about for ideas to help inspire their development programmes. And people have always travelled from place to place, offering suggestions about ways of solving problems or improving conditions in one place based on their experiences in other places.² It is, therefore, important to consider what is distinctive about such interactions in the planning field at the start of the twenty-first century, and what challenges these present for both the development of planning expertise and the moral and intellectual responsibilities of those involved in such interactions.

A first task, however, is to identify the planning field. It is an ‘open field’³ of ideas and practices, but defining its character and qualities has always presented problems. The term ‘planning’, although much used, is not very helpful in indicating its range and scope. The English word ‘planning’ does not translate easily into other languages, and even in English terms used include not only ‘planning’ but also ‘city planning’, ‘town planning’, ‘urban and regional planning’, ‘environmental planning’ and ‘spatial planning’.⁴ ‘Planning’ in English has a meaning in everyday language that can simply indicate an intention to do something, but also points towards some kind of policy intention and an imagined practice to follow this into action. As an area of public policy, ‘planning’ takes on a more specific focus, ranging from national economic development planning to the physical organisation of neighbourhoods, cities and regions. From such a perspective, the substantive focus of the planning field is the management and development of the relations between people and places.

An alternative way to arrive at a sense of the scope of the planning field is to focus on ‘what planners do’ and on the concerns expressed in the ‘cultures of practice’ within which ideas and practices about planning arise.⁵ I use the concept of cultures of practice to refer to communities of experts, advocates, officials and lobbyists who promote or work in distinct fields.⁶ Such communities, however, vary in relation to national government priorities and governance cultures,⁷ and in relation to disciplinary backgrounds. In some countries, such as China and the Netherlands, urban and regional planning has long been an important field of public policy. In the United States, the UK and Japan, national political interest has been much more ambiguous. However, in all these countries, there are communities of experts, officials and activists that focus on improving place qualities, on the development of territories, and on paying attention to spatial connections. The chapters in this book share this focus, but reflect also the diversity of ‘planning cultures’ to be found globally (Sanyal 2005).

The planning field has another important characteristic. It cannot be neatly tied to a particular academic discipline. It is a field of substantive concerns and practical activity, rather than a ‘discipline’ centred primarily on a specific body of academic scholarship and research. As with fields such as medicine, management and engineering, it is infused by a continual interaction between practical experiences, research inquiries and scholarly analyses.⁸ Most planning work involves drawing on a range of bodies of substantive systematised knowledge – the formal academic disciplines – along with all kinds of experiential knowledge, in order both to develop an understanding of places and their development potentials and to propose and carry out specific interventions. Through this ‘drawing together’, the planning field has created its own distinctive, interacting traditions of practical activity and intellectual inquiry.

Just as other fields of practice share certain moral attitudes, so too does this broad field of ‘spatial’, ‘urban’ and ‘territorial’ planning. These attitudes are full of ambiguity and contestation, marked as much by debates and struggles between different ideas as by any common programme. Yet there have been some important shifts in the focus of planning during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, when a vigorous advocacy movement for city/town/urban planning was gathering momentum, an emphasis on convenience, beauty and development efficiency often clashed with a social reformist concern with improving the living conditions of the working masses (Ward 2002; Sutcliffe 1981). In the 1930s, both the modernist CIAM⁹ movement and the US regional development initiatives linked to the national ‘New Deal’ programme were underpinned by a strong strand of social reformist values (Ward 2002; Birch and Silver 2009). At the start of the twenty-first century, social radicalism had remained an important strand, with its consequent emphasis on the social justice of planning strategies, projects and practice enlarged by much more attention to the diversity of people’s lifestyles, identities and aspirations (Fainstein 2005; Friedmann 2000). Roy, in Chapter 2 of this book, calls urgently for a reconsideration of this tradition, to inform struggles in global arenas over how the situation of the poorest in the world is understood.

The social reform agenda within the planning field has been challenged in the later twentieth century by a wider political emphasis on the ‘economic com-petitiveness’ of regions, nations and supranational groups such as the European Union, in a world of increasingly transnational or global economic relations. Accommodating economic growth strategies is a major concern in China today, as is reflected in the chapters in this book by Zhu and Abramson. This economic emphasis has, however, been moderated by anxiety about the environmental conditions of cities and about the global impacts of unrestrained economic exploitation of planetary resources, rather than by the more egalitarian concerns that influenced some post-independence nation-building in the mid-twentieth century (see Vidyarthi’s discussion of the role of urban planning ideas in India’s post-independence modernisation strategy in Chapter 4). Concern with environmental quality is linked to wider agendas centred on more ecologically sensitive and environmentally sustainable development strategies, which have become an important policy focus in many countries in the later twentieth century, although with a range of interpretations (see Sorensen in Chapter 6). Within Europe, the economic and environmental emphases are combined with a continuing concern for social welfare. ‘Balancing’ concern with social justice, environmental sustainability and economic well-being is a well-established principle in European Union policy initiatives, and has been expressed in influential initiatives to convey a continent-wide planning perspective (CSD 1999; Faludi and Waterhout 2002).

The chapters in this book illustrate a variety of ‘probes’ into this open field, presenting examples of the transnational flow of planning ideas and practices from the early twentieth century to the present. They range from examples of physical design in relation to nation-building (Vidyarthi, Perera), to competing notions of how to increase the access of poorer people to financial credit (Roy), the transfer of specific techniques (Stead, Whitzman and Perkovic, Ganapati and Verma), and overview discussions about development philosophy (Zhu, Sanyal). They include critical analyses by academic observers (Sorensen, Ward, Wang) and commentaries by practitioners reflecting on their experiences (Kazimbaya-Senkwe and Lubambo, Perera, Abramson, Friedmann). In their diversity, they mirror the various ways of thinking about the planning field to be found in the wider planning literature. Some books about planning with a transnational reach focus on designs for locales, cities and regions (see, for example, Wannop 1995). Others discuss the administrative and legal structure of ‘planning systems’, or look at different ways of analysing planning ideas and practices, or focus on particular technologies.¹⁰ The contributors to this book are themselves located within different schools of thought and trajectories of research inquiry. As a result, this book acts as an encounter between different academic communities within the planning field. Planning historians, those drawing on the international development and globalisation debates and institutionally minded policy analysts are all to be found here, complemented by contributions using critical insights from postcolonial analyses of development processes and the methods associated with ‘actor-network theory’.

Such multiple contributions all overlap, yet reflect different emphases and traditions within the field. Those who contribute to the planning literature do not always make clear the trajectory of knowledge development within which their work is positioned. This creates difficulties for others who are trying to assess the meaning and relevance of an idea, an analysis or a practical example for their own concerns. It requires probing behind what is said or written to draw out the meanings and contextual assumptions out of which a planning idea or practice experience has been generated. As several of the chapters in this book emphasise, this effort may lead to new interpretations and the selective use of ideas as they are taken up in these different contexts. Sometimes, this leads to a loss of radical edge, as Sorensen finds in Chapter 6 in his analysis of how the ‘compact city’ idea was slow to arrive in Japan, and was then used to address particular Japanese policy concerns. Whitzman and Perkovic in Chapter 10 describe how ideas designed to improve the safety of women and children in local environments lost their original emphasis on a gendered understanding of the spatial arrangement of urban areas. Yet in Chapter 8, in contrast, Stead and colleagues show that those making use of international experience may be shrewdly aware of the institutional assumptions embedded within experiences promoted from elsewhere. In another example of this aspect of planning, Hein (2003) shows that, although many European urban planners in the late nineteenth century emphasised the design of the built form, Japanese planners were more interested in the administrative and legal tools used in Europe to manage the land development process.¹¹ Kazimbaya-Senkwe and Lubambo in Chapter 9 illustrate a context in which external ideas promoted by a global aid agency were shrewdly resisted by local actors, mobilising the language of resistance to Western colonialism.

If diffusion is selective in this way then it is helpful to consider the planning ideas and experiences that get to travel around the world as ‘assemblages’¹² – of images of urban form and place qualities, of analytical approaches and specific techniques, of administrative and legal arrangements (such as ‘planning systems’), and of ideas about ways of doing things associated with doing planning work. Items in these assemblages get into the academic literature, the practice manuals and the minds of those who ‘carry’ planning ideas from one place to another. Academic authors, manual writers and travelling experts are themselves selective in putting together the specific ‘bundles’ they take from the wider assemblage of ideas and experiences to which they are exposed. The bundles they travel with reflect their interests and also the culture they have come from, though we are often unaware of the mental baggage we carry with us. Those who adopt ideas from such ‘carriers’ may be skilful at probing into the bundle, to pull out the less obvious aspects for implementation in new contexts. But many problems have occurred because carriers and adaptors have been insufficiently aware of the implicit assumptions shaping the ideas and suggestions encompassed in any given expert’s bundle. In other words, diffusion processes are not simply about how an idea or technique moves from place to place. They involve complex processes of translation, interpretation and adaptation.¹³

The imagery used above about carriers and adaptors may suggest that planning ideas and practices are transported by particular individuals, ‘travelling planners’ perhaps, and are honed to local conditions either by the ‘exogenous’ expert or by a local client agency or planning expert. Studies in planning history and the chapters in this book provide examples of such apparently linear processes, but they also show that the diffusion paths of planning ideas and practices are, in reality, much more complex. Individual experts are located in networks and communities of practice through...

Table of contents

• The RTPI Library Series
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2 POVERTY TRUTHS
• CHAPTER 3 TRANSNATIONAL PLANNERS IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD
• CHAPTER 4 REIMAGINING THE AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT FOR INDIA1
• CHAPTER 5 CITIES IN TRANSITION
• CHAPTER 6 URBAN SUSTAINABILITY AND COMPACT CITIES IDEAS IN JAPAN
• CHAPTER 7 WHEN PLANNING IDEAS LAND
• CHAPTER 8 WEST–EAST POLICY TRANSFER IN EUROPE
• CHAPTER 9 SUBALTERN SPEAK IN A POSTCOLONIAL SETTING
• CHAPTER 10 WOMEN’S SAFETY AUDITS AND WALKING SCHOOL BUSES
• CHAPTER 11 INSTITUTIONAL BIASES IN THE INTERNATIONAL DIFFUSION OF PLANNING CONCEPTS
• CHAPTER 12 DEVELOPMENTAL PLANNING FOR SUSTAINABLE URBANIZATION IN ASIA
• CHAPTER 13 A TRANS-PACIFIC PLANNING EDUCATION IN REVERSE
• CHAPTER 14 CROSSING BORDERS
• CHAPTER 15 SIMILARITY OR DIFFERENCES?
• INDEX