Culture and Planning

Simone Abram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317156000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Urbanisme et développement urbain

In planning debates, culture is often treated as a fixed element, either as a quasi-economic resource or as a category of behaviour. Yet a wealth of research and analysis is available that moves the spotlight from the question of what culture is, towards understanding what we are doing when we talk about culture. This book brings that focus to planning research, examining culture as a socio-historical concept, and introducing a line of scholarship, both established and recent, to show what 'culture' does and why. Illustrated by case studies from planning contexts, it addresses the materialisation of abstract concepts, performance and embodiment, and social categorisation. In doing so, it shows how a deeper understanding of culture can offer new insights into the challenges that planners and planning theorists face. While Culture and Planning is aimed primarily at planning theorists, professionals and students, it has equal relevance for students of human geography or sociology and is accessible to a wider readership. In effect, it opens up the field of planning to a new realm of research, enabling readers to think beyond the bounds of what they know about planning, and to think about what they may, or may not, know about culture.

Chapter 1
The Idea of Culture in Planning

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This chapter introduces culture as a concept. It outlines a brief history of the concept of culture and its study. It shows how it interacts with other concepts such as ethnicity and nationalism, and how it can be distorted through stereotyping. This chapter sets up an approach to culture that is developed through the following chapters.

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There are three key areas where the term culture is used in planning literature. One is to refer to civic activity, the Arts and social events. Culture as music, visual arts, media and sports is a category of public activity that attracts its own bureaucracy, what we might call the planning of culture. I should make it clear straight away that Arts management is not the subject of this book. A second area where culture is used is to identify that different institutions have different ways of doing planning, or that there are cultures of planning,1 and a third is concerned with questions of ethnicity, or social exclusion, what we might call cultures in planning.

The second area needs to be addressed straight away, as it is here that most planning attention has been focused, whereas this book goes in a different direction. There is now broad awareness that planning systems are not universally standardised, but vary between countries2 and can therefore be compared. This approach has two main implications. Firstly, it suggests that planning cannot be universally rational but has particular histories in different locations. This recognition that planning is a practice with a history, that it is not, as Friedman puts it, ‘a profession devoid of social, political, or cultural content except for its own specific professionalism’,3 is part of the concern of this book. The second implication is that much of the energy that could have gone into thinking about culture has been diverted into thinking about planning cultures. This is a well worn path trod by various industries over the 20th century. Keir Martin tells us how the Ford motor company began to realise in the 1970s that its traditional focus on numbers and systems was part of its problem rather than a solution, and that its focus shifted to the way social relations were organised in the company itself.4 The culture concept was ready and waiting, popularised by a generation of anthropologists as an ‘all-encompassing determining system into which individuals are socialized… [that] Americans could use to make sense of social issues.’5

Something similar has happened in planning in recent decades. In the UK, interest in culture and planning has been stimulated by a UK government action to change the ‘culture of planning’, which started in the early years of the 21st century as a move towards spatial planning and increased governmental focus on efficiency. For neo-liberal governments, the identification of local government as a problem is based on an idea that there are rigid bureaucrats who do not participate with sufficient enthusiasm in new adventures.6 With this definition in place, the answer to problems with the ways in which business or bureaucracy are done is to change the ‘culture’, or, in other words, change how practitioners think about what they are doing so that they do it differently. The idea of workplace cultures is well established, and draws on some of the earliest definitions of culture, as the customs and habits of social beings,7 a set of observable characteristics attached to a particular group of people or among those in a particular place. This idea of culture acknowledges the tensions between shared and secret information, that cultures vary and can change, and that customs and habits can be learned, but it is still a rather old-fashioned model, one that Martin describes as an ‘old, bounded, deterministic model of culture that many anthropologists from the 1980s onwards viewed with some disdain’.8 It is an idea we are now very familiar with, though, so much so that the idea of organisational culture has become a normative tool9 in the management consultant’s box of answers to procedural problems, one that appeals to politicians and practitioners who look to organisational cultures to change how things are to how they would like them to be. Despite the lack of evidence that ‘culture change’ is an effective business tool, the idea of organisational cultures has become extremely popular, and planners have joined the party in adopting these ideas.

Andreas Faludi defines planning culture as ‘the collective ethos and dominant attitudes of planners regarding the appropriate role of the state, market forces, and civil society in influencing social outcomes’, focusing clearly on the planners themselves.10 John Friedman, stretches things a little further, but keeps the focus tight in defining planning culture as ‘the ways, both formal and informal, that spatial planning in a given multi-national region, country or city is conceived, institutionalized, and enacted’.11 He acknowledges a rather different definition of culture by Mary Douglas, renowned anthropologist and important contributor to organisational theory, but where Douglas thinks about culture as the production of meaning in a community, Friedman slides the idea of a community across into being a ‘community of planners’,12 bringing us back into a field of organisational management: planners have their ways of doing things, and it varies from office to office. This is an ideal start to a project of comparing planning systems around the world, to show how the basis on which planning is done is different, and how those differences are also played out in different regulations, practices and languages. This, in itself, is a very important aspect of planning research,13 alongside the study of planning history. Not only does planning history teach us about the plans of our predecessors and their relative successes and failures, it gives a sense of time and proportion to current problems.14 It should also teach us that ‘Planning Cultures’ are not really cultures (in the anthropological sense) but managerial strategies. When we hear talk of Changing the Culture of Planning we should recognise that it alludes to changing the management of planning by putting new premises in place for bureaucratic practices.

The third area of culture focuses on the idea of thinking about people from different social, ethnic or national contexts as groups. This kind of work has been most effectively done in the planning field by Huw Thomas and his various colleagues, and is extremely important to try to ensure that planning is not inadvertently exclusive or racist.15 Vanessa Watson has also pointed out how planning theorists’ belief in the value of consensual politics relies on an essentialist and superficial understanding of cultural difference.16

I do not intend to repeat that approach here, though. Instead, this book challenges the very idea of distinct cultures and tries to put the concept of culture into perspective. Socially conscious planners strive to draw minorities into debates about development, to bring together people with conflicting cultural values as well as interests, to create debate and foster communication. There has been a heavy emphasis in planning theory on the potential for planning to build bridges, to open communication or even for planners to be cultural ‘therapists’, as though cultural differences were equivalent to psychoses that could be talked out through couple counselling. Rarely, though, do planning theorists stop to think about where the concept of ‘culture’ comes from. Where it is discussed, it is treated without the historical perspective and the theoretical critique that it requires to be properly considered.17 Ask yourself first: ‘what is your culture?’ What are the categories you seize on to describe it, and what are symbols you refer to, to distinguish it from others?

Culture and nationalism

My opening gambit on a course for postgraduate students in planning on ‘understanding cultural difference’ was to ask them to tell me five things about ‘their culture’. Perhaps not a very innovative opening gambit, but a useful one none the less, because the answers were very revealing. Many of them described their culture in terms of their nation, in terms like ‘I’m Welsh, and we Welsh like to do x and y’, trying to describe the culture of the nation in terms of common practices. They also tried to describe other cultures in a similar way, ‘ah, she’s Scottish, and they are like this…’ In fact, it seemed difficult for some students to sort out the culture from the nationalism, and indeed, the nationalism from the stereotypes. ‘English people are always drinking tea’ or ‘British undergraduates drink a lot and don’t take their studies seriously’. It is always striking how national stereotypes persist, and where only a trace of common practices needs to remain to keep the stereotype going. But more important are the mechanisms by which particular actions or habits – what used to be called ‘customs’ – are transformed from simple actions into symbolic emblems that are used to designate a whole group of people.

It should not be surprising that these otherwise well-educated students engaged in this debate, since it is regularly exploited by politicians and media to conjure up enthusiasm about the nation. What makes us British, or what makes us English (or any other nationalism), are common elements of slow news-day media discussion, or a helpfully distracting debate by beleaguered politicians. It is also encouraged by authors such as Kate Fox, whose entertaining book, Watching the English argues that English people share attributes and customs, behave in prescribed ways in the pub and generally display shared etiquette. There is nothing wrong with Fox’s observations, but there is something highly dubious about the way that she projects her observations of pub behaviour and etiquette (mostly in the South of England) to generalisations about the meaning of being English.18 She does this work of translating habits into the emblems of nationalism by generalising particular practices into characterisations of a population. This is a kind of hidden category-shift, a linguistic trick, which scales up observed characteristics to the larger category of nation that includes very many individuals who may not indulge in any of the actions described, and at the same time includes others, perhaps not nationals, who might participate in the same activities. Take a simple statement about English people taking tea at 4pm. This is a classic national stereotype in that ‘everyone knows’ that English people drink tea in the afternoon, yet we know that many English people never drink tea at all, and that lots of non-English people might drink tea in the afternoon. Yet it is enough that some English people drink tea in the afternoon, that cafés offer afternoon tea (especially in popular tourist destinations), and that English people are represented having tea (in films, books or other media) for the stereotype to persist. It is precisely the kind of nationalism that Benedict Anderson analysed as being based on an imagined community among people who have never, and are never likely to, meet each other. Casual readers of Anderson (or those who repeat second-hand versions of his thesis) have leapt to the conclusion that all communities are imagined, yet this is not at all his argument. The object of his study is the nation, a fictional unity that gains traction through the belief that there is a large number of people with whom we believe we have something in common, even though we have never met. That is, he notices how we transpose our experience of being part of a community to a larger cohort or population. We may still ask, how it is possible for such imaginary wholes as ‘nations’ to persist over such long periods of time? One way is surely through our acceptance of images and stereotypes that suggest commonalities among larger abstracted populations.

Stereotypes are very convenient ways to think, to simplify the world, and yet we know that stereotypes applied to ourselves are rarely accurate, sometimes not even recognisable. I was puzzled by French stereotypes of English people eating jam with dinner, for example, until I realised that the reference might be to cranberry sauce with Christmas turkey, or apple sauce with pork. It hardly needs pointing out that it doesn’t apply to every meal or every English person. On the other hand, it is not strictly untrue that some English dishes include both meat and fruit. Stereotypes are effective because they take a fact that might be found to be true in some circumstances, and generalise broadly. Stereotypes play with what we know to be true and how we generalise ideas about difference, making what Maryon McDonald calls ‘categorical mismatches’.19 As she points out, how we identify ourselves depends very much on the social and political maps of the day, that is, ‘the categories available for the marking of self/other or us/ them boundaries’.20 McDonald notes that ‘difference does not exist simply and solely between supposedly homogeneous wholes called “cultures” coincident with these categories’21 and that the lack of fit between the categories we use and those we observe is often transformed into a confirmation of our existing prejudices about our own rationality and the irrationality of others. A long history of Western nation-building has left us with systematised sets of oppositions into which we can fit our category mismatches: reason/emotion, logic/intuition, facts/ values, intellect/passion, and so on. McDonald’s broader point is that when we identify cultural difference, we often attribute such differences according to our own understandings, and do not recognise that we are actually meeting different classification systems.

We do not only do this in relation to nations, of course. We use stereotypes equally eagerly about internal classifications, characterising men and women, for example.22 We attribute a person’s actions to the features found in our stereotypes, reinforcing the difference we observe and classifying the person exhibiting that difference as a representative of a cultural group, who will then be expected to share the other attributes we include in that stereotype. That we do this so often on the basis of national categories is a product of our socio-historical context which also produces the idea that nations are a natural category, one that we have internalised so deeply that, like the students I men...