Situated Practices of Strategic Planning

An international perspective

Louis Albrechts, Alessandro Balducci, Jean Hillier, Louis Albrechts, Alessandro Balducci, Jean Hillier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317393412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

All over the world societies are facing a number of major problems. New developments, challenges and opportunities cause these issues and yet cases tell us that traditional spatial planning responses and tools are often insufficient to tackle these problems and challenges.

Situated Practices of Strategic Planning draws together examples from across the globe – from France to Australia; from Nigeria to the United States, as it observes international comparisons of the strategic planning process. Many approaches and policies used today fail to capture the dynamics of urban/regional transformation and are more concerned with maintaining an existing social order than challenging and transforming it. Stewarded by a team of highly regarded and experienced researchers, this book gives a synthetic view of the process of change and frames future directions of development. It is unique for its combination of analysis of international case studies and reflection on critical nodes and features in strategic planning.

This volume will be of interest to students who study regional planning, academics, professional planners, and policy makers.

Part 1
Situated experiences of strategic planning worldwide

2
Introduction

Louis Albrechts and Alessandro Balducci

The first part of the book illustrates the emergence of strategic spatial planning in different forms in various parts of the world. As we clarified in the general introduction, at the end of the twentieth century urban and regional planning, with its ‘doctrines’ (Faludi and van der Valk, 1994), traditions and practices, born at the beginning of the same century, has been challenged everywhere for its inability to cope with the speed of change and to serve the new demands emerging in the urban sphere: from urban competition to urban sustainability, from regeneration to the support of big events, from managing urban shrinkage to managing rapid growth in developing countries (Albrechts, 2004). On the one hand, the accelerated pace of change and the growing complexity favoured the crisis of any rigid and static form of planning, while on the other hand it emphasized the need for new instruments to orientate choices in a turbulent environment.

It has been in this context that new forms of planning have been experimented with and that strategic planning became the new hope of the community of (mainly academic) planners in Europe and beyond. Strategic planning aims to check government and corporate power to guarantee the use of local knowledge, to ensure that planning processes are responsive and democratic (see Friedmann, 1992). As it aims at securing political influence, it is certainly confrontational and conflicting, it is directed at change by means of specific outputs (a probe into the future, strategies, plans, policies, projects) framed through spaces of deliberative opportunities. As a consequence, strategic planning may take place beyond the boundaries of the (traditional) planning profession and planning laws and regulations. Its outcomes must be well informed, just and fair. There is ample evidence that in many strategic plans the often more abstract discourse is turned into something more tangible and is redefined into a more familiar vocabulary of statutory planning (see also Olesen and Richardson, 2012: 1703).

The meaning which has been attributed to the term ‘strategic’ has often been unclear and sometimes even contradictory. As strategic planning will be influenced by the available and effective policy levers and by past patterns of spatial and institutional development, it is unlikely that it means the same thing when it has been translated into a different cultural setting, political system, policy context and planning tradition. The policy levers and development patterns create both capacities and preferences among relevant actors (Friedmann, 2010: 325). Moreover, research in the field of policy research reveals that the theoretical basis underlying a policy concept in such diffusion is often inadequately conceptualized (Ganapati and Verma, 2010: 237).

The term ‘strategic’ was often used to indicate the detachment from traditional forms of planning and to overcome the shortcomings of statutory planning at local and regional tiers of planning and decision-making. More and more, it became a key word representing the need to practise a more interactive, proactive, selective and visionary form of planning.

From this perspective, this Part of the book produces, for the first time, an overview of situated experiences of strategic spatial planning worldwide. It is not an attempt to document all the forms of planning that have been labelled as strategic, but rather to look at different contexts in which we have observed the emergence of strategic spatial planning that has been explicitly conceived to deal with a problem of designing the future in an open and innovative way. Cases help us to find out how the approach imagined and produced in one context then becomes susceptible to processes of reimagination and reproduction that appropriate their originality but also facilitate their ability to travel to other contexts (see Vidyarthi, 2010). It is clear that strategic planning has not always had the impact that its different streams intended. This is partly due to the fact that the capacity of a strategic spatial planning system to deliver the desired outcomes is dependent not only on the legal-political system itself, but also on the conditions underlying it (see also Mintzberg, 1994). These conditions – including political, societal, cultural and professional attitudes towards spatial planning (in terms of planning content and process) and the political will on the part of the institutions involved in setting the process in motion (and, with even more difficulty, in keeping it going) – affect the ability of planning systems to implement the chosen approaches. The surrounding political regime enhances or inhibits the institutional change needed for strategic planning.

Strategic planning does not work on its own. It needs change agents, what Kingdon (2003) has described as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ – a champion, in the terminology of Bryson (1995), to take the approach and deploy it. This means that the influence is not direct, but works through multiple processes in which relevant actors can see an opportunity to use strategic planning to push forward a policy change (see Sorensen, 2010: 133). Actors interpret strategic planning differently and will adopt those aspects of the approach that best fit their own situation. This may be a choice of elements that promise to solve some problems and can be implemented or reinterpreted within the frameworks of existing planning tools (see Healey and Upton, 2010). So, for strategic planning to be successful, a key task is to explore who has a stake in an issue. The question concerning who is to be considered a stakeholder in a particular context or situation is not only an epistemological challenge, but also a fundamentally ontological issue (Metzger, 2012: 782). When all public agents and all citizens are viewed as decision-makers, ‘laws and rules should not be seen as prescribing a specific course of action. Rather they are frames within which people make decisions’ (Whitaker, 1980: 242; see also Forester, 2010). They serve as ‘benchmarks against which to assess the wisdom of alternatives, but they do not determine behavior; neither do frames prescribe fixed outcomes’ (Whitaker, 1980: 242).

For some (see Mazza, 2011, 2013; Mäntysalo, 2013), the possible detachment of strategic spatial planning from the statutory planning system into a parallel informal system would pose a serious legitimacy problem. For Mäntysalo (2013: 51), the main purpose of strategic planning is framing the statutory-strategic planning relationship. A frame in this context embodies a sensitivity to the complexity, plurality and indeterminacy of particular urban development dynamics as they emerge, and which generate sufficient energy to inspire and direct transformative actions within those dynamics with the aim of shaping what happens in a place (Healey, 2008: 35). Many challenges that societies are facing are structural: diversity (race, class, age, religion), equity (unequal development), inclusivity (inclusion, exclusion), sustainability, climate change. Hence the need for transformative change. Transformative change is about systemic change (deep change) in society that cannot be undone. It focuses on the structural problems in society, and it needs to construct images/visions of preferred outcomes and how to implement them. The transformative agenda is a modern term for structural change that has been discussed by many in the past (Etzioni, 1971; Schön, 1971; Friedmann, 1987) in the context of planning theory. It simply refuses to accept that the current way of doing things is necessarily the best way. It differs from the established or traditional way of thinking, in which there is hardly any choice and hardly an awareness of other possibilities. The construction of different futures, which lies at the very heart of transformative practices, requires creativity and original synthesis. Therefore, strategic planning must involve a creative effort to imagine futures that are structurally different, and to bring this creative imagination to bear on political decisions and the implementation of these decisions. To construct visions for the future, we need both the solidity of the analysis that seeks to discover a place that is – this includes the multiplicity of the webs of relations which transect a territory and the complex intersections and disjunctions which develop among them (Healey, 2006: 526) – and that might exist, and the creativity of the design of a place that would not otherwise be.

As it is impossible to do everything that needs to be done, much of the process lies in making the tough decisions about what is most important for the purpose of producing fair, structural responses to problems, challenges, aspirations and potentials. To create particular future states is an act of choice involving valuation, judgement and the making of decisions that relate to the selection of perceived appropriate means for going forward.

Strategic spatial planning focuses on a limited number of strategic key issues; it takes a ‘collective’ critical view of the environment in terms of determining strengths and weaknesses in the context of opportunities and threats. Strategic spatial planning focuses on place-specific qualities and assets (social, cultural and intellectual, including physical and social qualities of the urban/regional tissue) in a global context.

Conceptions of the future in statutory plans were often based on linear derivations from the present and tended to create the impression that there was something logically and factually inevitable in both the sequence and the final configuration of predicted events. This approach resulted in plans that are closed systems constructed to solve specific classes of problems in the light of given goals which had been conceived outside the plan’s own system. In strategic planning, the future needs to transcend mere feasibility and must result from judgements and choices formed with reference, first, to the idea of what is desirable, and then to that of betterment. Such futures might (and perhaps, must) be imagined as differing radically from present reality: they must represent situations which are not mere temporal extensions of the here and now; they must be free of the weight of what we are able simply to predict. A particular future state becomes, in this way, an act of choice that involves valuations, judgements and decisions and, when these decisions are carried out, which will lead to a gradual shift in a desirable direction. ‘Futures’ must symbolize some good, some qualities and some virtues that the present lacks (diversity, sustainability, equity, spatial quality, inclusiveness, accountability). Speaking of sustainability, spatial quality, virtues and values is a way of describing the sorts of place we want to live in, or think we should live in.

We don’t look upon strategic spatial planning as the ultimate model, nor as a new ideology preaching a new world order, nor as a panacea for all challenges. Strategic planning is not meant as a substitute but as a complement for other planning tools (statutory planning, urban design). For us, it is a method for creating and steering a (range of) better future(s) for a place. Its focus on ‘becoming’ produces quite a different picture from traditional planning.

The theoretical notions introduced above will be reflected on in the cases described in the various chapters. The editors have developed a grid as a conceptual framework for the chapter authors, enabling a more systematic and coherent treatment of the cases. The grid is used to fuse the cases into a framework and to draw interesting conclusions from them. On the one hand, the grid allows the creation of a common ground for this exploration and, on the other hand, it facilitates our efforts to profile a number of characteristics that can make strategic spatial planning really strategic.

The grid is as follows:

• - Describe how and why strategic spatial planning has developed. What was the context? What created the momentum? Who were the actors who started the process and why were other forms of planning not used (if appropriate)?
• - Describe the nature of strategic spatial planning, in terms of its intellectual roots, the model assumed, if any, to understand the propagation of ideas and the emergence of specific patterns.
• - Describe in what sense the strategic spatial planning is ‘strategic’. What meaning has been attributed to the term?
• - Describe where the focus of the planning action is. Is it on longer-term visions of the future, or rather is it on pragmatic actions?
• - Describe the underlying spatial and temporal logics.
• - Describe what issues these processes cover and what kind of societal challenges are dealt with (for example, if and how they make reference to climate change, environmental issues, social exclusion, ageing, and equity, etc.). Describe whether these and other such problems are addressed in a comprehensive or a selective manner.
• - Describe the relationship of strategic spatial planning with statutory planning and what is its legal status.
• - Describe how uncertainty is conceptualized and dealt with in the specific case.
• - Describe what the output of the strategic spatial planning process is. Is it a vision, a planning document, strategies, a number of projects, or something else?
• - Describe how strategic spatial planning deals with multi-level governance issues, the changing boundaries of ‘the urban’, and the involvement of stakeholders and citizens.
• - Describe what degrees of control/stability or flexibility are evident in the case and its planning processes. How has the need for adaptation been considered and experienced? What has been the capacity to deal with unintended effects?
• - Offer a critical evaluation of the planning processes examined. What has been really new and innovative? What could be considered an effective way of dealing with emerging problems? What have been the major limitations of this approach to strategic spatial planning?
• - Describe what lessons the case study might offer for strategic spatial planning practice elsewhere.

Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1 Some ontological and epistemological challenges
• Part 1 Situated experiences of strategic planning worldwide
• Cross-national and national experiences
• Regional and local experiences
• Part 2 Conceptual and critical nodes in strategic planning
• Part 3 Epilogue
• Index