Planning and Conflict
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Planning and Conflict

Critical Perspectives on Contentious Urban Developments

Enrico Gualini, Enrico Gualini

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eBook - ePub

Planning and Conflict

Critical Perspectives on Contentious Urban Developments

Enrico Gualini, Enrico Gualini

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About This Book

Planning and Conflict discusses the reasons for conflicts around urban developments and analyzes their shape in contemporary cities. It offers an interdisciplinary framework for scholars to engage with the issue of planning conflicts, focusing on both empirical and theoretical inquiry.

Byreviewing different perspectives for planners to engage with conflicts, and not simply mediate or avoid them, Planning and Conflict provides a theoretically informed look forward to the future of engaged, responsive city development that involves all its stakeholders.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781135007461
PART I
INTRODUCTION TO THE VOLUME
1
Conflict in the City: Democratic, Emancipatory—and Transformative? In Search of the Political in Planning Conflicts
Enrico Gualini
Introduction
This volume addresses the issue of conflict in urban development in two dimensions: as a key to regaining meaning for the political in urban policy contexts, and as a potential resource for transformation in local policy.
Understanding conflict as a constitutive element of social relations and as a source of their strength and ability to innovate has an important tradition in policy analysis and planning. Authors who have significantly influenced thinking about urban policy and planning in pluralist and contentious societies (e.g., Lindblom 1965; Friedmann 1987; Hirschman 1994; Dahl 2000) have addressed the question of the conditions under which conflict and antagonism can be turned from disruptive social phenomena into transformative potentials. There is no doubt that this can be seen as an important thread in critical and progressive planning theory.
The issue gains a new meaning today, however, in relation to ‘post-democratic’ and ‘post-political’ practices that tend to fence off contestation and conflict from the domain of urban politics—only to see them emerge in new, ‘insurgent’ forms at the core of contested urban development practices.
The contributions in this volume address contemporary issues of conflict in urban development and planning in a plurality of perspectives. In doing so, they move from three assumptions that together define the scope and intention of the volume: they see contention and conflict as key dimensions for understanding and conferring meaning to politics and to ‘the political’ in cities; they aim to (re)politicize urban policy and planning as well as planning theory debates; and they do so by intersecting relevant contributions and debates in the social sciences, political theory and policy analysis, and planning theory.
The latter point is crucial, as different understandings of the political and of the role of conflict as a potential resource for political emancipation and democratic transformation—and different conceptual frames of reference—appear today as a reason for a divide among scholars in the fields of urban theory and research on one side, and of planning theory and research on the other side. As will be argued in this volume, there is, however, much scope for exchange in a mutual focus on understanding processes of formation and potentials for social and political transformation of insurgent practices of contestation in urban development and planning.
Planning, Conflict and Pluralist Society: Which Democratic Politics?
A first conceptual node to be addressed, as we approach a discussion of conflict and the political, is represented by conceptions of democratic politics in a pluralist society that frame their understanding.
A key tenet of liberal–pluralist conceptions of democracy is acknowledging conflict as a constitutive reality and as a challenge for democratic politics. Accordingly, in light of an understanding of planning as a public task, embedded in liberal-democratic societies and institutions, acknowledging conflict and the responsibility and role of planning in the face of conflict has represented something like a political coming of age.
Behind references to democracy, however, stand different models of democratic politics, with different implications for understanding and, above all, dealing with conflict. This is apparent both in the historical development of planning theory’s engagement with social conflict and in current debates—with significant potentials for division. As a matter of fact, the issue of conflict still marks significant differences in worldviews in planning theory and practice. The aim in this brief overview is not to single out theoretical models of democracy per se but to assess how these have framed planning debates and practices in a complex interplay with a variety of cultural influences. The idea is that we need to bridge theoretical debates on democratic politics and debates in relevant areas of empirical social research—in particular research on contentious politics and social movements in urban policy (cf. Della Porta 2013)—in order to critically engage with planning conflicts in a cross-disciplinary dialogue.
The rise of planning as a public task increasingly embedded in state bureaucracies and supported by the development of an integrated planning system relied on a dominant aggregative-representative model of democracy. The statist-technocratic model embodied by the ‘rational-comprehensive planning ideal’ supported the claims for institutional recognition and the rise of an institutionalized ‘politics of expertise,’ as it fitted the process of consolidation of the dominant Eastonian model of a democratic state-centered politics (cf. Easton 1965).
The assumption underlying the ‘democratic moment’ (Crouch 2004: 6–11)—occurring in most Western-capitalist countries at the outset of the Keynesian–Fordist post-war era—was that, with expanding mass democracy, popular sovereignty (as understood by the classical model of democracy) was increasingly becoming inadequate to deal with complex, development-oriented public tasks in the areas of the economy and welfare. While notions of the ‘common good’ and the ‘public interest’ became part of the mythology of modern liberal democracies, their pursuit was hence only conceivable as an aggregation of interests and preferences and no longer as an object of a ‘rational’ political consensus. Hence the emphasis on democratic procedures of the aggregation of preferences, in the first place, through political representation by parties and a political apparatus legitimated by popular vote but, even more significantly, through administrative ‘expert’ practices. Democratic politics is therefore primarily viewed from an instrumentalist-procedural viewpoint; it is a set of political procedures for the treatment of interest-groups pluralism, but also—and increasingly so in the view of planners—as a procedural ‘expert’ rationality for bringing to a synthesis and for achieving the public interest. Significantly, a procedural understanding of systems planning based on the act of making decisions by design—against the arbitrariness of political behavior—as “a set of procedures” with “exercise of choice as its characteristic intellectual act” (Davidoff and Reiner 1962: 103) or, as in Faludi (1973), as a general approach to decision-making intended as application of scientific method to decision-making, highly relied on assumptions on the availability and legitimacy of means for interests aggregation, through the public function of ‘embedded’ technical expertise.
The aggregative-representative democratic model is thus premised on the assumption of a ‘tacit consensus’ on the political validity of technocratic choice—one that could only be validated, self-referentially, through technical-instrumental verification. In light of such assumption, conflict is bound to be viewed as either expression of political arbitrariness or ‘systemic noise.’ Conflict is seen as a disruptive force that causes an imbalance in a system of interrelated parties—an imbalance that needs to be institutionally resolved through legitimate modes of representation and aggregation of interests.
The belief in a tacit consensus underlying liberal democracy was soon to be shaken, as we know, on both theoretical and socio-political grounds—with the discovery of social conflict playing a key role. The emergence of civil rights movements and social contention in cities highlighted—from the grassroots—the political dimension of planning processes that was being uncovered, among others, by Banfield’s analysis (1959) of the urban policy process, by Altshuler’s and Schön’s inquiries into planners’ ‘espoused theories’ (Altshuler 1965a, 1965b; Schön 1983) and by Wildavsky’s critique (1973) of planners’ false consciousness vis-Ă -vis politics. Simon’s arguments about ‘bounded rationality’ (1957), the discovery of the dilemmas of decision-making (Rittel and Webber 1973) and Lindblom’s and Dahl’s ‘incremental rationality’ (Lindblom 1959, 1965; Dahl 1961; Polsby 1980) contributed to theoretically delegitimize the idea of a technocratic pursuit of the public interest on grounds of a different ontology and epistemology of policy processes, in which the idea of the political was strictly tied to the capacity of mutual adjustment in an environment characterized by potential non-mediated conflicts of interest. While the incrementalists’ and pluralists’ ideas of an ‘intelligence of democracy’ and of a polyarchic social order (Dahl 1971) was premised on a conception of embedded liberalism, their influence was crucial in reassessing conflicts of interest and strategically oriented negotiating practices as social forces. Conflicts are seen here as a potentially positive force that can promote change, integration and adaptability. Meanwhile, social activism and progressive planning opened to understanding the role of contention and of struggles for values—and of the role of planning in facilitating their treatment—in a public domain that proved ever more contested (e.g., Davidoff 1965; Webber 1969; Forester 1982).
Critique of the practice of Western democracies highlighted the perverse combination of rational actor assumptions, reliance on institutionalized representation and belief in the neutrality of a ‘politics of expertise’ underlying the aggregative-representative model of democracy. The effects of this combination originated diffuse disaffection with democratic institutions, the emerging legitimacy crisis of institutionalized democratic apparatuses (e.g., Habermas 1975; Offe 1984), and a spread of democratic experiments—in order to change, but also extend beyond, liberal institutions.
The participatory-deliberative model of democracy emerges as an alternative throughout a variety of local experimental practices, backed by a significant renewal in theoretical frameworks. Its key underlying assumption is that, in a democratic system, political decisions should be reached through a process of deliberation among free and equal citizens, endowed with the rationality of argumentation and adequate means of communication. Under this conception of democratic politics, the reality of pluralism and of the co-presence of many different conceptions of the good—including their contested nature and their conflictual potential—is a premise that needs to be acknowledged and accepted as a normative requisite; at the same, a normative idea of the ‘public’ and of the ‘public interest’ is revived in the form of the pursuit of a consensus on normatively and ethically defined political issues. A participatory-deliberative democratic politics pursues therefore a normative and ethical rationality which is premised, first of all, on the existence of liberal-democratic institutions that, second, enable the embedment of democratic sovereignty to be actively exercised. The embedment of democratic practices in liberal institutions is therefore only a precondition for a practice of democracy that needs to be exercised through adequate procedures of deliberation. Through deliberation, it is possible to reach forms of agreement that would satisfy both rationality—understood as defense of liberal rights—and democratic legitimacy—as represented by popular sovereignty.
Particularly significant for planning theory and practice—and a key inspiration for redefining its progressive mission—is the fact that the exercise of democracy in this model is no longer premised on general systems of representation but on a renewal of popular sovereignty as ‘communicatively generated power’ through “free public reasoning among equals who are governed by the decisions” (Cohen 1988: 186). This implies the need to reconstruct democracy and conditions for sovereignty at the local level, in the context and in adherence to the situation in which a public issue is raised and is contested. Accordingly, the practice of deliberation is seen as both legitimate and effective when practiced within a political community that is identifiable inasmuch as it shares a public issue or concern—even if controversially or contentiously.
The idea of a deliberatively enacted popular sovereignty is significantly inspired by the tradition of philosophical pragmatism, particularly influential in progressive planning (Healey 2008), as well as by a conception of a communicative rationality and political ethics influenced by the renewal of liberal philosophy represented paradigmatically by the work of Rawls (1971) and Habermas (1984).
The prospects of political emancipation are no longer tied to the pursuit of a public interest directed toward an ideal of progress based on abstract—and increasingly contested—goals, but to dealing with pluralism and differences within ‘communities of fate’ that take their own responsibility in defining the directions of public action. This includes a more politically responsible as well as socially effective way of dealing with conflicts.
Planning inspired by a participatory and deliberative model of democratic politics develops therefore from the initial adversarial model inspired by the idea of reconstructing community representation through advocacy (e.g., Davidoff 1965) to the development of collaborative approaches based on communicative ethics and argumentative rationality (e.g., Healey 1993, 1997: Innes 1995, 1996; Innes and Booher 1999) and on an engagement with relations of power and the reality of conflict (Forester 1982, 1989; Innes et al. 1994). Along with the idea of a ‘critical pragmatism,’ planning intended as a pragmatic-communicative practice (Forester 1989) is increasingly seen as a contribution to (re)constructing democratic communities. This ties in with the development of ‘alternative,’ i.e., integrative approaches to conflict resolution, in which the conduct of negotiation capable of overcoming deadlock and of producing ‘positive-sum games’ is premised upon the realization of conditions for a transparent deliberation on interests (cf. Susskind and Cruikshank 1987; Bryson and Crosby 1992; Susskind et al. 1999). Moving beyond this, however, practices of consensus-building in local planning processes are conceived not only as a way of anticipating or resolving conflicts in spatial and environmental development, but as a means for democratization and community-building. Hence, planning comes to be related to notions like the building of social, intellectual and political capital (Innes et al. 1994), institutional capacity-building (Healey 1997; Cars et al. 2002), the contribution to a political economy of attention and argumentation (Forester 1989) and to ‘political alphabetization’ (Forester and Krumholz 1990). Conflict is seen not only as a necessary starting point that reveals social power relations and demands to be acknowledged, but as a potential resource for change and social innovation if inscribed in a participatory and deliberative design, of which the planner is a key facilitator.
The intensified exchange with theories and applications of a deliberative-participatory model of democratic politics (e.g., Elster 1988; Dryzek 1990; Hirst 1994; Wright 1995; Fung and Wright 2003; Fung 2004) along with developments in critical and interpretive policy analysis and the argumentative turn (cf. Majone 1989; Fischer and Forester 1993; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003) give a crucial theoretical backing to this emergent paradigm of planning. To this must be added two major lines of contribution to dealing with conflict in public policy and...

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