Explorations in Planning Theory

Luigi Mazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780882851549
• eBook ISBN: 9781351520928
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is this thing called planning? What is its domain? What do planners do? How do they talk? What are the limits and possibilities for planning imposed by power, politics, knowledge, technology, interpretation, ethics, and institutional design? In this comprehensive volume, the foremost voices in planning explore the foundational ideas and issues of the profession.Explorations in Planning Theory is an extended inquiry into the practice of the profession. As such, it is a landmark text that defines the field for today's planners and the next generation. As Seymour J. Mandelbaum notes in the introduction, ""the shared framework of these essays captures a pervasive interest in the behavior, values, character, and experience of professional planners at work.""All of the chapters in this volume are written to address arguments that are important in the community of planning theoreticians and are crafted in the language of that community. While many of the contributors included here differ in their styles, the editors note that students, experienced practitioners, and scholars of city and regional planning will find this work illuminating and helpful in their research.

PART I

Designing a Domain for Planning Theory

LUIGI MAZZA

Designing a Domain for Planning Theory

INTRODUCTION

FOR a long time, planners have been searching through their history to find the roots and meanings of their activity. Planning accounts tend to be biased toward certain types of practice or theoretical hopes in an attempt to assign a domain to planning that can boast homogeneity and consistency, characteristics considered typical of a well-defined technique if not of a science. In this way, even the best planning accounts become willing reductions of the multiplicity of planning practices to the coherence of general theoretical systems. The results are sometimes exciting, but because they are either too partial or too removed from reality, they are necessarily fictitious.

Friedmann’s chapter, which opens this section, is the first account of a wide perspective that restores the roots of contemporary planning without forcing coherence and without fearing to show how much these roots are contradictory and ambivalent—and how many important questions remain without definitive answers from the four planning traditions that he identifies in the political and social thinking of the last two centuries. In this chapter, the concerns and aims of historians are subordinated to a dual task: to design a conceptual framework in which to locate the extraordinary multiplicity of contributions that so widely influenced planning activities and, secondly, to graft onto this framework a program for planning that asserts the priority of democracy over planning. Even though Friedmann’s second aim is not explicit here, it seems helpful to recall it in order to grasp fully the meaning of two possible levels on which his chapter may be read. What is immediately essential is the design of the conceptual framework and the acknowledgment of the four main planning traditions. Within that framework, the traditions overlap, conflict, and are inseparably related. What was seen as a great synoptic scheme exposes an interpretative capability that breaks out of the original framework and develops the connections among different contributions, however distant in space and time.

Throughout these articulations and patterns, the chapter may also be read as a definitive confirmation that the “age of innocence” for planning is over, in the sense that planners have to abandon their technocratic illusions and their illusions of renouncing the power (however meager) bestowed on them by their professional activity. Neither the reflective planner nor the radical planner is innocent. The ambiguous relationship between action and knowledge is a daily reality, and everyone may respond to it with different intentions and commitments, whether to raise awareness and change power relationships or to unveil power and take one’s distance from it.

To simplify Friedmann’s scheme, we might paraphrase Sen (1987, 3) and say that planning has two origins, “both related to politics, but related in rather different ways, concerned respectively with ‘ethics’ on the one hand, and with what may be called ‘engineering,’ on the other.” Friedmann’s planning traditions and other contributions to this section show how planners’ different aims and ways of considering the relationship between action and knowledge, knowledge and power, reflect a dual and rather conflictual nature of planning. The two origins become two planning approaches that mingle variously with theoretical contributions. A balance is not always reached between the two approaches: at times the concerns of one prevail over the other. For example, among the authors of this section, although in different ways, ethical concerns are predominant in Hoch and Mandelbaum, and methodical concerns in Alexander and Faludi. Faludi, though claiming the need for planning methodology and the positive implications of rationality in practice, advances a “weak” version of the rational model and develops the concept of “planning doctrine” as defined some years ago together with Alexander. This, in my opinion, may offer a bridge between the two approaches, for it contributes to the definition of decisional situations and consensus building. Faludi notes the independence of such a strong concept and suggests that the efficacy, comprehensiveness, and consistency of a doctrine have to be subject to the control of rational debate, but he acknowledges that a doctrine is an amalgam of heterogeneous elements and “relies on sometimes deceptively simple but ambiguous concepts.” Ethical dimensions are also present in Alexander’s research, which suggests a contingent framework for planning that includes critical rationality and communicative action. Hoch’s aim is to untie the knot of the relationship between power and knowledge and resolve it into political pragmatism. His interest in technical knowledge is a defensive interest, aimed at preventing knowledge from becoming a tool of professional coercion and power. Mandelbaum, on the other hand—for the very reason that he acknowledges that his replies to the limits of social sciences fluctuate conflictually between regret for “political” influences, which limit the application of “knowledge,” and enthusiasm for the wisdom of experience—is looking for a space for freedom and research within the claims of moral communities that give sense and value to our actions. Formal theorizing is defined by Mandelbaum as the production of a medium of escape from the vindications of moral communities—that is, the production of alternatives to what communities argue as being just. His program involves social sciences, while planning knowledge is in the background.

The importance of the two origins seems to be confirmed and expressed by the long and intractable debate about the rational model, a debate that has concerned planners for decades and turns up again in the chapters of this section. Whatever one’s judgment of this debate, it is natural to wonder why it has taken us so long to understand it—and understand ourselves. It has been observed that this debate is prompted by planners’ difficulty in finding their way through the complex Weberian discussion on the limits to rationality, without reducing it to a mere contrast between formal and substantive rationality. I do not want to ignore the question of planners’ limits in action and understanding. I would merely like to suggest the possibility that such a schematic contrast has been, and perhaps still is, a more or less unconscious screen concealing a reluctance to develop a more open debate on the nature of planning.

One of the more generally agreed-upon accounts of planning activities depicts them as activities aimed at designing the future. The expression “designing the future” is usually meant as the design of something new. This has strong appeal because it hints at the generosity of those who are in favor of challenging power, uncertainty, and risk to foster change and help the community thrive. Designing the future may, however, also mean opposing change in favor of environmental or social conservation, or acting aggressively to promote the survival of what seems worth conserving and defencing. In both modes, designing the future implies questioning and discussing moral values. But this account of planning activities is a partial one.

In the last few years, numerous studies of planners’ daily activities (some of which are published in this book) have shown that most involve forms of routine administrative activities and control. A substantial quota of planning activity is not carried out either for or against change, for or against expansion or exclusion. In short, it is not aimed at “designing the future” but at managing the present on the basis of a known past.

If this development of the account of planning activities has a base, planning nature reveals not only two origins but also a blend of two basic types of action that are different from each other, and to which different forms of rationality and justification correspond. These are anticipatory actions based especially on the logic of consequence and obligatory actions based especially on the logic of appropriateness. This distinction has more than an analytical value. It is present in practice and at times is formally authorized, even though it is evident that designing the future and managing the present are interdependent and in many instances affect each other reciprocally. The use of the two logics is not divided—even the more consolidated routines can give rise to dilemmas. The planner’s daily activity nearly always implies discretion and negotiation. It is often not easy to define the proper choice in a given situation. The rule must be interpreted and, within different interpretations, choice may be defined following a consequential logic. The interlacing of the two logics is strengthened by the fact that planning activities have both a technological and an institutional nature. Sometimes technological fragments are embodied in the laws that define the planning system, and the outcome is a further meshing of technical knowledge and procedural rules. In turn, technological components embody consequential logics and calculability. Procedural rules embody obligation and appropriateness.

Since planning activities are almost everywhere a formal government tool, another generally agreed-upon account is that planning activities have become institutionalized. While this is formally true for obligatory actions, it is less true for action aimed at designing the future. In general, due to its characteristic blend of actions and logics, planning appears as a rather incomplete institution, a “non-defined” one, which is continuously urged to define its task, its position. Formally, planning’s role is a given—subservient to the needs of the community. But in practice planners are continuously redefining it within and outside the institutional form. Conflictual values, present within any democratic process, constantly widen the field and the contingency of choices, questioning anew any attempt to reduce all planning practices to predetermined and conclusive formal logics, to contain them in a general system of predefined procedures. Planning activities and practice seem to resist general rationalization and bureaucratization processes because they are anthropologically—and not technically—committed to the future, and within them the temporal order of decision processes, within and outside institutions, overcomes the sequential order of technological processes. The result is an institutional incompleteness that shows itself not only at a technical level but as a continuous tension between an accomplished form and rationality and the need to break out of the form in order to foresee and provide. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the attempt to resolve this tension, the search for a general theory is not abandoned. But the nonexistence of a general theory is consistent with planning’s inherent characteristics as described so far, and Mandelbaum’s arguments are quite difficult to refute. Those arguments, furthermore, lead us to conclude that “we don’t need a complete general theory of planning and we don’t even need to agree on the definition of the field.” Besides, how many sciences have a complete general theory?

If planning activities were committed only to designing the future, to breaking established balances in order to build new and different ones, then the tension that runs through them could be considered the result and expression of conflicts between conservation and change. The search for a planning rationality could be dismissed either as an attempt at rationalizing the balances established in the form and rationality of power or as the scientifically and historically failed attempt to develop a form of total planning. But a significant portion of planning activity is not aimed at the future. It is, on the contrary, committed to removing uncertainty and risk and to excluding these from life-plans by implementing established models and routines that are formally expressed in the form of plans and bylaws and informally by the actions of the planner. The basis of these regulative policies is formed by the methodical rationality of a disregarded planning knowledge—we could say a planning “science”—that is the result of “unforced agreements,” slowly sedimented in time and spread out in the knowledge of our communities. A sense of voluntary obligation springs from these agreements and allows for “acknowledging” and hence “expecting”—that is, of describing in a rational manner, in accordance with the established and accepted way—and, as long as solidarity and obligation are respected, of projecting into the future the if-then relationship, beyond uncertainties and risks.

If by rational we mean “methodical,” most planning activity has been rational for a long time, in terms of both obligatory and anticipatory actions. If by rational we mean “reasonable” rather than methodical, then anticipatory actions, directed toward designing the future—hazardous activities, characterized by a measurable probability of failure, punctuated by successes but also by disasters of varying dimensions—are reasonable, and their reasonableness is constructed through the justified composition of fragments of methodical rationality, of technical knowledge. Methodical rationality and reasonableness are no strangers to planning. On the contrary, they are both intrinsic to its processes and follow interlocking paths that are not always easy to distinguish at first glance. Planners’ difficulty in understanding (and in understanding each other) could perhaps be traced back to the complexity of this mesh, particularly as planners sometimes try to be rational in cases where it is possible to be only reasonable, while they fail to consider the rationality applied in daily practices, governed by a technical knowledge. That knowledge is not technical merely because it is shared but is so shared that it is sometimes applied in an unconscious way.

Surprisingly, the premises of methodical rationality are little known and rarely analyzed or developed. Planners know very little about technical knowledge and its application in discretionary action, in mediation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Talk of the Community
• Part I. Designing a Domain for Planning Theory
• Part II. The Latitude of Planners
• Part III. The Planning Encounter and the Plan
• Part IV. The Status and Use of Knowledge
• Part V. The Status and Use of Ethics
• Part VI. Designing Planning Processes
• Contributors
• Index