Planning in the Public Domain

From Knowledge to Action

John Friedmann

• Editore: Princeton University Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691214009
• Argomento: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoria: Asuntos públicos y administración

John Friedmann addresses a central question of Western political theory: how, and to what extent, history can be guided by reason. In this comprehensive treatment of the relation of knowledge to action, which he calls planning, he traces the major intellectual traditions of planning thought and practice. Three of these--social reform, policy analysis, and social learning--are primarily concerned with public management. The fourth, social mobilization, draws on utopianism, anarchism, historical materialism, and other radical thought and looks to the structural transformation of society "from below." After developing a basic vocabulary in Part One, the author proceeds in Part Two to a critical history of each of the four planning traditions. The story begins with the prophetic visions of Saint-Simon and assesses the contributions of such diverse thinkers as Comte, Marx, Dewey, Mannheim, Tugwell, Mumford, Simon, and Habermas. It is carried forward in Part Three by Friedmann's own nontechnocratic, dialectical approach to planning as a method for recovering political community.

Part One / Concepts

1The Terrain of Planning Theory

When we say that someone has acted rationally, we usually imply approval. But what, precisely, do we mean by a “rational” action? For some, an action is rational when it adheres to a formal criterion, such as economic efficiency. If I can get more of something for the same cost, I am said to be acting rationally. For others, conforming to socially expected behavior is rational. Thus, if I quit my job for one that pays better, people will nod with understanding: I have acted rationally. Or if, as an industrialist, I shut down my factory in Cleveland, because I can increase my company’s profits by moving operations to Arizona or Brazil, that action, too, will be widely hailed as rational. Although the shutdown may have put thousands out of work, my first responsibility is to myself and to my stockholders.

Market Rationality and Social Rationality

In the market as well as in society, rationality identifies a relation between means and ends in which the ends are generally taken to be the self-regarding interests of an isolated individual or firm. The linked interests of all those workers in Cleveland were not expected to enter into my profitability calculus. And yet, strictly speaking, I cannot entirely ignore them either, because as a value that enjoys social approval, rationality needs to be justified in terms that are broader than mere self-interest. I need to demonstrate that my actions will tend to benefit the collectivity as well as me. As Charlie Wilson once tried to argue, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the nation.”

This, as everyone knows, was also Adam Smith’s basic position. Following Mandeville, he argued the doctrine of the natural harmony of interests. In his famous poem The Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville had said that human pride and the desire for luxuries would lead to general prosperity (Dumont 1977, ch. 5). Or as Smith expressed it, “private vices yield public benefits.” This “logic” still informs the work of contemporary economists. Social welfare is enhanced, they say, so long as an action makes at least one person better off than before and no one’s situation is made worse. The underlying assumption is that the gain of some is not necessarily inconsistent with the gain of all, which therefore implies that the interests of capital and labor can be unified. This principle of practical philosophy, called the “Pareto optimum” after the Italian sociologist who first stated it, is the most widely accepted criterion for analyzing the costs and benefits of actions in the public domain (Mishan 1981b).

The unrestrained pursuit of self-interest by individuals and corporations came to be known as market rationality. Because its social outcomes were not planned with any conscious effort, market rationality could be presented as a quasi-natural phenomenon, something beyond human intentions. Yet it was obvious from the beginning that social welfare was not being unambiguously promoted by transactions in the marketplace. Even the weak conditions of a Pareto optimum were rarely, if ever, achieved. As the “blind” forces of the market increased the prosperity of some, they also stepped up the exploitation of labor, drove peasants from their land, dehumanized work, caused mass unemployment, produced urban squalor, hurled small businesses into bankruptcy, exacerbated inequalities of wealth and power, and ravaged the earth. In the face of these realities, a different kind of rationality was needed to balance the calculus of private gain.

Market rationality was grounded in a metaphysics of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962). According to this doctrine, the individual is assumed to be logically prior to society, and the satisfaction of material needs is said to be the principal reason people live in social groups. The contrasting doctrine of social rationality, which came into prominence during the nineteenth century, made the opposite assumption: social formations were said to be logically prior to the individual, whose separate identity as a person derived from membership in a specific group. Reason, therefore, ought to be exercised in the name of the group, so that its collective interests might be properly formulated and pursued through appropriate actions. Since collective interests, in this view, always took precedence over the interests of individuals, the Pareto optimum ceased to be valid as a criterion for social welfare. In political terms, this implied that market operations would have to be curtailed or replaced; in either case, some form of central planning would be needed (Lindblom 1977).¹

In the twentieth century, and particularly after the Depression, a third position was gradually adopted throughout the capitalist world. Though its rhetoric was deliberately vague, the practices it advocated were plain enough. Market rationality would be allowed free rein, but only within legal constraints designed to protect the collective interest. To mitigate the negative consequences of market rationality for people and their communities, then, the state would intervene in markets with the instruments of planning in progressive income redistribution, basic social service programs, unemployment and old age insurance, laws to protect natural resources and human habitats, and so on.

While corporate planning continued to hold firmly to the original model of market rationality, public planners championed a modified form of social rationality that was explicitly concerned with social outcomes (Mishan 1976). Public planning was thus brought into head-on conflict with private interests. The respective criteria for determining what was rational were diametrically opposed. But business was powerful, and planners rarely accomplished more than private interests were prepared to accept. When civic passions were inflamed by some particular practice—such as the dumping of toxic wastes, to take a recent example—planners might move against the interests of property and business. But such moments were relatively rare, and once passions had cooled, earlier gains might be reversed. It is probably correct to say that in most cases public sector programs are successfully launched only when they are broadly compatible with the interests of corporate capital.

The Uses of Planning

The practice of planning, in the modern sense, began in the early decades of this century. But to trace its ideological roots, we must go back to the early nineteenth century, to the work of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, in which the vision of a science working in the service of humanity first took shape. A full century of material and perceptual changes had to pass before planning emerged as a distinctive practice, with its emphasis on technical reason and social rationality. The first and most important among these changes was the gradual breakdown of the “organic” order of feudal society and the emergence of the economy as a system of interrelated markets (Polanyi 1957). As economic pursuits came to be governed chiefly by the principle of private gain and were spurred on by competition, nearly all social relations outside the household came to depend upon money. Second, a science of society, together with its several distinctive disciplines, had to grow to maturity and gain a measure of social acceptance before the new planning could be based on it. Third, the industrial revolution had to mature before the bureaucratic state would take an active role in promoting the new economic forces, maintaining the necessary internal and external balances, and coping with the enormous social problems that industrialization had engendered.

Before the nineteenth century, a very different sort of planning had prevailed. Because it tended to impose a rational, Euclidean order upon the organic forms of nature, I shall call it orthogonal design (Houghton-Evans 1980). For architects and engineers, who were its chief practitioners, the straight lines and right angles of orthogonal design were classic instances of an artificial, rational ordering of space. The proto-cities of the ancient world—for example, the ceremonial centers of the Chou Dynasty; Teotihuacan in the central plateau of Mexico; and Angkor Wat, the magnificent temple city of the Khmer empire—are classical instances of orthogonal design (Wheatley 1971). Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s imposing design for the federal capital at Washington, D.C. (1791), is a more recent example. In its purest form, orthogonal design can be found in the conceptions of utopian space expressed in Campanella’s seventeenth-century City of the Sun, with its symmetrical-hierarchical patterns (Campanella 1981), and in the twentieth-century city of Brasilia, designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the shape of an airplane with sweptback wings. It was master builders like these who had planned the great cities of antiquity; devised the complex irrigation systems of the early “hydraulic” civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China; and laid out the roads that sent the Roman legions marching from the imperial hub to the furthest reaches of the empire (Childe 1956; Wittfogel 1959; Mumford 1961).²

Orthogonal design had many historical and local variants, but its salient features can be readily described.³

1. It was primarily concerned with the physical arrangement of activities in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space.

2. It was intended for a static, hierarchical world that was construed as part of a cosmic order whose ultimate meaning could only be grasped through mystical revelation.

3. It had to conform to divine reason as interpreted by priests, shamans, theologians, geomancers, astrologers, and sometimes royalty. Because divine reason could only be “revealed,” it became authoritative knowledge. Orthogonal designers were not obliged to justify their work in rational discourse. It was sufficient that designs came from an acknowledged master, and that the relevant spiritual authorities declared them in accord with divine purpose. Two kinds of knowledge were thus required for validation: pragmatic knowledge based on experience and knowledge of the “will of Heaven.”⁴

4. Pragmatic knowledge of orthogonal design was typically passed from master to apprentice in actual work situations. Professional secrets were closely guarded, and design theory was a set of learned, pragmatic rules of procedure.

With the period we call the Enlightenment (ca. 1650–1850), Western European culture began to make a drastic break with the past, and by the mid–nineteenth century planning began to acquire features that had virtually nothing in common with the orthogonal design tradition. Although architects continued to work along traditional lines, most modern planning has been of an entirely different order.

1. As a form of technical reason, modern planning is applied to the full range of problems that arise in the public domain.⁵

2. Planning takes place in and is adapted to a rapidly changing and increasingly turbulent world. Many aspects of this world will remain opaque to human understanding and can be only partially controlled.

3. In contemporary planning practice, knowledge derived from scientific and technical research has been added to the pragmatic knowledge of experience. Expressed in arch, conceptual language and in the form of quantitative models, scientific knowledge comes to us only in fragments, from different disciplines and focused experiments. Despite the lack of a unified “scientific” world view, these fragments, even when they are in conflict, tend to be stated as universally valid hypotheses.

4. Modern planning practice must conform to human (as opposed to divine) reason. Sharpened by science and logic, specific statements about the world must be validated in rational, open discourse, in which the burden of proof is generally on those making the initial statement. Unlike orthogonal design, modern planning has to justify itself politically, in open forum. As a result, the support for specific planning proposals generally takes the form of a fragile consensus that is constantly beset by rival theories and proposals. Far from being authoritative, modern plans are historically contingent and rest on democratic processes of decision-making.

One of the first demonstrations of the new planning practice was the allocation of raw materials to the German war machine during World War I. The technical genius responsible for applying the “scientific method” to central resource allocation was Walther Rathenau, who had apprenticed as president of Germany’s largest public utility, the Allgemeine Elektrizitätswerk. An early exponent of scientific management and the world’s first technocrat, Rathenau was assassinated by political and racist enemies in 1922 (Berglar 1970).⁶ But the idea of scientific planning had already taken root elsewhere. In the United States, Herbert Hoover, an engineer, had used methods almost identical to Rathenau’s in mobilizing America’s war economy. And over the next two decades, planning ideas proliferated, especially at the urban and regional levels (Scott 1969; Sussman 1976; Krueckeberg 1983). The first professional degree program in city planning was started at Harvard University in 1923 (Sarbib n.d.).

The full range of contemporary planning practice is illustrated in Chart 1. Although this is only a rough classification, some conclusions can nevertheless be drawn.

1. In market societies, the central coordination of all planning activities is patently impossible.

2. The same planning activity may cut across several levels of territorial organization–national, state, and local.

3. Physical planning or design is now only a small area of planning, and even in that sphere the orthogonal tradition has been largely replaced by scientifically based modes of analysis that involve modeling, projections, and spatial synthesis.

4. Modern planning practice is a social and political process in which many actors, representing m...