Planning Against the Political

Democratic Deficits in European Territorial Governance

Jonathan Metzger, Philip Allmendinger, Stijn Oosterlynck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134071821
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book brings together a number of highly innovative and thought provoking contributions from European researchers in territorial governance-related fields such as human geography, planning studies, sociology, and management studies. The contributions share the ambition of highlighting troubling contemporary tendencies where spatial planning and territorial governance can be seen to circumscribe or subvert 'due democratic practice' and the democratic ethos. The book also functions as an introduction to some of the central strands of contemporary political philosophy, discussing their relevance for the wider field of planning studies and the development of new planning practices.

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THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF EUROPEAN TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE

New perspectives on democratic deficits and political displacements

Jonathan Metzger, Phil Allmendinger and Stijn Oosterlynck

For the past ten years or so, we have been giving in to the temptation to replace politics by management, and the exercise of democracy by the awful word ‘governance’.

(Latour, 2012)

Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she ‘normally’ has no reason to either see or hear.

(Rancière, 2001)

The tired spectre of governance

A spectre is haunting Europe – but it is not Karl Marx’s famous spectre of communism-to-come – it is the tired, disoriented and crepuscular spectre of governance. The appearance on the scene of governance, conceptualized as an institutional regime based on inter-scalar cooperation and networked public-private partnerships, was initially heralded in large quarters of the social scientific research community as the final absolution from authoritarian state government when the concept rose to prominence in the early 1990s. But today, as European citizenries sift through the debris of the modern welfare-state and attempt to come to terms with the prospect of an extended age of austerity, the previously heralded merits of a governance-driven society have become increasingly clouded. In place of the promises there is a thickening mist of suspicion and mistrust in the wake of the constant failure of more or less ingeniously designed governance arrangements to deliver, in particular in relation to issues of democratic legitimacy and credibility. The ongoing collapse of “rolled out-neoliberalism” (Haughton et al., 2013) in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and its systemic repercussions and seemingly irreversible global political and economic destabilizations is today fuelling massive protests on the streets as well as at the ballot box – many of which can not by any means be labelled as ‘progressive’. Thus governance, built around the idea of broad consensus as the fundamental tool and goal of political action and the high road to steady global ‘progress’ by way of one-dimensionally measured economic ‘growth’ – appears today to be dead in the water as a mode of societal organization.

Following the general rise in popularity of the governance concept in the 1990s the related concept of territorial governance began to appear with increasing frequency in the academic literature about a decade later. Initially the term was used descriptively to designate different institutional designs of territorial organization, i.e. the formation of a territorial control apparatus in the form of tiers of government, governmental fiscal mechanisms, electoral systems, etc. (see e.g. the work of Loughlin, 2007, 2009 who uses the term this way). More recently, the term has increasingly mutated into a more normative concept, often with the addition of the qualifier ‘multilevel’. For instance in the EU policy sphere the concept ‘multilevel territorial governance’ to a large extent appears to have developed as a euphemism for the seemingly politically tainted concept of ‘spatial planning’ (see e.g. Faludi, 2012) and also planning academics such as Davoudi et al. (2008) appear to generally deploy the concept to this purpose, while more broadly also contending that “territorial governance is different from governance because, in brief, its object is the territory, a complex object per se, and its aim is to regulate, to govern, to manage territorial dynamics through the pilotage of a multiplicity of actors” (Davoudi et al., 2008: 50, emphasis in original).

As hinted above, beyond academic definitions which seldom travel in any wider circuits, there also exists a much wider proliferation of concrete ‘governance’ practices pertaining to the contemporary organization of spatial/spatialized/spatializing relations and processes in European states and other sites of (supposedly) public-interest decision-making. Planning has always dealt with different spaces – territorial, relational, relative – simultaneously balancing and choosing in what circumstances to ‘open up’ and relate territorial spaces to wider, relational issues and then ‘closing down’ such issues into concrete plans and strategies, enabling or articulating certain connections and relations, while disabling or obfuscating others. The academic ambition behind introducing the concept of governance into questions of spatial planning, organization and management originally appears to have been aimed at developing more inclusive and democratic urban and regional management procedures (see e.g. Cars et al., 2002 and Healey, 2007). Alas, things did not turn out this way. Instead, in empirical investigations of concrete contemporary territorial governance practices and arrangements, a number of scholars have warned that the emerging informal institutions and opaque and nebulous networks of territorial governance in fact may pose a grave challenge to democracy and direct risks to the democratic representation, accountability and transparency of decision-making processes of fundamental relevance to large groups of citizens (see e.g. Swyngedouw, 2005; Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2010; Metzger, 2011). As issues are displaced from arenas of public debate and decision-making into closed networks of elite representatives and technical experts, glaring democratic deficits are generated as issues which are often of pressing concern to both local populations and broader citizenries become sheltered in shadowy forums comprised of select groups of influential ‘stakeholders’ who take upon themselves the right to resolve the issues at hand in between each other. This severely limits the transparency of the decision-making process and further disables public discussion and interrogation of issues – in a way thus short-circuiting the democratic political process (Metzger, 2011; see also Marres, 2005a).

Notwithstanding the above-expressed reservations concerning the implications of policy practices that today circulate under the label of ‘territorial governance’, in the context of the current volume we nevertheless choose to retain this term as an analytical concept, so as to be able to designate and map out the policy spaces and practices today being generated and performed under this and similar related labels.

What we now ask ourselves is how we can find the adequate intellectual resources to conceptualize and highlight the democratic deficits we see as worryingly proliferating through current territorial governance practices. In the quotes at the opening of this introduction, two authors coming from very different theoretical traditions, namely Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, both suggest that the alternative to managerial governance practice is politics. In this book, we build upon this critical suggestion, and bring it to bear upon contemporary territorial governance practice – asking how an understanding of the politics and political dimensions of these societal processes can help us highlight and grasp the glaring democratic deficits that appear to be generated in these contexts. Enrolling the concepts of politics and the political as central tools in this endeavour of course requires us to make explicit what we mean by these terms. Of course, there is no way that we can comprehensively discuss all the different ways in which politics and the political have been conceptualized in the recent history of political thought. Rather, we choose to ground our approach in an appreciation of what Oliver Marchart has called ‘the political difference’ (Marchart, 2007). The political difference refers to the fundamental distinction between society as an instituted social order and the impossibility to find a definite foundation for any social order. The differences, partial connections and entanglements along and across class, gender, ethnic-cultural and innumerable other lines that shape contemporary societies are such that they cannot be once-and-for-all overcome, but continue to produce political frictions and disagreements. In other words, our political condition is shaped by the fundamental ungovernability of society, despite continued attempts to make it governable. This does not at all imply a rejection of the analytical relevance of the concept of governance in territorial or other matters, but a call for paying attention to the limited reach of any governance effort or arrangement, recognizing that any form of order is a precarious achievement, and always spatially and temporally limited (Law, 1994), and thus always sooner or later being bound for failure as it becomes extended in space and time. We therefore suggest that a rewarding avenue of investigation in territorial governance is to pose the question about the democratic deficits of contemporary territorial governance practices as a question of how such practices in different ways relate to ‘the political’ understood as the ultimate ungovernability of the heterogeneous and multifarious bundles of entanglements and partial connections that we choose to label as ‘societies’, as well as the related necessary limits in space (Euclidean as well as relational) and time of any governance arrangement.

If we as academics are to be able to get a grip on and highlight contemporary troublesome developments in the specific field of territorial governance we need intellectual equipment in the form of concepts that lend themselves to picking up upon and highlighting contemporary practices of depoliticization – and which further may even offer some tentative suggestions as to how things actually can be done differently. Proceeding from a, by necessity, succinct overview of the historical grappling with the political dimension of spatial planning and territorial governance in the context of planning studies, the remainder of this introduction will explore different approaches to these questions that, when taken together, generate a menu or selective toolbox of concepts that we believe (and the authors of the chapters in this volume show!) may come in handy in the endeavour to make sense of the current state of territorial governance practice in Europe. All the tools suggested here are not fully compatible with each other, but they are all useful for their own specific purpose – and most of them are as of now still quite novel and scantly employed by academic investigators of territorial governance practices.

Planning studies have long since engaged in studying the drivers and institutional landscapes of territorial governance in different national and social contexts and as a field of research contains a richesse of accumulated experiences of grappling with the democratic challenges posed by engagement and negotiations at the contested frontier between legitimate democratic decision-making, public political engagement and the domain of technical expertise in relation to territorial management and organization. Advocacy planning, prominent in the 1960s and 1970s and then collaborative or communicative planning from the 1990s, struggled with how planning could reconcile growing demands for greater public involvement within advanced, capitalist societies while promoting a progressive role and agenda for planning and planners in territorial management.

We then choose to highlight two interrelated but distinct contemporary intellectual traditions that we believe are particularly suited for providing the intellectual tooling necessary for tackling these questions and these are: post-foundationalist political thought and Actor-Network Theory (ANT).¹

We are convinced that a closer engagement with post-foundational political thought may help investigators of territorial governance processes find resources to conceptualize politics and the political in ways that do not assume society to be a harmonious whole just in need of management and some marginal optimizing ‘tweaking’, but rather as a space of contestation riddled with difference and strife, thus attuning us to the dangers of disavowing or foreclosing the space for genuine political disagreement. ANT may help us find tools to empirically investigate practices of politicization and de-politicization of processes and projects normally not deemed to belong to the sphere of politics ‘proper’ and to track the evolution of unfolding contested issues and public imbroglios as they become displaced across various more or less democratic forums in the course of their development.

The chapters of this volume all, to different degrees and in different ways, draw upon the above presented sources of inspiration (amongst others). Taken together, we are convinced that there are novel insights that might be gained from bringing all these perspectives together, not in the form of some superficial and impossible synthesis, but rather so as to constitute the parameters of a hopefully fruitful space of productive academic engagement. After setting out the key parameters of this volume, the rest of this introduction consists of three sections, each presenting one of the above-mentioned strands of scholarship that form the inspiration for the present volume. The introduction then concludes with a presentation of the chapters of the book.

Setting the scene: planning studies and politics

The conception of and role accorded to politics varies from one planning perspective to another. Perhaps the most important shift in thinking about the relationship between politics and planning occurred in the 1960s, when the rational-technical knowledge that formed the basis of planners’ claims to professionalism began to be increasingly criticised (Allmendinger, 2009). The democratization movement of the late 1960s both challenged planners’ exclusive access to valid knowledge about territorial arrangements and questioned the value neutrality of the planner’s position, instead highlighting a complicity in state capture by economic interests. The rational and systems planning traditions were typified by a view on society where there was little place for politics, instead seeing society as an integrated machine that can be optimized through fine-tuning. Politics was either seen as a disturbance of this system or, in rational-procedural planning, had a specific and minimal role in helping identify ‘ends’ whilst planners determined the ‘means’ (e.g. Faludi, 1973). Such means were imagined to be technical, non-political and firmly within the realms of planning.

Reactions against this worldview grew throughout the 1960s, peaking in the late 1960s and leading to the emergence of perspectives that did not treat politics as illegitimate incursions in technical-rational decision-making procedures, but put politics much more central to the planning endeavour. Aaron Wildavsky (1973) for example claimed that planning is politics, perhaps by other means and under another name, but politics none the less. This reasoning also resonated throughout the intellectual movements of advocacy and equity planning, in which the political in planning is directly embraced. For Paul Davidoff (1965), planners should align their roles with their values acting on behalf of causes or communities with whom they shared a worldview. However, advocacy and equity were only ever marginal in the planning field and were largely confined to North America. Such views may not have had a significant impact upon practice, particularly in Europe, but they represented a growing challenge to the rationalist orthodoxy. This challenge reached its zenith in the re-emergence of political economy and Marxist interpretations of planning in the 1970s (e.g., Harvey, 1973) on the left and the growing libertarian (e.g. Jacobs, 1961; Banham et al., 1969) and then neoliberal counteroffensive in the wake of the economic crisis from 1973 (e.g., Hayek, 1960; Siegan, 1972). Whilst the neoliberal challenge began to dominate in policy and practice, it was the left’s development of the communicative planning paradigm that was to dominate planning theory and its approach to politics from the 1990s onwards.

Collaborative or communicative planning theory, broadly derived from the shift towards a ‘planning as politics’ school of thought, is very influential in contemporary planning theory. This approach emphasises the role of discourse and power, drawing upon critical theory, Foucauldian notions of power and Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory (Innes and Booher, 2010; Healey, 1993, 1996, 1997). Collaborative and communicative theories of planning are underpinned by observation-based analyses of practice or ‘what planners do’ (Forester, 1983; Healey, 1992; Hoch, 1995). Such empirical analyses morphed into theories for planning drawing upon a quite idiosyncratic reading of pragmatist philosophy (Hoch, 1997, 2002) and/or communicative ethics (Habermas, 1984). Healey (2003) describes the collaborative turn as the dominant rhetoric in contemporary planning thought and “consensus formation has become the grail of much participatory practice” (Hillier, 2003: 424).

The emergence of consensus-based planning theory reflec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The contested terrain of European territorial governance: new perspectives on democratic deficits and political displacements
• 2 Post-political regimes in English planning: from Third Way to Big Society
• 3 In search of the irreducible political moment: or why planning shouldn’t be too hung up on conflictuality
• 4 Opposing the postpolitical Swedish urban discourse
• 5 Rethinking politics and the (post-)political through Deleuze-Guattarian micropolitics
• 6 Impossible common ground: planning and reconciliation
• 7 Hopeless postpolitics, professional idiots, and the fate of public space in Stockholm Parklife
• 8 Conflict management, democratic demands, and the post-politics of privatisation
• 9 Planning as war by other means
• 10 The moose are protesting: the more-than-human politics of transport infrastructure development
• 11 Insurgent architects and the spectral return of the urban political
• Index