6

THE PUBLIC INTEREST

Stefano Moroni
Introduction: The Fall from Grace of the Idea of the Public Interest
Planning has traditionally considered the public interest as its principal criterion of
justification. The notion of the public interest has traditionally provided the raison d’être for
planning.
This was true, in particular, of comprehensive technocratic planning. As Altshuler (1965: 186)
wrote, the traditional master plan approach is based on the assumption “that the comprehensive
planners understand the overall public interest”. In other words: “The existence of such a public
interest was taken for granted during the heyday of comprehensive planning . . ., and the ability
of planners . . . to identify this public interest and justify their proposals in its name, was rarely
questioned” (Alexander 1992: 129). This traditional view, which for long dominated planning
theory and practice, can be termed the rationalistic conception of the public interest.
The situation is completely different today. The concept of the public interest has come under
severe attack. It is in fact, today, a commonplace in the planning literature to say that the public
interest does not exist. In other words, it has become fashionable “to dismiss the concept of
‘the public interest’ as devoid of content. Its use as a counter of public debate is said to be
fraudulent, since there is no such thing as a public interest” (Barry 1990: 207).
But the statement “the public interest does not exist” can be interpreted in four different ways
(usually not clearly demarcated in the debate) that correspond to four quite different arguments
on the ‘inexistence’ of the public interest: first, the public interest does not exist as a fact;
second, the public interest does not exist as an a priori criterion; third, the public interest does
not exist as an extra-individual value; fourth, the public interest does not exist as an always
overriding substantive value (Table 6.1). For each of these four views, I shall ask four questions
(further developing some ideas anticipated in Moroni 2004 and 2006): first, what is the presup-
posed argument and what kind of argument is it? Second, who proposes the argument? Third,
against whom (and against what idea of the public interest) is the argument proposed? Fourth,
what idea of pluralism is accepted? Answering these questions will allow me not only to present
a (new) map of the various positions on the public interest (Table 6.2), but also to suggest a
number of conceptual distinctions that will be useful for the subsequent attempt to reconstruct
the concept.
I use here the term “public interest” in a very broad sense that roughly coincides with expres-
sions like “public good” or “common good”. The expression “common good” is the oldest one
Stefano Moroni
Table 6.1 Four different arguments on the inexistence of the public interest

Main idea Kind of Perspective

argument
The public interest does not exist as a fact Empirical Divergentism

The public interest does not exist as an a priori criterion Ethical Dialogical
proceduralism
The public interest does not exist as an extra- Ethical Classical
individual value liberalism

The public interest does not exist as an always Meta- Value pluralism
ethical
overriding substantive value

(dating back to Greek and Roman thought), while “public interest” has been introduced more
recently (in an attempt to render the concept more consistent with the secularization of political
science). However, both concepts convey the same idea: that the state should not pursue private
and sectional interests or needs, but rather the interests and needs of all citizens.
What Kind of Inexistence? First View, Divergentism
The central idea of this view is that the public interest does not exist as a fact. Let us consider
four crucial questions in this regard.
First question: What is the main argument and what kind of argument is it? In this case, the
idea is that the public interest does not exist as a fact because, in our contemporary fragmented
societies and cities, there is no possible factual overlap among the multiple varied individual
and group interests. The interests of individuals and groups in our societies are today too
divergent to exhibit any significant area in common. It is therefore impossible for public action
to operate simultaneously to everyone’s advantage. This is, fundamentally, an empirical
argument. In other words, it has something to say about our social and urban world as it is.
Second question: Who proposes the argument? This argument is usually advanced by those
planning theorists and political scientists who want to evidence the marked distributive effects
of political decisions in a society that de facto comprises multiple factions and groups with
different interests. In the planning literature, this is a position held by Simmie (1974), who
argues that in social circumstances characterized by divergence among the goals and desires of
the various individuals and groups as regards access to the scarce resources available, the
public interest is a totally inadequate criterion for planning intervention. As he writes: “There
is no such thing as THE public interest. Rather there are a number of different and competing
interests” (Simmie 1974: 125). A similar view is propounded by Gans (1973: 10):
In a pluralistic society, it is difficult to identify communal goals because they generally turn
out to be shared by … only a part of the population. For example, open space is usually thought
to be in the public interest, but it does not necessarily benefit those too far away to use it, those
who do not wish to use it, or those who want scarce resources applied to a more urgent need,
such us housing.

Third question: Against whom (and against what idea of the public interest) is the argument
directed? This argument is directed against the rationalistic conception of the public inter-est;
that is, the idea that all individuals and groups have, in fact, interests in common, even if they
are usually not aware of this fact. It is therefore an argument against those (i.e. orthodox
technocratic planners) who believe that the role of the planner is to uncover this factual area of
common interests and to show it to the individuals and groups.

The Public Interest

Fourth question: What idea of pluralism is presupposed? Pluralism (of interests, desires, aims)
is, here, merely a fact. More precisely, it is a peculiarity of our contemporary societies that we
must recognize as fundamental if we wish to furnish a viable empirical description of them.
Today cities represent the clearest example of this irreconcilability of the interests of the
various individuals and groups.
What Kind of Inexistence? Second View, Dialogical Proceduralism
First question: What is the main argument and what kind of argument is it? In this case the idea
is that the public interest does not exist as an a priori criterion. It is maintained that anyone who
claims that it is possible to define what the public interest is in abstract terms and in advance
ignores the fundamental interactive and dialogical process through which meaningful criteria
are actively constructed. This is an ethical argument.
Second question: Who proposes the argument? This argument is advanced by planning theo-
rists who stress the centrality of communicative practices. On this view, a good planning
process can be understood as one of joint sense-making in practical collective conversation
(Forester 1989). This approach focuses on removing barriers of various types – structural,
organizational, and political – which may distort dialogue. While the public interest cannot be
defined a priori, it can therefore emerge a posteriori in a process of undistorted collective
communication.

The purpose of intercommunicative planning is to help planners begin and proceed in mutually
agreeable ways based on an effort at interdiscursive understanding. … We may be able to agree
on what to do next, on how to start out, and then travel along for a while. We cannot know
where this will take us. (Healey 1993: 244)

As a consequence, the public interest is identified ex post facto through open dialogical
processes. As Healey (1997: 296–297) writes: “The ‘public interest’ has to reflect the diversity
of our interests and be established discursively.” Compare with Innes and Booher (2015: 205):
“Although partici-pants do not come into the process looking for the public interest, as they
accommodate diverse interests, the proposals come closer to something that can be viewed as
in the common good.”
Third question: Against whom (and against what idea of the public interest) is the argument
directed? This argument, too, is mainly directed against the rationalistic conception of the
public interest. According to communicative planning theory, planners must not limit their
action to set ends and look for the means with which to achieve them; rather, they should use
their abilities to generate a platform that encourages inter-communication. Planners are not
mere problem-solvers; rather, they are (and must be) organizers of public attention. As Healey
(1996: 230) writes in an influential paper:
The spatial planning tradition emphasized planning’s role in spatial ordering, supported by
rationalist methodologies of technical analysis and evaluation designed to achieve “public
interest” goals … . The approach outlined in this paper presents strategic spatial planning as a
process of facilitating community collaboration in the construction of strategic discourse, in
strategic consensus-building.

Fourth question: What idea of pluralism is presupposed? Pluralism is here again mainly a fact.
The focus is not simply on different interests but also on different ways to formulate problems.
As Forester (1989: 57) observes: “In a pluralist world the decision-making setting becomes
more

Stefano Moroni
complex . . . . Definition of problems in a pluralist environment are multiple. Different interest
groups have different senses and valuations of the problems at hand.”
What Kind of Inexistence? Third View, (Classical) Liberalism
The central idea of this view is that the public interest does not exist as an extra-individual
value.
First question: What is the crucial argument and what kind of argument is it? In this case, the
main idea is that the public interest does not exist as an extra-individual or supra-individual
value because we must reject any value of this kind. The assumption here is that individuals
are the only appropriate moral entity to which public choices must refer. In short, only
individuals should be taken into account when public decisions are taken. In this perspective,
the individual is an end in him/herself; the only source of legitimate moral claims. As a
consequence, there are no legitimate distinct moral claims deriving from cultures, structures,
communities, groups, etc. (Kukathas and Pettit 1990) We can call this conception “moral (or
deontic, or normative) individualism” to distinguish it clearly from other forms of
individualism. It is therefore essential to stress what moral individualism is not: first, it is not
a meta-ethical subjectivistic claim regarding the nature of the value (in particular, it is not the
claim that the only source of value is subjective sensation and that there are no sources of value
independent of the real and subjective experi-ences of individuals); second, it is not an
ontological claim regarding the non-existence of entities other than individuals (in particular,
it is not the claim that there are no collective entities – collective entities may exist, but they
do not have a moral status in themselves); third, it is not a methodological claim regarding the
way in which we ought to describe society (in particular, it is not the claim that we ought to
explain society by conceiving individuals as monads independ-ent of social relations and prior
to them); fourth, it is not an empirical claim regarding a specific individual psychology (in
particular, it is not the claim that individuals have to be viewed as selfish agents).
This argument against a certain idea of the public interest (i.e. an argument that is focused on
the idea of moral individualism) is patently an ethical argument. In other words, it does not
con-cern so much the social reality as it is, as the best way to evaluate that reality, and intervene
in it.
Second question: Who proposes the argument? This argument is advanced, in particular, by
liberal thought. A clear example can be found in Nozick (1974). After having suggested an
idea of rights as side constraints expressing the individuals’ reciprocal inviolability, Nozick
(1974: 32) asks: “But why may not one violate persons for the greater social good?” Here is
his reply:

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are
only individual people, different individual people, with their own indi-vidual lives. Using one
of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What
happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of on overall social good
covers this up.
(Ibid.: 32–33)
The term “liberalism” is used here to denote a family of normative political theories which
have some fundamental ideas in common: first, the above-mentioned idea of moral
individualism; second, the idea that we have to draw a sharp distinction between the good
(which personally concerns each individual separately) and the right (which regards all
individuals); third, the idea of the desirability of a plurality of conceptions of the good (i.e. the
idea that we neither need nor want a society in which people share a similar idea of the good
life); fourth, the idea of the centrality of certain basic rights and liberties (i.e. the idea that we
have to recognize and
The Public Interest
defend certain individual rights or liberties in order to protect ourselves from others and from
the state itself).
The various contemporary liberal perspectives in this sense can be located on a continuum that
ranges from the libertarian-liberal (e.g. Nozick 1974) to the egalitarian-liberal (e.g. Rawls
1971). There are few examples in the planning literature of the libertarian-liberal outlook (e.g.
Sorensen and Day 1981). Examples of egalitarian-liberal perspectives are more common (e.g.
Stein and Harper 2005).
Third question: Against whom (and against what idea of the public interest) is the argument
directed? The liberal criticism of the idea of the public interest or the common good as an extra-
individual or supra-individual value is levelled first of all against those holistic conceptions
that disregard moral individualism. A first example is provided by the holistic transcendental
conceptions of the public interest; that is, those conceptions focused on some overall idea such
as “the spirit of history”, “the spirit of progress”, or “the essence of the state”. Transcendental
conceptions of this kind have had a considerable impact on planning (see Taylor 1994: 106–
109). Other examples are the holistic communitarian conceptions of the public interest: that is,
those conceptions focused on the community as the prime ethical subject and, consequently,
on a common conception and standard of the good life. By “communitarianism” here I do not
mean any generic claim in favour of collective or communal life, but rather a strong ethical
commitment to community as the only decisive source of value (MacIntyre 1981). Conceptions
of the public interest or the common good rooted in communitarian perspectives of this kind
have also had a strong impact and are still widely accepted – explicitly or implicitly – in
planning theory and practice. (For a critical appraisal of various ideas of community in
planning theory and practice – and a warning against the risks of a “strong community”
perspective – see Ganapati 2008).
The liberal argument is also an argument against aggregationist conceptions of the public inter-
est such as utilitarianism; that is, those normative perspectives based on an aggregative
criterion of choice focused on the notion of utility. As is well known, the utilitarian philosophy
strongly influenced planning theory and practice (with particular reference to the interpretation
of the public interest, see Taylor 1994: 103–106; Campbell and Marshall 2002: 174–176).
Utilitarians usually start with an apparently individualistic claim: “Real individual preferences
(desires, inter-ests, aims) are what really matter for us.” But their particular principle of
collective choice, the maximization of total utility as a sum of individual utilities (interpreted
as the satisfaction of individual preferences), is incongruous with the initial individualist
stance. In the utilitarian aggregative criterion of public decision-making, the separateness of
persons becomes lost in an impersonal global calculus (Rawls 1971: 27; Lukes 1973: 48). The
utilitarian aggregative pro-cedure takes account of utility measures and not of individuals. To
sum up, utilitarianism seems open to criticism not because it is too individualistic (as many
planning theorists believe), but because it is not individualistic enough.
Before concluding, it is essential to specify that liberal theorists do not focus specifically on
the “rationalistic” conception of the public interest. However, they reject it implicitly, consider-
ing rationalistic conceptions to be irrelevant a priori. It is also essential to underscore that what
we have said does not imply that liberal thinkers reject any idea of the public interest. A liberal
con-ception of the state simply presupposes a particular idea or version of the public interest.
There is a public interest present in liberal conceptions of the state as well, since the
intervention of a liberal state aims at safeguarding certain (individual) rights of the members
of society (Kymlicka 1990: 206; Freeden 1991: 97). In conclusion, despite the prevailing
narratives, no liberal thinker has ever considered self-interest as an alternative to the public
interest (Holmes 1989: 252).
Fourth question: What idea of pluralism is presupposed? For liberal perspectives the idea of
pluralism that is centrally relevant is the idea of the “pluralism of conceptions of the good”.

Stefano Moroni
The plurality of the conceptions of the good is here not simply a fact, but a desirable situation.
In this perspective, each individual must be free to pursue the conception of the good life that
he or she likes, once some guarantees for all are provided (through certain universal individual
rights). Classic liberals have nothing to say about the individual’s conceptions of the good and
about the possible forms of self-realization. Crucial for liberalism, in fact, is the idea of the
state’s neutrality regarding the good itself. A legitimate state is, therefore, a state whose
principles do not presuppose any comprehensive conception of the good life (Rawls 1993).
Each individual can obviously believe that his or her particular idea of the good life is the best
one and that he or she has sound reasons for this conviction, but these reasons cannot become
public reasons.
What Kind of Inexistence? Fourth View, Value-Pluralism
The core idea of this view is that the public interest does not exist as an always overriding
substantive value.
First question: What is the argument, and what kind of argument is it? In this perspective, the
conviction is that the public interest does not exist as a substantive value since it is impos-sible
to contend that any substantive value is better than others. A strong value-pluralism is the only
acceptable option. The interests and goals of individuals and groups are, in this perspective,
morally equivalent and strictly incommensurable. The argument is therefore primarily meta-
ethical. That is to say, it concerns whether or not it is actually possible to argue rationally in
the field of ethics.
Second question: Who proposes the argument? Value-pluralism can assume a quite different
meaning in two different perspectives: first, we have non-sceptical value-pluralism; second,
sceptical value-pluralism.
In the first case, i.e. in the case of non-sceptical value-pluralism, the fundamental idea (Kekes
1993; Gray 2000) is that we can at least identify and defend societal arrangements that can
allow pluralism to flourish in peace. Kekes (1993) and Gray (2000) argue that no particular
value always overrides any other. Hence moral dilemmas cannot be completely eliminated
from ethi-cal experience. But this does imply, according to Kekes and Gray, radical scepticism.
Kekes (1993) believes that plural values unavoidably conflict with each other. The state that
accepts value-pluralism has, therefore, no overriding commitment to any specific value and
must be hospitable to the flourishing of the widest possible array of values. But this does not
mean that the state has nothing to do apart from encourage pluralism; it might sometimes
become an advo-cate of particular conflict-resolutions. Along similar lines, Gray (2000)
suggests the idea of modus vivendi as the focus of a viable political perspective for value-
pluralistic societies. The idea of modus vivendi recognizes the ineliminable plurality of values:
not simply the diversity of desires, but the unavoidable diversity of ways of life. In this view,
“harmony” is not the preferable starting point for political doctrines: “It is better to begin by
understanding why conflict – in the city as in the soul – cannot be avoided” (Gray 2000: 5). In
this view, institutions do not reflect any common or universal value; they are simply devices
enabling individuals and groups with different ideas of the good to coexist. In short: “The
ethical theory underpinning modus vivendi is value-pluralism” (Gray 2000: 6).
In planning theory, a similar idea of (non-sceptical) value-pluralism is implicit in Davidoff
(1965). Here planners are considered to be advocates of the various groups according to their
own personal values: “The planner as advocate would plead for his own and his client’s view
of the good society” (ibid.: 333). In other words, advocate planning is “the exercise of the
planning function on behalf of specified individuals and groups, rather than on behalf of a
broadly defined public” (Davidoff et al. 1970: 12).

The Public Interest

Turning to the second case – i.e. the case of sceptical value-pluralism – we can observe that
the central idea is that the public interest does not exist, since it is impossible to justify any
kind of public choice in any reasonable fashion. It is also asserted that it is difficult to imagine,
specify and defend any societal arrangement as preferable to any single other arrangement.
Value-pluralism here coincides with total scepticism. A large group of sceptics have advanced
an argument of this kind. A recent version of this form of sceptical value-pluralism is connected
with the post-modern incommensurability thesis, according to which values, aims and lifestyles
are so intrinsically varied and diverse that we lack any common ethical language and standard.
An example of this kind of scepticism in the planning literature was anticipated by Rittel and
Webber (1973) in a noted article on the impossibility of a general theory of planning (I do not
mean to say that Rittel and Webber always sustained a similar form of scepticism; simply that
this kind of scepticism can be found in their well-known 1973 article). Rittel and Webber
(1973: 168) write: In a situation in which a plurality of individuals is pursuing a diversity of
goals,

how is the larger society to deal with its wicked problems? … Surely a unitary con-ception of
a unitary “public welfare” is an anachronistic one. We do not even have a theory that tells us
how to find out what might be considered a societally best state.

Third question: Against whom (and against what idea of the public interest or the common
good) is the argument proposed? In this view (i.e. in both the perspective of non-sceptical
value-pluralism and that of sceptical value-pluralism, albeit in partially different vein in the
two approaches) the argument is against any outlook other than value-pluralism. It is, therefore,
an argument against every use of the idea of the public interest to identify certain values as
always overriding other values.
Fourth question: What idea of pluralism is presupposed? It is essential to maintain the
distinction between the idea of pluralism accepted here – value-pluralism – and the idea of
pluralism – pluralism of the conceptions of the good – accepted by classic liberals. Kekes
(1993: 199) himself writes: Pluralism is committed to the view that there is no particular value
that, in conflicts with other value, always take justifiable precedence over them. By contrast,
… liberalism … must be committed to holding that in cases of conflict the particular values
liberals favour do take justifiable precedence over other values.

Observe, moreover, that the idea of pluralism presupposed here is also partially different from
that discussed in the first case above (i.e. divergentism). At issue is not whether value-pluralism
is a simple fact accentuated by the complexity of contemporary cities and societies and the
contradic-tions inherent in the capitalist system, but whether it is a fundamental condition of
human existence. As Gray (2000: 10–11) notes: “Value pluralism is . . . not an interpretation
of pluralism in late modern societies. If it is true, it is a truth about human nature, not the
contemporary condition.”
Rethinking the Public Interest: First Point, Acceptable
(and Unacceptable) Criticisms
Having clarified a number of preliminary issues, I now put forward some considerations crucial
for formulating a viable idea of the public interest. First of all, not all the versions of the idea
that the public interest does not exist seem acceptable.
The divergentist perspective – the public interest does not exist as a fact – is plausible but
trivial. Presenting it as one of the fundamental discoveries of planning theory and political
science

Stefano Moroni
in the second part of the twentieth century is an exaggeration. Moreover, if this idea is taken in
absolute terms, there is a risk of rendering it simply untrue. It is, in fact, evident that any group
of individuals will always share some common interests: we can find common interests even
among enemies (Barry 1990: 195). The crucial point is that the interests that are actually in
common cannot necessarily help to resolve fundamental conflicts. In any event, accepting this
first view implies the (agreeable) rejection of the rationalistic conception of the public interest
(and only that).
The dialogical proceduralist perspective – the public interest does not exist as an a priori
criterion – appropriately directs attention to the usefulness of real interaction and debate; but if
this point is taken to the extreme, such a position becomes open to criticism. First, as Alexander
(2002: 234) writes: “A dialogical concept of the public interest may be useful as a kind of
default legitimation for planning but it fails to provide the substantive content planners need if
the public interest is to have any value as an evaluative criterion for plans or planners’
decisions.” Second, the desirability of dialogue cannot be justified dialogically: in other words,
some (albeit minimal/thin) idea of the public interest must precede any process. Not every
value can be redeveloped ad hoc in each interchange; some of them have to transcend particu-
larity (Fainstein 2005: 126). In short, some sort of meta-consensus (Dryzek and Niemeyer
2006) is an inevitable presupposition.
The value-pluralist perspective – which argues that the public interest does not exist as an
always overriding substantive value – can be rejected. More precisely: non-sceptical value-
pluralism seems simply incoherent; sceptical value-pluralism is, on the contrary, coherent but
susceptible to criticism.
Non-sceptical value-pluralism (as in Kekes 1993 and Gray 2002) is self-defeating (Tate 2010).
The idea that there must be some kind of state – protecting and favouring value-pluralism –
rather than no state (Gray 2000) entails accepting certain substantive values rather than others.
The same problem arises when we argue (Kekes 1993) that the state has a crucial role to play
in conflict-resolution. Strictly speaking, value-pluralism entails nothing at all about what we
ought to do (Talisse 2015). Gray (2000: 135) himself seems to admit this when, irreparably
damaging his theory, he writes: “Yet value-pluralism does not strictly entail modus vivendi.
As a matter of logic, value-pluralism cannot entail any political project.” In short, non-sceptical
value-pluralism seeks to reconcile two incompatible elements: on the one hand, total pluralism
of values; on the other, some sort of idea of a preferable institutional arrangement and public
action. A similar kind of incongruence can be found also in certain current planning
approaches.
Sceptical value-pluralism is, on the contrary, coherent – or at least can be made such – but can
be criticized on different grounds. It is impossible to discuss this issue extensively here (see
the arguments by Trainor 2008). I simply stress that incommensurability seems not to be abso-
lute (individuals belonging to different cultures, traditions and groups have strong differences
but when they meet they can learn, exchange and change; moreover, to coexist in peace and
with reciprocal advantage, they do not need to overlap or converge on everything, but only on
very circumscribed “framework-issues”), and axiological reasoning seems not totally
impossible (in particular, it can take many intermediate forms between “foundational
absolutism” and “total relativism”; as regards planning, see Harper and Stein 1995).
The classic liberal perspective – the public interest does not exist as an extra-individual value
– can not only be accepted but seems to me particularly relevant. Accepting it implies rejecting
not just holistic conceptions of the public interest, such as the transcendental and communitar-
ian, but also the aggregationist conceptions of the public interest, such as the utilitarian one.
This happens for reasons that seem appropriate, and that do not deny the relevance of other
ideas of public interest. In particular, it is important to stress here that, according to a liberal
view, we

The Public Interest

can accept conceptions-of-the-good-pluralism as crucial to planning issues without necessarily
having to embrace a more radical – and not totally convincing – blanket value-pluralism.
Liberalism and value-pluralism are usually thought to be intrinsically linked. The widely
accepted idea seems to be that value-pluralism is a fundamental component of liberalism. But
this is untrue. This mistaken overlap between liberalism and (value-)pluralism has emerged
because pluralism has usually not been clearly demarcated from a different idea that is the core
of liberal thought: the idea of reasonable disagreement (Larmore 1996). Reasonable
disagreement is the recognition of the inevitable disagreement concerning what can constitute
a good life; the recognition that reasonable individuals tend to disagree about the nature of self-
realization. But this does not mean that there exists no value at all that overrides others; it
merely means that the state cannot impose any comprehensive conception of the good life on
all individuals (Rawls 1993). The state must limit itself to safeguarding the right of each
individual to pursue the concept of the good life that he or she prefers without seriously
harming others. Liberalism is, therefore, not value-neutral.
Rethinking the Public Interest: Second Point, Viable
(Nomocratic) Universalism
As stressed, liberal criticisms of certain ideas of the public interest seem particularly
convincing. Having concluded the pars destruens of the argument, I shall now try to develop a
more positive pars construens, which I see as a development and reformulation of the classic
liberal paradigm toward what can be termed “nomocracy” (Moroni 2010). (As already
evidenced, classical liber-alism is against certain ideas of the public interest, not against every
idea of it.)
Drawing on (and mixing) insights from Buchanan (1977), Hayek (1982) and Cordato (2007),
one could say that it is in the public interest to improve in the long term the chances of unknown
individuals of pursuing their equally unknown and continuously changing purposes in a
complex social environment that is open-ended.
This view is still based on moral individualism, but in a quite particular sense. Here, the pub-
lic interest is not the real interest of any one specific person but the potential interest of anyone
at all in the long run. As was already clear to Lewis (1832: 233): “Public, as opposed to private,
is that which has no immediate relation to any specified person or persons, but may . . . concern
any member or members of the community, without distinction.” In assessing whether some-
thing is in the public interest the point is, therefore, if it is in the interest (advantage, benefit . .
.) of potentially everybody, but not literally everybody (Taylor 1994: 97). The public interest
is something that is in the interest of each individual regardless of his or her membership in
any specific sectional interest group: it is the interest of any individual taken at random (ibid.:
95). For instance, there might be no single road or other kinds of infrastructure in a region to
whose building cost it would be strictly in everyone’s interest to contribute directly; but it might
still be in everyone’s interest to contribute to the costs of an institutional and political setting
in which roads and infrastructures will be built (Barry 1990: 197). In this sense the public
interest is something that concerns an indefinite number of non-assignable individuals (ibid.:
192). A public rule or policy ought not to be the decision to grant X to B, but to grant X to
everyone in such-and-such conditions (ibid.: 197).
Note how an idea of the public interest of this kind becomes almost a matter of course if we
want to take also future generations into account. And note how it presupposes intrinsic
unpredictability and continuous change as peculiar and unavoidable features of complex
systems – like contemporary urban realms (Moroni 2015). The suggested definition of the
public interest avoids, in fact, any interpersonal comparison of contingent utilities and instead
focuses on settings

Stefano Moroni
that can help and encourage everyone to discover and use the information and tools concern-
ing the appropriateness of means to (centrally unknowable and not fixed once-and-for-all)
individual ends. The above conception of the public interest is “ends-independent” in the sense
that it does not depend on single given ends, but aims at promoting a situation where everyone
can adaptively pursue the various ends he/she perceives from time to time as most valuable
(Cordato 2007).
Observe that if the criterion of the public interest is formulated thus, it is primarily a metacri-
terion for institutional design which can be progressively enriched and specified through
successive decision-making stages.
As I see the issue, this approach to the public interest requires the granting to each individual
of certain basic negative rights (i.e. the right for everyone to freely pursue their idea of the good
life – using the knowledge, capacities, resources and assets at their disposal as they wish –
without being harmed by others, or harming others; for instance, the right to own, use, manage,
trans-form private spaces without producing – or being affected by – negative externalities),
and some positive rights (for instance, the availability for all of certain public spaces and
services, such as basic urban infrastructures) (Moroni and Chiodelli 2014). What is crucial,
according to the approach suggested, is that these rights and entitlements have to be granted
and made effective through much less decision-making discretionality than happens today and
a more radical application of the principle of equality of treatment (also at the local level). The
simplicity and stability of land-use and building rules are also crucial. The focus of attention
will, therefore, be on certain stable patterns of social relations and public provisions, rather
than on contingently introduced and frequently revised specific material distributions and
physical configurations (Moroni 2010). All of this is in accord with the necessary reaffirmation
of a radical (both procedural and substantive) version of the classic ideal of the rule of law
(Moroni 2007). As was already clear to Harrington (1771: 241): “The public interest (which is
no other than common Right and Justice) may be called the Empire of Laws and not of Men.”
In this perspective, planners neither create nor uncover the public interest but contribute to
specifying and operationalizing the above-mentioned higher-level criterion. According to this
view, communicative and dialogical methods do not entail a new global perspective; rather,
they only provide (together with other methods) useful assistance – for example, in particular
circumstances at local level – within a more general, stable and different framework.
Final Remarks: The Ineliminability of the Concept of the Public Interest
A first conclusion of the foregoing discussion concerns the diverse positions taken on the issue
of the public interest. As a partial alternative to more traditional typologies of conceptions of
the public interest, it is now possible to compile a somewhat different one (Table 6.2).
The second conclusion is that it is not easy to refute the concept of the public interest. We are
obviously free to abandon the term “public interest” if we do not like it; but if we do so, we
will simply have to deal with the same problem under some other label: determining justifiable
public intervention in the face of diversity is crucial for any political order (Flathman 1966:
13). In short, I believe (as do, in the field of planning theory, Friedman 1973; Klosterman
1980; Howe 1992; Campbell and Marshall 2000 and 2002; Taylor 1994; Alexander 2002;
Chettiparamb 2016) that one of the main tasks of planning and political theory is to rethink the
public interest. To do this – and independently from accepting or otherwise the particular
proposal above on how to reformulate a substantive idea of the public interest – we need to
revise many current ideas too often taken for granted. In particular, we need: to sharply
distinguish arguments at different levels of discourse (empirical, ethical, meta-ethical); to
rediscover the real meaning and

The Public Interest

Table 6.2 Views on the public interest
Views on the public interest
Rationalistic views Technocratic perspectives
Holistic views Transcendental perspectives
Communitarianism
Utilitarianism
Communicative/dialogical perspectives
Classical liberalism
Nomocracy
Divergentism
Value-pluralism (sceptical and non-
sceptical)
 Aggregationist views Procedural views
Individualistic (deontic) views

Abolitionistic views

relevance of (moral) individualism; to reconsider the real limits of orthodox approaches such
as
utilitarianism; to admit that no preferred institutional schema can be derived from value-plural-
ism; to recognize that value-pluralism and classical liberalism are not connected; to recognize
that a different kind of pluralism – pluralism of the conception of the good – is the really crucial
one.
References
Alexander, E.R. (1992) Approaches to Planning, Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach.
Alexander, E.R. (2002) “The Public Interest in Planning”, Planning Theory 1(3): 226–49.
Altshuler, A. (1965) “The Goals of Comprehensive Planning”, AIP Journal 31(3): 186–97.
Barry, B. (1990) Political Argument, New York: Harvester.
Buchanan, J. (1977) Freedom in Constitutional Contract, College Station: Texas A & M
University Press. Campbell, H. and Marshall, R. (2000) “Moral Obligations, Planning, and the
Public Interest”, Environment
and Planning B 27: 297–312.
Campbell, H. and Marshall, R. (2002) “Utilitarianism’s Bad Breath? A Re-Evaluation of the
Public Interest
Justification for Planning”, Planning Theory 1(2): 163–87.
Chettiparamb, A. (2016) “Articulating ‘Public Interest’ through Complexity Theory”,
Environment and
Planning C 34(7): 1284–1305.
Cordato, R.E. (2007) Efficiency and Externalities in an Open-Universe, Auburn, AL: The
Ludwig von Mises
Institute.
Davidoff, P. (1965) “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning”, AIP Journal 31(4): 331–8.
Davidoff, P., Davidoff, L. and Gold, N.N. (1970) “Suburban Action: Advocate Planning for an
Open
Society”, AIP Journal 36(1): 12–21.
Dryzek, J.S. and Niemeyer, S. (2006) “Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political
Ideals”, American
Journal of Political Science 50(3): 634–49.
Fainstein, S. (2005) “Planning Theory and the City”, Journal of Planning Education and
Research 25:
121–30.
Flathman, R.B. (1966) The Public Interest, New York: Wiley.
Forester, J. (1989) Planning in the Face of Power, Berkeley: California University Press.
Freeden, M. (1991) Rights, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Friedmann, J. (1973) “The Public Interest and Community Participation”, AIP Journal 39(1):
2–7. Ganapati, S. (2008) “Critical Appraisal of Three Ideas for Community Development in
the United States”,
JPER 27: 382–99.
Gans, H.J. (1973) “Commentary”, AIP Journal 39(1): 10–12.
Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harper, T.L. and Stein, S.M. (1995) “Out of the Postmodern Abyss: Preserving the Rationale
for Liberal
Planning”, JPER 14: 233–44.
Harrington, J. (1771) The Oceana and Its Other Works, London: Becket and Cadell.
Hayek, F.A. (1982) Law, Legislation and Liberty, London: Routledge.

7
RETHINKING SCHOLARSHIP
ON PLANNING ETHICS
Tanja Winkler
Introduction
Many scholars accept that planners operate at the interface of knowledge and action
(Friedmann, 1987; cf. also Campbell, 2012a; Fainstein, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Healey, 1997;
Porter, 2010; Sandercock, 2003; Yiftachel, 2006). Many equally accept that operating at this
interface neces-sitates not only an awareness of how we know (epistemology), but also an
awareness of our value-based judgements (or ethical principles), since ethical principles guide
discursive and material actions, and vice-versa. Stated differently, epistemological standpoints
and accompany-ing actions shape—and are shaped by—ethical principles. This suggests
articulating knowledge, actions and ethical principles as recursively interlinked conditions,
rather than as separate pre-conditions that occur before each other in some linear, causal chain
of events (Davoudi, 2015). Planning might, therefore, be conceptualised as an epistemology of
ethical actions.
Furthermore, epistemologies of ethical actions undergo periodic shifts in accordance with ever-
changing philosophical understandings of ‘the world’. Thus, during one moment in history,
operating at the interface of knowledge and action was shaped by positivist standpoints,
whereas contemporary ways of knowing and doing reject positivist claims about value-free
knowledge. Many scholars now argue in favour of the value-laden nature of planning ideas and
practices. Many also argue in favour of developing context-specific knowledge for situated
actions. And for those of us who argue along these lines, our epistemological standpoints
embrace concerns for embodied, historically grounded and embedded knowledge(s) and
actions. Planners might then be identified as “situated agents [who] work across different
epistemological frames [that] shape not only [our] socio-political ways of knowing and doing,
but also [our different] ways of understanding the objects and purpose of [our planning]
activities” (Davoudi, 2015: 325).
Yet, while contemporary planning theories draw on poststructural, postcolonial, subaltern or
feminist scholarships that value subjective and situated epistemologies of action, work on
planning ethics tends to retain a focus on normative ethical theories alone. To be sure, Stein
and Harper (2005: 148) claim that “contemporary planning theories rest [squarely] on norma-
tive ethical theories”. And by extension, it can be argued that planning’s different
epistemologies of ethical actions equally rest on normative frames of reference. This resting
stems from the fact that planning, as an applied discipline, is oriented toward future courses of
action, and, as such, “it tends to be normative” (Madanipour, 2015: 2). But a focus on normative
(or first-order)

Tanja Winkler
ethical theories alone effectively forecloses further explorations of the nature and meaning of
adopted ethical values regardless of ever-changing epistemological understandings of situated
contexts, and regardless of the fact that scholars refer to the significance of ‘situational eth-ics’
in their work (cf. Flyvbjerg, 2001). First-order ethical principles also tend to be objective in
nature, because they hone in on what planners should do in accordance with established social
rules (Campbell 2012a, 2012b). Should or ought ethical questions, in turn, assume that planners
are sufficiently knowledgeable to endorse some ethical judgements while rejecting others, and
that planners instinctively know what the nature and meaning of adopted value-based
judgements entail. Argued differently, within first-order ethical frameworks “the [ethical]
matter is already decided in advance, and the capacity for reflexive questioning of [value-
based] frames is thereby surrendered” (Fraser, 2009: 291). The field of normative ethical
theories thus negates opportunities to critically reflect on taken-for-granted ethical discourses,
social rules and ‘Master Signifiers’ (cf. Gunder 2004 and Gunder and Hillier 2009 for critiques
of planning’s ‘Master Signifiers’).
Such observations then beg the question: Why is the scholarship on planning ethics rooted,
almost exclusively, within normative ethical frameworks despite ever-evolving epistemologies
of action in situated contexts? This is not to suggest that the idea of planning needs be conceptu-
alised as something other than a normative project. The normativity of planning per se is NOT
in question. Rather, the aim of this question is to create a space that might allow planners to
reflect on their ethical frames of reference in the first place. To this end, I turn to Nancy Fraser
(2009: 284) who asks: “What sort of theorizing can both open up a space for entertaining novel
claims and also provide for the provisional closure needed to vet and redress them?” In
response, Fraser proposes that theorising suited to contemporary moments in history “must
engage the meta-level” if we hope to entertain the possibility that our normative ethical
“framings might, in themselves, be in dispute” (ibid.). While Fraser’s (2009: 284) project
concerns justice in a post-Westphalian world, her argument that our “first-order framings are
in dispute” resonates with the concerns put forward in this chapter. And if we hope to ‘see’ this
dispute, we need to question the taken-for-granted assumptions of planning ethics by engaging
with meta ethical (or second-order) theories. Alternative ways of theorising planning might
then rest not only with how we know and act in ‘the world’, but also with how we theorise
ethics from first- and second-order ethical standpoints. Arguably, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to answer (first-order) normative ethical questions (that concern an ethics of
knowing to what end) before engaging with (second-order) meta ethical questions that include,
for example:

• What are the nature and meaning of an ethical planning judgement in a situated context?
• How do planners know if their interpretation of an ethical value is ‘better’ (or ‘worse’) than
the interpretations made by others?
• How does the subjective understanding of a ‘better’ (or ‘worse’) planning intervention vary
from person to person, context to context, or culture to culture?
Meta ethics is the branch of moral philosophy that pays attention to the study of moral concepts,
discourses, languages and thoughts. Whereas the field of normative ethical theories focuses on
“what is moral” and “what we ought to do”, meta ethics focuses on “what morality itself is”
(Jacobs, 2002: viii). In contrast to the field of normative ethics—that presupposes that some
ethical judgements are ‘better’ than others—meta ethical theories allow us to consider subjec-
tive and intersubjective interpretations of value-based statements, attitudes and judgements
from situated standpoints by asking questions about our moral judgements without attempting
to dis-cover what the ‘right’ (or ‘wrong’) course of action is (Foucault, 1984; Garner and
Rosen, 1967;

Rethinking Scholarship on Planning Ethics

Mackie, 1977). Although less intuitively familiar, meta ethical questions are purposefully
crafted to examine how we come to know our own interpretations of ethical values, as well as
the interpretations made by others, in the first instance. They enable reflexivity by critically
assessing how moral discourses, languages and thoughts shape decision-making processes and
planning interventions. At issue here are precisely those value-based frames that are, in
themselves, in dispute, but that are often taken for granted in normative ethical questions
(Fraser, 2009). In the absence of grappling with meta ethical questions, planners might have
no other way of assessing and justifying their value-based claims.
The aim of this chapter is to explore how engagements with meta ethical questions might offer
scholars alternative bases for theorising and operating at the interface of knowledge and action
in situated contexts. It also aims to demonstrate how such engagements might be of par-ticular
interest to scholars who are calling for Southern theories. To these ends, this chapter is
structured in two sections. In order to begin to understand why scholarships on planning ethics
are rooted, almost exclusively, within normative ethical frameworks, the first section sets out
to critically analyse (via a discourse analysis) some of planning’s dominant epistemologies of
ethical actions. The second section briefly turns to the potential relevance of meta ethics in
Southern contexts, before drawing to a conclusion.
Conceptualising Planning’s Dominant Focus on Normative Ethics
Epistemology and ethics are usually considered as two distinct philosophical domains.
However, when epistemology appeals to the character traits of an epistemic agent as a
condition for knowl-edge production, it might then be argued that ethical commitments
function as productive components of epistemic processes (Code, 2007; van Fraassen, 2007).
Contemporary planning theories are replete with appeals such as ‘collaborative’, ‘just’,
‘respectful’, or even ‘ordinary’ character traits, and these character traits contribute to the
theoretical conceptualisations of Healey’s (1997) collaborative planning, Fainstein’s (2010)
Just City, Sandercock’s (2003) inter-cultural planning, or Robinson’s (2006) Ordinary City (to
name a few theories that explicitly draw on value-laden epistemologies of ethical actions). Our
ethical choices inform our acquisition of knowledge, and vice-versa (Code, 2007; van Fraassen,
2007). And seeing ourselves as epistemi-cally responsible agents implies that planners’ ethical
choices carry a degree of responsibility, since we might be held accountable for the choices we
make and the actions we take.

Indeed, planning is an archetypical example of Aristotle’s “practical discipline” which

concerns the doing of something not separate from the agent [and her] actions and choices.
Knowledge of social and spatial processes becomes, at once, a condition for and a consequence
of planning. That is why Aristotle’s discussion about action (praxis) is closely linked to the
discussion about planners’ ethical values.

(Davoudi, 2015: 321, 323)

Furthermore, adopted epistemologies and accompanying value-based choices are “situated in
time and space and specific to a particular context” (Davoudi, 2015: 323). Such assertions
invoke a Foucauldian understanding of ‘situational ethics’ in the sense that epistemologies and
values are not only contextually grounded but are also provisional, since human actions—
which are closely linked to adopted epistemologies and accompanying values—are “made
through ongoing internal and external processes” (Foucault, 1990: 9). And because actions are
“made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how they were made” (ibid.). The idea that
actions are ‘made’ through ongoing internal and external processes also draws our attention to
the fact

Tanja Winkler
that epistemologies of ethical actions are both self-constructed (through subjective
interpretations) and socially constructed (through intersubjective interpretations).
Foucault talks about ethics in relation to “an aesthetics of existence,” that is, the rela-tionship
you have to yourself when you act. [Whereas] Aristotle is mainly talking about ethics in
relation to social and political praxis, that is, the relationship you have to society when you act.

(Flyvbjerg, 2001: 55)

Persons and objects, groups and institutions, are therefore not merely given, but are instead
open to subjective and intersubjective interpretations that concern both the self and society
(Beauregard, 2012). And since individuals and groups hold different world views—that are
subjectively and intersubjectively constructed—Foucault (1984: 37) argues that “the search for
a form of morality acceptable by everyone, in the sense that everyone would have to submit to
it, seems catastrophic to me”.
These kinds of arguments then suggest the need for some engagement with the nature and
meaning of the ethical choices we adopt when we hope to plan. Such engagements also allow
us to question, rethink, and, if necessary, challenge first-order ethical framings that are in
dispute (Fraser, 2009). However, because the study of meta ethics explicitly desists from
establishing how we ought to plan, scholars of planning ethics tend to dismiss meta ethics as
irrelevant to planning theory and practice (cf. Campbell, 2006, 2012a, 2012b; Campbell and
Marshall, 1999; Harper and Stein, 1992; Hendler, 1996, 2001; Lo Piccolo and Thomas, 2009;
Stein and Harper, 2005; Thomas, 1991; Thomas and Healey, 1991; Wachs, 1985). Thus, for
some, further explo-rations of the nature and meaning of planning values are deemed
superfluous, because first-order framings remain uncontested. Argued differently, because the
normative idea of planning rests squarely upon “a search for a better future” (Healey, 2012:
199), it is assumed that planners instinctively know what the nature and the meaning of this
‘better’ future entails. This might be argued even if scholars hint at meta ethical concerns when
suggesting that it is “the nature of ‘better’ that requires engagement with ethics” (Campbell,
2012b: 393, my emphasis), or when suggesting that the normative idea of planning “demands
consideration of what ‘better’ could and should mean” (Healey, 2012: 199, my emphasis). But
instead of delving deeper into what this nature means, and how we might know if something
is ‘better’ (or not), scholars tend to turn only to first-order ethical theories for answers to their
considerations. By way of an exam-ple of this tendency, Campbell (2012b: 393, my emphasis)
proposes that:
[There] is no need for a perfect definition of justice or equality [in order] to take actions which
will reduce injustices and inequalities. [That] such actions will fall short is no revelation. The
revelation lies in the ability to envisage better actions, which will deliver better outcomes.

While planners might not require perfect definitions of justice or equality in order to act,
Winkler and Duminy (2016), nevertheless, suggest that since subjective and intersubjective
interpretations of ethical values vary from person to person, from culture to culture, and from
one context to another (including from one neighbourhood to another neighbourhood within
the same city), we need to engage with the nature and meaning of the planning values we adopt
when we hope to act. Arguably, in the absence of such engagements our planning actions might
“lead to unintended consequences” (Davoudi, 2015: 324). We therefore cannot assume that all
participants or recipients of a planning intervention subscribe to the same interpretations

Rethinking Scholarship on Planning Ethics

and understandings of ethical values such as ‘justice’ or ‘equality’, for example (cf. Winkler
and Duminy 2016 for an example of residents’ and planners’ conflicting interpretations of
‘justice’ or ‘equality’ that led to unintended consequences). But, how can I be sure that
contemporary epistemologies of ethical actions preclude, for the most part, meta ethical
considerations?
Without presenting a lengthy discussion on planning’s philosophical roots, it is worth not-ing
that it was only once an explicit epistemological break from unitary and universal methods was
called for in the late 1950s, that a greater engagement with planning ethics began to surface
(cf. Marcuse, 1976). Until then, planners seldom felt compelled to justify their work from an
ethical standpoint, since planning actions that were based on unitary scientific methods
(whether from posteriori or priori standpoints) were deemed to be sufficient justifications for
what should take place (cf. Freestone, 2000; Friedmann, 1987). Ethical concerns, therefore,
remained sub-sumed within matters of procedural correctness and professional integrity. With
the rise of hermeneutic approaches to knowledge production in the social sciences—that
coincided with a recognition of the political nature of planning (cf. Davidoff, 1965; Freestone,
2000; Friedmann, 1987; Klosterman, 1978; Madanipour, 2015)—planning scholars sought to
challenge the then assumed value-neutral stance of the profession by arguing that the social
world “can only be understood from within, rather than from without” (Davoudi, 2015: 319).
Still, one might ask, as Davoudi does, from within what? To this she responds: Either “from
within the mind of each individual planner (subjective meaning), [or] from within the social
rules which render [a] plan-ner’s action with meaning (objective meaning)”. And for Davoudi
(2015: 319):
Subjective meanings are concepts “we think about”, while objective meanings are concepts
“we think with”. Although difficult to untangle from each other, the separa-tion is analytically
[and philosophically] useful as it highlights the distinction between what a planning action
means to others and what a planner means by it.
It might then be argued that if a planner interprets (or thinks about) ‘the world’ from within her
subjective mind in order to understand the meaning of her actions, so too do recipients of a
planning action interpret (or think about) ‘their world’ and what a planning action means to
them from within their subjective minds. Thus, different and even conflicting interpretations
of these meanings can arise. This might be argued regardless of the socially constructed nature
of establishing value-based meanings, as “it [seems] impossible to secure one’s own [values
entirely] independently of the [values held by] others” (Aristotle, cited in Flyvbjerg, 2001: 59).
This can also be argued regardless of the social rules that render planning actions with objective
meanings, since we all “interpret the world through specific forms of language and thought that
are situ-ated in specific social and political contexts” (Davoudi, 2015: 319).
Nonetheless, while the manifold interpretations of subjective and intersubjective ethical
meanings were briefly celebrated during the first decades of the twentieth century—as moral
philosophy was no longer solely embroiled in (first-order) normative ethical concerns—the
study of (second-order) meta ethics declined after the influential publication of John Rawls’ A
Theory of Justice in 1971 (Bridge, 2000; Jacobs, 2002). The Rawlsian idea that self-interested
and rational individuals emerge from behind ‘a veil of ignorance’ to live in a risk-adverse
society became the moral basis for “a rejuvenated conception of normative ethics from a
universalist, impartial and liberal-individualist perspective” (Bridge, 2000: 520; cf. Rawls,
1971). For the scholarship on planning ethics in particular, the idea that social rules render
planning actions with objective meaning thus grew in prominence, even if Rawls’ (2001) later
assertions recant universal ethical positions.
Rawlsian philosophy—with its dominant focus on normative ethics—remains a key influ-ence
on the scholarship of planning ethics (Howe, 1990). Explicitly stated: “Rawls’ normative
Tanja Winkler
ethical theory provides a firm moral basis for much of contemporary planning theory” (Stein
and Harper, 2005: 148). Accordingly, scholars maintain that our ethical choices “must be
deemed good (or bad) in order for good and bad to have meaning” (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 57, my
emphasis). But instead of critically reflecting on subjective and intersubjective meanings of
‘good’ and ‘bad’, or on the nature of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in situated contexts, scholars of planning
ethics assume that “debates in planning theory need to be understood [only] as debates about
underlying normative ethical theories” (Harper and Stein, 1992: 105), because “determining
what constitutes ‘the good’ or whose interest this good serves are highly normative questions”
(Davoudi, 2015: 326; cf. Campbell, 2006, 2012a, 2012b). Let us explore this assumption a little
further by demonstrating how three different planning theories—that are grounded in different
epistemologies of action—retain a focus on normative ethical theories and the social rules we
think with (Davoudi, 2015), irrespective of the fact that all three embrace the idea that planning
is a value-laden discipline.
Habermas’ (1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1990) theory of communicative action acknowledges, in the
first instance, the existence of stakeholders’ subjective and competing ethics. However, in
order to proceed from this initial meta ethical acknowledgement, and in order to arrive at an
ethics of action, Habermas’ (1990: 120) procedural discourse ethics necessitates the produc-
tion of “normatively right statements based on good reasons”. For Habermas (1990: 120), these
“normatively right statements [are the] agreed upon social rules [that allow us] to reach consen-
sus on generalizable maxims”. And by necessitating a consensus on social rules and
generalisable maxims, Habermasian discourses unquestioningly shift their focus from
subjective ethical values to “a universal ethics of action” (Bridge, 2000: 519), since, according
to Habermas, an ethi-cal norm is “universal when all affected stakeholders [of a communicative
process] accept the consequences of an ethical norm” (Bridge, 2000: 523). As such, all
participants of a commu-nicative process presumably can, and will, accept the consequences
of agreed upon social rules and ethical norms, because these rules and norms are based on the
concepts we think with and not the concepts we think about (Davoudi, 2015). In other words,
“Habermas is a universalis-tic, top-down moralist [in that] the rules for correct [ethical] process
are normatively given in advance” (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 91). We might then conclude that our
normative framings are not in dispute, and that these framings cannot be unmade, since
‘correct’ ethical matters are already decided in advance. Such conclusions, however, ignore
Fraser’s (2009) and Foucault’s (1984, 1990) invaluable insights.
In the same way that Habermasian procedural discourse ethics moves from recognising sub-
jective values to a position of ‘generalisable’ ethical norms, communicative and collaborative
planning theories move from intersubjectivities to a position of consensus based on
normatively ‘correct’ ethical processes that are established in advance. Communicative and
collaborative theorists thus begin their arguments with a recognition of discursive spaces that
are intersub-jectively constructed, before shifting their focus to the search for agreed upon
communicative actions in a ‘scaled-up’ public realm. Here, in this scaled-up public realm,
members of a group no longer orientate their actions toward subjective and intersubjective
concerns. Rather, actions are oriented toward a “unifying, consensus-building force in which
participants overcome their subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated
agreement” (Habermas, 1987b: 315). Habermasian procedural discourse ethics combines
elements of intersubjectivity and abstract universal ethics for the ultimate purpose of
establishing consensual communicative actions, while the nature of ‘consensual actions’
remains subsumed within a normative understanding of ethical theories that renders
communicative actions with objective meanings alone.
Flyvbjerg (2001), in contrast to communicative and collaborative theorists, draws on an
Aristotelian conceptualisation of phronesis and a Foucauldian understanding of situational
ethics

Rethinking Scholarship on Planning Ethics

that rejects universal rules. Yet, and somewhat surprisingly, Flyvbjerg’s moral point of depar-
ture remains firmly grounded in normative ethical theories. Accordingly, Flyvbjerg (2001: 130)
begins his phronetic inquiry by focusing only on the following three normative ethical ques-
tions: “Where are we going? Is it desirable? What should be done?” But this focus relegates
meta ethical concerns to a realm of mere intellectual curiosity, which is demonstrated via
Flyvbjerg’s (2001: 98) acknowledgement that “Foucault is a declared opponent of Kant’s
question, ‘what ought I to do?’ or Lenin’s ‘what is to be done?’” Thus, instead of grappling
with Foucault’s rejec-tion of Kant’s and Lenin’s normative ethical questions, “phronesis
concerns the analysis of values that are good or bad” despite the possibility that different
members of a “reference group” might hold different understandings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
(Flyvbjerg, 2001: 57). To be clear, phronetic research is based on subjective and intersubjective
“interpretations [that are] open for testing in relation to other interpretations” (Flyvbjerg, 2001:
130). However, “every interpretation must be built upon claims of validity, [because] one
interpretation is not as good as another. [Rather,] the key point is the establishment of a better
interpretation” (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 130, 131, origi-nal emphasis). Phronetic research, therefore,
seeks to ensure that value-based choices are “not based on idiosyncratic morality or personal
preferences, but instead on a common view among a specific reference group” (Flyvbjerg,
2001: 130). It is then assumed that all members of a ref-erence group hold a ‘common view’
regarding the value-based choices needed when aiming to establish: What is desirable? And
how should we achieve these desires? It is also assumed that all members intuitively know
what the meaning of a better interpretation encompasses, because “phronesis is what permits
one to chase away false opinions and make good decisions” that are informed by predetermined
validity claims (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 110, my emphasis).
Other planning scholars, in turn, focus on how “various subjectivities coalesce in ways that
undermine and disrupt ways of knowing [and doing in situated contexts]” (Derickson, 2015:
653; cf. Porter, 2010). Contained within these scholarships are more nuanced understandings
of the manifold, and often non-discursive, ways in which lived experiences of difference,
marginali-sation and subalterneity are produced through competing subjectivities. Such
understandings are central to multicultural and intercultural planning theories, among other
contemporary schol-arships that are grounded in postcolonial, subaltern and feminist
epistemologies. Sandercock (1998: 30), accordingly, calls for a more “inclusive democracy
[of] heterogeneous publics”. And the accompanying ethical values for the fulfilment of
heterogeneous publics might be understood from a Levinian conceptualisation of
intersubjectivities that is founded on a moral agent’s unconditional responsibility toward
others. Here we find an ethics of care and respect. However, ethical responsibilities toward
others require “a move from proximity to infinity” (Bridge, 2000: 526), where proximity is
based on intersubjective and situational ethics, whereas infinity is based on “a higher realm of
ethical conduct” that is shaped by agreed upon social rules (Lash, 1996: 102). Hence, in the
same way that Habermas is able to move from the subjective to the universal, or Flyvbjerg is
able to move from situational ethics to common validity claims, Levinas is able to move from
the intersubjective to the infinite. And in all three epistemologies of ethical action, value-based
judgements involve, by-and-large, normative ethical concerns that emphasise the ethical
concepts we think with.
Regardless then of scholars’ critiques of the tendency in planning to derive ethical principles
from “a universal set of deontological values” (Watson, 2006: 46), concerns pertaining to plan-
ning values remain, for the most part, normative ethical concerns that are shaped by the social
rules ‘we think with’. This is not to suggest that these concepts and rules are irrelevant. Rather,
if scholars based in Africa (or elsewhere) are asked to seek “new moral philosophical sources
to inform [their] thinking” (ibid.), perhaps a starting point for such a search is from a meta
ethical position before arriving at normative judgements. Such a starting point might be of
particular
Tanja Winkler
interest to scholars who are calling for alternative ways of theorising ‘the African urban’ (or
the global South-East), since reflecting on first- and second-order ethical questions allows us
to shift our attention from merely explaining social events as being different in different
contexts, to “understanding what the social world means for the people who live in it”
(Davoudi, 2015: 320, my emphasis). Let us now briefly turn our ‘gaze’ to the relevance of meta
ethics for Southern scholarships. In so doing, the aim is not to argue for a totalising narrative.
Rather, the aim is to encourage an ongoing search for authentic specificities by embedding
local knowledge(s), actions and value-based claims within everyday subjectivities and
intersubjectivities.
Turning Our ‘Gaze’ to Southern Epistemologies of Ethical Actions
For many Southern scholars, the problem with planning theory stems from the geopolitical
dominance of knowledge production within capital-centric settings (Appiah, 2006; Connell,
2007; Kemete, 2010; Parnell et al., 2009; Pieterse, 2010; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2008; 2011;
Watson, 2009; Yiftachel, 2006). And for them, a useful starting point to provincialise main-
stream theories—including those with a more critical bent—involves grappling with how we
might come to know Southern urbanities. Being able to identify and name Southern urbanities
as something different—all be they ‘ordinary’ (Robinson, 2006) and intrinsically linked to
global economies (Roy, 2008)—also allows them to question contemporary planning values.
In fact, Parnell, Pieterse and Watson (2009: 235, my emphasis) argue in favour of “making the
values of planning contextually relevant to our location in Africa”. However, they go on to
suggest that “there is scope for the reaffirmation of the fundamental values that underpin
planning” (Parnell et al., 2009: 235, my emphasis). But whether ‘contextually relevant’ values
are necessarily the same as, or compatible with, planning’s ‘fundamental values’, is an issue
that remains undisputed. Rather, for Parnell et al. (2009), concerns pertaining to planning
values are normative ethical concerns. Accordingly, their focus is aimed at how we should plan
in order to improve urban conditions in Africa; and from their standpoint, we should plan by
ensuring ‘greater equity’ and ‘socio-spatial justice’: “Planners do not alter the fundamental
relations of society, but they may be able to stimulate particular growth paths, mitigate
disasters, [and] identify how to redistribute resources to ensure greater equity and socio-spatial
justice” (Parnell et al., 2009: 235, my emphasis).
Yet, what precisely is the nature and meaning of ‘greater equity’ and ‘socio-spatial justice’ in
a situated context? How might we know if our planning-based interpretations of ‘equity’ and
‘justice’ are ‘better’ than the interpretations made by residents with whom we hope to plan?
What are residents’ subjective and intersubjective understandings of values such as ‘equity’
and ‘justice’, and how might these understandings differ from a planner’s interpretation of
‘equity’ and ‘justice’? These are the types of questions that remain unanswered despite the fact
that answers to these meta ethical questions have very real consequences for planning in
Southern (and other) contexts. To clarify, by posing these kinds of questions I am not
questioning the concepts of ‘equity’ or ‘justice’ per se. Rather, second-order ethical questions
allow us to explore how subjective and intersubjective interpretations of ethical values such as
‘equity’ or ‘justice’, for example, shape planning outcomes in situated contexts.
Engaging with meta ethical questions then becomes relevant if we hope to understand how and
why ethical meanings differ in practice, and if we hope to explain how competing
understandings of values are in themselves embroiled in power relations that shape planning
outcomes. From this perspective, keeping concepts such as ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ (or any other
planning value) as relatively undefined normative principles serves only to obscure unequal
power relations, while negating opportunities to justify the validity of our normative ethical
claims and social rules in the first place. But regardless of the potentials that might arise from
Rethinking Scholarship on Planning Ethics
meta ethical inquiries, ongoing quests for Southern theories remain rooted in desires for alter-
native epistemologies alone: “[W]e need to understand the various epistemological dimensions
of the overall knowledge project that has to simultaneously provincialize western-centred
urban theories while addressing the imperative to purpose” (Pieterse, 2012: 26, my emphasis).
Western-centred epistemologies are identified as necessitating provincialisation, while simi-
lar assertions are not asked of normative planning ethics. However, if impartial and universal
rationalities are rejected as epistemological bases for Southern scholarships, why then do we
continue to frame Southern (or other) epistemologies of ethical actions within planning values
that are assumed to be known and shared from the outset? One answer to this question—as
gleaned from Davoudi’s (2015) argument—is that we have not yet begun the project of
untangling the subjective meanings ‘we think about’ from the objective meanings ‘we think
with’. Our normative social rules are presumed to be ‘agreed upon’, ‘shared’, ‘common’ and
‘given’ in advance, even if contemporary theories draw on poststructural, postcolonial,
subaltern and fem-inist scholarships that value subjective and situated epistemologies of action.
But by neglecting the project of untangling subjective meanings from taken-for-granted social
rules, we equally neglect what our planning interventions might mean to others, and what the
consequences of different meanings might be for the residents who live and work in the spaces
we plan (even if we aim to plan with them). Of equal concern, by neglecting second-order
ethical questions we relinquish the opportunity to question, reflect on and unmake our ethical
framings that are in dispute.
Conclusion
It is argued that epistemological standpoints and accompanying actions shape—and are shaped
by—ethical principles, and that epistemologies of ethical actions undergo periodic shifts in
accord-ance with ever-changing philosophical understandings of ‘the world’. Thus,
contemporary ways of knowing and doing are, on the whole, grounded in poststructural,
postcolonial, subaltern or feminist scholarships that value subjective and situated knowledge.
Yet regardless of an assertion that knowledge, actions and values are recursively interlinked,
and that epistemologies of action are subject to ongoing transformations, our objectively
defined social rules and moral points of departure seem to be static, because these rules and
morals are assumed to be known, shared and given in advance. Furthermore, and despite an
acceptance of planning’s value-laden nature, scholarships on planning ethics continue to focus,
almost entirely, on normative ethical theo-ries that hone in on first-order ethical questions such
as: How should we plan, what ought to be done, and what is done (for the purpose of launching
‘better’ outcomes)? And answers to these types of questions presuppose that planners are
sufficiently knowledgeable to endorse some ethi-cal judgements while rejecting others, and
that planners intuitively know what the nature and meaning of a ‘better’ outcome should entail.
For these reasons, when scholars acknowledge that planners “may not [always] know what to
do when it comes to moral choices about what course of action to take” (Davoudi, 2015: 321),
they tend only to turn to a normative ethics of knowing to what end. While this purposeful
knowing is indispensable if we hope to act, a focus on normative ethics alone precludes the
possibility that the nature and meaning of our planning values might be understood and
experienced as something different by the recipients of our actions. So while “people [tend to]
know what they do; [and while] they frequently know why they do what they do; what they
don’t know is what what they do does [to others]” (Foucault, 1982, here cited from Davoudi,
2015: 327). Foucault’s somewhat convoluted assertion therefore remains intact, because
scholarships on planning ethics have not yet begun to untangle the value-based mean-ings ‘we
think about’ from the objective meanings and the social rules ‘we think with’.

Tanja Winkler
Foucault explicitly defines his ethics as a type of “thinking differently” (Foucault, 1990: 9).
Alternative ways of theorising planning might then rest not only with how we know and act in
‘the world’, but also with how we might ‘think differently’ about planning ethics by engag-ing
with normative and meta ethical concerns. Meta ethical concerns allow us to consider the
specific nature and histories of ethical principles, and how we come to know our own and other
value-based judgements before deciding on how we should plan or what the ‘better’ judgement
is. “Because [these concerns are] pitched to the meta-level, [they also] permit us to entertain
the possibility that first-order questions have been unjustly framed” (Fraser, 2009: 294), and
that taken-for-granted framings can be unmade (Foucault, 1990). Moreover, if “planning
cultures worldwide exist only in the plural” (Friedmann, 2005: 184), then meta ethics becomes
relevant to scholarships that purposefully seek to embed local knowledge(s), actions and value-
based claims within everyday subjectivities and intersubjectivities.
“The trick [however] is to resist the reactionary and ultimately futile temptation to cling to
assumptions that are no longer appropriate to our post-Westphalian world” (Fraser, 2009: 295).
For this reason, meta ethical theories explicitly desist from establishing criteria for making
ethical judgements about situated contexts. Establishing such criteria would be a distinctly
normative project: one that aims to develop some authoritative model by which other things
are judged. So while meta ethical questions cannot assist us in deciding which ethical principles
are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’, or how we should plan, such questions can assist us
in our different understandings of how planners arrive at moral judgements in the first place;
how we employ ethical principles in practice; what our planning interventions might mean to
others; and what the consequences of different meanings might be. Meta ethical engagements
unsettle our own presuppositions. And in so doing, they empower us to critically reflect on our
value-based frames of reference by deliberately prompting us to rethink our scholarships on
planning ethics.
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Planning
 8
COMMUNICATIVE PLANNING
Tore Sager
Core Ideas and Progress of Communicative Planning
Communicative planning (CP) is seen here as a participatory and dialogical endeavour involv-
ing a broad range of stakeholders and affected groups in socially oriented and fairness-seeking
developments of land, infrastructure, or public services. It is guided by a process exploring the
potential for cooperative ways of settling planning disputes and designed to approach the
principles of discourse ethics, demanding processes to be open, undistorted, truth-seeking, and
directed at mutual understanding. The process of CP is open in the sense of being inclusive and
transparent; the public can gain knowledge of what is going on. Development efforts are
socially oriented when they aim to further the interests of large segments of society rather than
the interests of a few stakeholders only. Fairness-seeking development aims to improve the liv-
ing conditions of deprived groups, and its planned results observe the rights of all groups.
CP aims to advance deliberative democracy by exploring the potential for broad workable
agreement on planning matters, in any case making deliberation inclusive and thorough before
a planning issue is politically settled. This mode of planning also helps democracy produce fair
outcomes by striving to reduce the influence of systematically biased power relations on the
dialogically determined recommendations. It is assumed that a change toward more
participative approaches will help to develop social capital and community cohesion, improve
service deliv-ery to meet local needs, restore information flows and accountability, and give
voice to those most directly affected by public policy. Excellent overviews of CP are offered
by Allmendinger (2009: 197–223) and Healey (2012). The present chapter gives more attention
to the difference from ordinary citizen participation, the planner role, legitimation, and the
critique of CP for facilitating neo-liberalism.
All strands of CP research have in common a revision and expansion of what used to count as
rational decisions (Sager 1994: 3–25). Instrumental rationality is insufficient in the kind of
planning where the ulterior end is embedded in the participatory process itself. Dialogue, close
ego-confirming relationships, and the experience of being able to make a difference, are
important to the development of mature personalities. These activities have intrinsic value
independent of any goal-oriented strategy. ‘Communicative rationality’ (Habermas 1998: 220–
22, 300) requires arguments in dialogue to be comprehensible, factually true, sincere, and
appropriate within the normative context of public planning. This rationality established
Communicative Planning
Tore Sager
Theory (CPT) as a bulwark against the relativism of post-modernism (Harper and Stein 2006).
It provided a platform for critiquing and building alternatives to plans with a narrow economic
focus, and planning processes designed to be the fastest road to implementation of ready-made
decisions. Communicative rationality depends on the use of language oriented toward mutual
understanding and sets CP apart from earlier modes of planning. Synoptic (rationalistic)
planning and disjointed incrementalism are built on instrumental rationality in full-blown or
modified versions (Innes 1995: 184).
The most important forerunner of CP is John Friedmann’s transactive planning, in which
dialogue and mutual learning are key concepts (Friedmann 1973). Processed knowledge
justifies the expert status of the planner. Personal knowledge reflects the undisguised subjective
inter-pretations of the lay person, resting on an informed and detailed picture of the local
conditions. The planner expands the frame of local lay people’s assessment of the plan; lay
people supply nuances and particulars to the planner’s outline of local consequences. The
necessary exchange of experience requires – according to Friedmann – a more personal, face-
to-face relationship between experts and lay people, namely, the transactive style. Friedmann
launched dialogue and transactive planning against the backcloth of what he called ‘the cracked
melting pot: rising cultural pluralism’ (Friedmann 1973: 90–93). The sentiment of instability
lingers on in Innes and Booher’s (2010: 3) advocacy for CP in the US context marked by rapid
transformation, a ‘new tribalism’, and an accompanying loss of identity and shared values.
The inception of CPT came with John Forester’s PhD dissertation in 1977, outlining a critical
theory of planning. Critical CPT assesses how organizational and institutional contexts affect
the contingencies, the fragility, and the vulnerable precariousness of people’s speaking and
deliberat-ing together in preparation for collective action (Forester 1993: x, 4). Mangled
communication patterns are an important aspect of the contexts in which planning takes place.
These patterns are shaped by power and ideology. In CPT, the critique of ideology turns into
the critique of systematically distorted communicative structuring of citizens’ attention; that is,
the taken-for-granted power relations encroaching on efforts to make sense together in
autonomous dialogue (Forester 1993: 62). Critical CPT aims to scrutinize and reform planning
and decision processes in order to advance fairness by empowering local publics.
In planning practice, communication is political. Even if the power of planners is limited, they
can influence the communication between the parties involved in the process. Planners do this,
for example, by shaping attention and questioning the information, statements, and arguments
of the parties, thereby revealing misinformation, authoritarian pressure, and power games.
Forester developed this strategy into a critical tool in articles from the early 1980s. Jürgen
Habermas’ critical theory of communication was a main inspiration (Habermas 1998). Other
influences are mentioned in Forester’s own accounts of the early development of CP (Forester
2013). The arguments for CP were brought together in the seminal book Planning in the Face
of Power (Forester 1989). It spelled out the strategy for achieving fairness in planning
processes by approaching dialogue and identifying and counteracting manipulation, threats,
concealment, self-serving argumentation, and other forms of communicative distortions.
Main works by other authors have later elaborated on the theory and tried to advance the
practice of CP (Harper and Stein 2006, Healey 2006, Innes and Booher 2010, Sager 1994,
2013). Healey and Innes searched for new forms of governance, such as consensus building,
alternative dispute resolution, and various kinds of partnership and collaboration, while
Forester explored the techniques and opportunities of mediation. CP theorists have attended to
a wide range of communicative practices, such as listening, storytelling, rhetoric, mediation,
and use of metaphors. A rich literature links CP to descriptions of the argumentative and
interactive aspects of a planner’s day and to a variety of planning tasks.

Communicative Planning
Communicative Planning and Citizen Participation
When CPT appeared in academic journals, citizen participation had been a hot topic among
planning scholars for one and a half decades or more (Levine 1960). An important difference
between typical citizen participation and critical CP is illustrated by the concepts ‘invited
space’ and ‘invented space’ (Miraftab 2004). Citizen participation is about inviting groups and
individ-uals from civil society into the official planning process and creating arenas – invited
space – for expression of opinion and information exchange between professional planners and
affected lay people. CP entails citizen participation, but acknowledges the need that some
protest groups and social movements have for standing outside the official planning process.
Communicative planners meet these actors in invented spaces external to the planning
framework of the authori-ties. Communication in these arenas can come closer to discussion
on an equal footing and bring a wider set of interests into the planning dialogue.
Citizen participation takes place within a framework encouraging public input, but ending
public involvement well before implementation and even before the decisive discussions. The
intention in CP is, in contrast, that the dialogue among stakeholders, planners, and public
should include all affected actors, making joint recommendations hard to ignore when the
politicians finally decide. The desired shift is from a planner–citizen information exchange
under citizen participation, to a wider dialogue, solution-seeking, and decision-oriented
deliberation in CP.
It has been questioned whether CP, in practice, adds much to earlier planning processes with
procedures for public involvement. Similar to the assessment of regular, government-initiated
citizen participation, available case studies are by no means in agreement on the potential and
the success so far of CP. Margerum (2002) belongs to the creed concluding in a balanced or
largely positive tone, while Bedford et al. (2002) are among the many sceptical researchers.
They conclude that experience with CP has been discouraging, or that real gains have still to
be proved.
CP theorists were keen to study what was going on in participative processes and to make
improvements. The aim was not only to expand participation in numbers or to ascend one rung
on the ladder from tokenism to codetermination. Rather, the idea was that a dialogical process
would enhance mutual understanding, trust, and cooperation, thereby opening up possibilities
for planning problem solutions that were not viable in conditions of misunderstanding, mutual
suspicion, and clogged communication channels (Innes and Booher 2010). Aspirations were
not limited to procedural progress, although this is often assumed by critics (Fainstein 2014:
7). The critique that communicative planners take little interest in the content of the plans is
understand-able, however, as the transformation from procedural values to substantive realities
reflecting them, is severely understudied in CPT.
Other aspects of theory building preoccupied the CP theorists. First, they wondered what
institutional designs facilitate the communicative mode of planning (van Dijk et al. 2011). How
to put up protective institutional fences around the planning process, so that power outside is
less easily converted to domination inside? The planner must have institutional backing for
pre-venting the powerful in market-oriented urban development from trampling on the rights
and interests of other parties around the table in the official planning process.
Second, several theorists studied how to include marginalized groups and make their voices
heard (Sandercock 1998). Advocacy planners tried to achieve this by speaking for the deprived
and translating their viewpoints and arguments to technical-economic jargon familiar to
bureau-crats. In contrast, communicative planners let communities in need of planning
assistance speak for themselves, but direct attention to their problems and proposals, and
question critically the attitudes and procedures making it difficult for the disadvantaged to get
their message through.
Tore Sager
Third, CP theorists prepare for diffusion of the dialogical approach to democratic problem
solving beyond the single planning process. The aims of CP fit well with the idea of deliberative
democracy (Gutman and Thompson 2004). Neither requires that consensus decisions replace
voting. Any actor has the right to stand up for his or her own interest in a liberal democracy.
However, just as in deliberative democracy in general, CP explores the potential for working
agreement emerging from a process that is reasonably free from communicative distortions
(Mansbridge et al. 2010).
Fourth, from the start, there was an epistemological side to CPT, which was virtually absent in
the already established literature on citizen participation. One strand of CP research took a
phenomenological and ethnographic approach (Forester 1992, Sandercock and Attili 2010).
Even more important, much North American research linked up with the philoso-phy of
pragmatism (Harper and Stein 2006, Hoch 2007, Verma 1998), as shown in Healey’s (2009)
excellent overview. Pragmatic CP research has partly dealt with rational inquiry and the
consequences of communicative action.
The differences between the approaches of main proponents – such as John Forester, Patsy
Healey, and Judith Innes – were particularly clear in the 1980s and 90s. Forester was
developing the basis of CP as a critical theory, while Innes – in addition to theoretical works –
demonstrated the potential of CP and consensus building by drawing attention to successful
cases (Innes and Booher 1999). Healey’s approach was somewhat in between, more formed by
institutionalist thinking than Innes, and with a stronger leaning toward place-making and
spatial planning than Forester (Healey 2012: 344). Some of the differences are reflected in the
terms chosen by the researchers to characterize their versions of CP. Forester denotes his
version ‘critical pragma-tism’, while Healey and Innes settled for ‘collaborative planning’.
Harper and Stein (2006) gave the name ‘dialogical planning’ to their variety of CP, which owes
as much to John Rawls and American pragmatists, as to Habermas.
The Planner Role
It is not obvious how communicative planners can use the technical-economic knowledge
acquired in their academic education, which traditionally gave planners expert status (Fainstein
2014: 7). Wide-ranging impact assessments and network governance bring an increasing
number of actors into planning processes. Accordingly, the ideal has changed from expert
planning with a public involvement supplement, to participatory planning with a technical-
economic expert supplement. An illustration of the change from expert planning to CP can take
the typical text-book presentation of synoptic planning as the starting point. Its often-listed
phases are problem formulation, goal setting, option seeking, forecasting and impact
assessment, evaluation, and implementation. The conspicuous feature of this list of tasks is the
falsely assumed self-sufficiency of the expert planner. Everything having to do with interaction
between actors in the plan-ning process is invisible. This includes collecting and giving
information, facilitation, mediation, negotiating land acquisition, conflict solving, citizen
participation, consensus building, coordi-nation with other public agencies, eliciting people’s
preferences, and building political support. Masking these interactive tasks makes it difficult
to plan and even to understand planning.
Nearly everything regarded as essential in CP is relegated to the shadows in rationalis-tic expert
planning. ‘CPT introduced practical heuristics alien to the model, such as listening, inclusion,
dialogue, and deliberation among diverse stakeholders’ (Innes and Booher 2015: 197). Impact
assessment and the other listed tasks of synoptic planning are not ignored in CP. However, the
knowledge and preferences of local communities, interest groups, and stakeholders have

Communicative Planning
become more important inputs in the techniques applied to carry out the tasks, and in the
process leading up to decisions. It is the role of communicative planners to make stakeholders
and affected groups collaborate with each other in a creative process, generating opportunities
that offer each participating group more than it could achieve for itself through alternative
procedures.
Throgmorton (2000) describes the communicative planner’s role as that of being a skilled-
voice-in-the-flow of persuasive argumentation. The planners must work both on process and
substance. It is part of their role to advance fair plans to the advantage of deprived groups, as
well as to design an inclusive process based on open exchange of sincere and honest arguments.
As pointed out by Allmendinger (2001: 134), the central coordinating role of the planner is
played down in CPT. He regards this as a necessary consequence of the planner’s engagement
with local stakeholders in an unbarred search for local consensus. This engagement also leads
him to question: ‘[H]ow can you have a profession (whose raison d’être is the application of
expert knowledge) if you argue that there is no such thing as expert knowledge, only different
opinions to be brought together?’ (Allmendinger 2009: 220–21). The trade-off between cater-
ing for local interests and meeting the need for expertise of society at large warrants further
discussion in CP.
Legitimizing Communicative Planning
Sustainable systems for collective action – such as CP – need legitimacy. Legitimation is about
the justification of power. In a democracy, public planning must be legitimate in order to build
and retain the authority required to implement plans. Solid anchoring of this authority in
democratic institutions is of paramount importance to planners who are trying to restrain
particularistic interests that rely on force, and fight for solutions serving the great majority.
This section concentrates on legitimizing features that are closely associated with the main
attractions of CP, that is, its epistemological, empowering, and relation-building potentials.
Public planning is legitimate only when planners can invoke sources of authority beyond and
above themselves. A decision is justified if made by the right legitimate authority, and if the
procedural rules of this authority were observed. What is worth doing together, according to
CP theorists, is what the parties come to agree on in a dialogical process. With the demand-ing
requirements to be fulfilled by a communicative process to make it dialogical in the sense
adopted by most CP theorists, it might not be unreasonable to define the consensual outcome
of dialogue as being in the public interest. After all, everyone concerned should take part, freely
and equally, in the cooperative search for truth, where nothing coerces anyone except the force
of a valid argument. In ideal conditions, then, the public interest can be discovered discursively
through participatory practice.
The remainder of this section draws attention to three ways in which CP can favourably affect
knowledge, power, and action, respectively (Sager 2013: 3–33). The argument is that CP is a
legitimate way of defining what is in the interest of the citizenry for the following reasons:
• The dialogue aimed for engages many people representing all interests affected by the plan-
ning, thus increasing the likelihood that decisions are right and fair.
• One interest group cannot for paternalistic reasons set aside the stated preferences of another
group.
• Social capital networks established by CP generate relational goods, such as social approval,
confirmation of identity, and community attachment.

Tore Sager
Knowledge: The Advantage of Many Minds
The Condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to
select the better of two alternatives when there is uncertainty about which of the two better
serves the purpose. More accurately, the theorem states that, if each individual is more likely
than not to make the better choice between some pair of alternatives, and each individual votes
independently and sincerely, then the probability of the majority being correct increases as the
number of individuals increases, toward a limiting value of 1 (List and Goodin 2001). The
Condorcet jury theorem has been generalized in several respects and offers a strong argument
for democratic practices such as CP. The exchange of arguments in inclusive debate free from
repression educates the interlocutors and makes it more likely that each of them identifies the
best alternative.
Power: Anti-Paternalism
In a paternalistic power relationship, the subordinate is regarded as incapable of recognizing
and defending his or her own interests, and the paternalist therefore defines and manages these
inter-ests on behalf of the less competent individual. Paternalism can be defined as the
interference of an individual or a collective actor with another person, against the other’s will,
claiming that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm (Dworkin
1983: 1). Much paternalism in planning springs from the belief that identifying the public
interest requires spe-cial knowledge, and that those who have attained this knowledge – the
planners – are thereby entitled to make policy on behalf of those who have not. This belief is a
challenge to CP in particular, as the credence questions the ability of ordinary citizens to make
rational choices concerning public goods.
Intrinsic to all paternalistic power relations is the problem that subordinates’ attempts to
articulate their own interests conflict with the paternalist’s conviction, and will be repressed.
In denying the subordinates all independent means of expressing and defending their interests,
there is nothing to stop paternalism with a benevolent intent from degenerating into exercise
of power in the interest merely of the powerful. CPT takes a stance against paternalism and
fights it by advising that all affected parties come to the table and take part in deliberative
decision-making.
Action: Producing Relational Goods
Public goods are not only produced through market transactions, contracts, and physical con-
struction, but also through the building of interpersonal relations. Relational goods are public
goods that are simultaneously produced and consumed in relationships between people who
are not anonymous to each other. Examples of relational goods are social approval, friendship,
con-firmation of identity, emotional support (encouragement and comfort), solidarity, and a
sense of belonging. Relational goods can only be produced by people acting together. Such
goods emerging from communicative action are anti-rival, in that a person benefits both as her
own and others’ consumption increases.
CP produces relational goods in addition to physical goods. Dialogue is conducive to empa-
thy, which in turn promotes pro-social behaviour. A spiral of dialogical rewards is at work, as
relational goods, in turn, motivate more CP. The spiral goes like this: CP → interpersonal
encounters → social capital networks → relational goods → deeper and more extensive par-
ticipation. The encounters of CP generate networks of social relations in which social capital

Communicative Planning
is embedded. Dialogue is the most efficient vehicle for creating the positive communicative
externalities that are inherent in relational goods (Rader Olsson 2009).
Planners’ transformation of knowledge into action is mediated by power. CP can improve prac-
tice in relation to each of these key words and enhance the legitimacy of governance. CP aims
for (1) right decisions through the mechanism of the Condorcet jury theorem, (2) reduced
misuse of power by encouraging anti-paternalism, and (3) a stronger motive for participatory
collective action by producing relational goods. None of these legitimizing features requires
that everyone agrees on the planning matter under discussion.
Debates and Critique
CPT sparked off some new planning debates and revived other discussions that were ongoing
in the social sciences both inside and outside planning. This section deals with four
controversial themes that are partially connected:

1. how to link procedural and substantive qualities;

2. how to conceptualize power and deal with it in planning processes;
3. how to handle social conflicts of interest: consensus seeking or agonism;
4. how to avoid urban public planning becoming biased toward satisfying capital interests,
in particular neo-liberalism.

Planning theory is criticized for focusing too narrowly on how to design a democratic
process and make it work well. This has come at the expense of theorizing about substance,
scrutinizing criteria for what is a good plan. The communicative turn, centring on the
interaction between actors in the planning process, intensified this critique (Fainstein and
Fainstein 2013: 40–42). Mees (2003) builds on the process-substance gap to blame CP
theorists for bringing forward a risky mode of planning. The participatory and
communicative part of the planning process is often manipulated or contracted to a
minimum level, even if the planners’ engagement with the public was originally advertised
as a central characteristic of the process. The problem, according to Mees, is that when this
happens, there is nothing left in the ruins of the CP effort that can defend broader social
interests. In alternative modes of planning – even in the despised rational-istic expert
planning – one has professional recommendations about the substance of the plan to lean
on, if workable agreement from deliberation is missing. Mees fears that, in a manipulated
and curtailed communicative process, there will be nothing to counteract opportunistic
political proposals and profit-maximizing market solutions. CP is seen as risky, as it leaves
no defence of non-partisan interests if deliberation fails.
An equally salient problem is how to prevent CP being used intentionally – or especially
unintentionally – to justify policies that support the predominant economic-political
ideology of the time. This question is considered here, directly after the question of risk, as
the two prob-lems have the same solution. A standard Marxist critique of spatial planning
is that it makes the capitalist markets run smoothly and thus enhances the perpetual
accumulation of capital (Scott and Roweis 1977). Fainstein and Fainstein (2013) restate
this critique, specifically targeting CP. They contend that CPT flourishes due to neo-
liberals’ wish to gain legitimacy through locally agreed development projects, and their
need for establishing social institutions that match and advance urban land markets and the
continuing flow of investment. A planning regime with a minimum of predefined
restrictions and guidelines, and ample possibilities to strike deals at the community level,
seems to fit with neo-liberalist preferences. This is because critics assume that developers
gain the upper hand in local negotiations. If this is so, communicative planners

Tore Sager
facilitate market processes and make development plans the products of individual deals
between private firms and the public sector (Fainstein and Fainstein 2013: 41).
The values of CPT and neo-liberalism differ greatly. Individualism, entrepreneurialism,
accountability, prosperity, merit reward, and freedom of choice are among the neo-liberal
val-ues. CPT values are, for example, empathy, empowerment, equality of moral worth,
fairness, honesty, inclusiveness, responsiveness, and self-government. The value
differences are the foun-dation of the strategy for addressing the charge that CPT facilitates
the progress of neo-liberal urban development. The strategy is to bring process qualities
and outcome qualities closer together. It must be made evident that what is required from
the plan (the outcome) is grounded in substantive principles that explicitly point back to
the procedural values. Given the profound differences between the value sets, it is unlikely
that urban plans complying with a set of substan-tive principles that mirror the process
values of CPT, will also serve the purposes of neo-liberals. The proposals below make no
claim to be exhaustive, but taken together, the listed principles are associated with all the
procedural communicative values mentioned above.

• The plan should accommodate diverse lifestyles and not hinder licit groups from living
in accordance with their self-chosen identity. For example, cultural minorities should find
places in the city that are fit for their rituals and ways of socializing (empathy).
• The plan should respect what is culturally essential to affected groups, such as their
heritage and their conception of that which is sacred (equality of moral worth).
• The plan should hold something for each affected group, if not in the main physical mani-
festation of its purpose, then in the form of compensation. Especially, the situation of
underprivileged groups should not be aggravated (fairness).
• The plan should correspond to the information and the planner intentions conveyed to the
participating parties throughout the planning process. The plan should not give reason to
suspect previously hidden agendas (honesty).
• The plan should make it easier, especially for disadvantaged groups, to take part in public
life, to work, and to access basic public and private services (empowerment, inclusiveness).
• The plan, even when designed contrary to the wishes of a particular group, should include
elements signalling to this group that it has been listened to. At least some details of the
plan should be fashioned to accommodate the needs of protesting groups (responsiveness).
• Widely accepted solutions negotiated in the communication process (especially consensus
proposals) should be incorporated in the final plan, possibly with modifications catering
for the interests of people who might not be part of a local consensus; for example, tax
payers in general and future generations (self-government).

The substantive principles above help to solve two problems. First, it seems unreasonable
to blame CP for lubricating neo-liberal urban development to a greater extent than other
modes of planning when holding on to these principles. They are attached to values
differing greatly from those of neo-liberalism. Second, they bridge the gap between process
and product and make CP less risky by providing guidelines for the content of the plan even
when the communication and participation process does not live up to expectations.
Over the years, the liveliest and most consequential debate concerning CP has been about
power. The question of how to conceptualize power led to deep disagreement on ‘how to
deal with it in planning’. Even this innocuous phrase may point to a reductionist view of
power as suppressive, that is, as use of force that has to be counteracted. It suggests a
reading of power as ‘power over’ instead of emphasizing the productive aspect expressed
as ‘power to’. The critics associated Habermas and CP theorists with the reductionist view
of power (Huxley 2000: 372).

Communicative Planning
It was largely ignored that Habermas (1977) endorsed Hannah Arendt’s notion of
‘communica-tive power’. This is an enabling collective capacity, which Booher and Innes
(2002) linked to CP under the label of network power.
The debate on power in CP was very much a Habermas versus Foucault discussion, reach-
ing its peak in the planning academy in the latter half of the 1990s. Foucault did not see
power as a ‘massive . . . condition of domination, a binary structure with “dominators” on
the one side and “dominated” on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations
of domina-tion’ (Foucault 1980: 142). Power always generates resistance, as Foucault sees
it, and it must therefore be analysed as something that circulates, rather than a phenomenon
present only at particular localities. Productive power involves the capacity to engage in
conflict to protect one’s own values and interests, while a conception of communicative
action that presupposes con-sensus comes close to being an instrument for discipline and
rather unbearable group pressure, according to Huxley (2000).
Foucault’s followers in the planning academy regard communicative planners’ attempts to
build consensus as a repressive normalizing practice in planning governance. There is,
however, scant empirical support for claiming that mapping the potential for a working
agreement on the next few steps in a planning process is likely to result in restrictive
conformity. Besides, some notions of consensus are less demanding than perfect agreement
at the substantive level. They require instead a common understanding or a shared symbolic
space. Theories of social choice and democratic deliberation analyse harmonization of
preferences and judgements characterized by overlapping consensus, single-peakedness,
meta-consensus, and inter-subjective rationality (Niemeyer and Dryzek 2007). These
concepts are consistent with sound deliberative procedure, but have been largely ignored
both by CP theorists and their critics.
Theorists with a bent for Foucault combined the conceptual critique of power in CPT with
the equally widespread critique contending that Habermasians have no credible strategy for
counteracting repressive exertion of power, for example, by private developers acting to
maximize profit at the expense of broader community interests. The critique for serving
neo-liberalism gains credibility if communicative planners invite people affected by
proposed urban developments to join in consensus-building deliberation without having an
effective strategy for how to help them stand up to real estate interests and resourceful
investors. This is the objec-tion most often voiced against CPT (Flyvbjerg and Richardson
2002). The problem is how to hold back those trying to influence the planned solution by
leaning on their power base instead of persuading by arguments that sound reasonable to
the wider public. For all its good inten-tions of counteracting such behaviour by fighting
communicative distortions through critical questioning and by decreasing the political
transaction cost of fair-playing actors and groups that stand to lose from the project (Sager
2013: 34–65), critics are not convinced that such measures are effective. One reason is that
planners need strong institutional backing in order to follow up with sanctions when threats,
manipulations, and other communicative distortions are disclosed. The establishment of
such a solid platform for exercising a critical function is at odds with the neo-liberal wish
to push planners into an entrepreneurial role.
According to the critics, the consensual approach to planning cannot succeed as an eman-
cipatory and empowering project. This view is much inspired by Foucault’s (1980) thinking
about power and Mouffe’s (1999) theory of agonistic pluralism. Critics see consensus as
shallow due to language games and different community life forms causing participants
hailing from dif-ferent social groups to talk at cross-purposes. Agreement would be the
product of power politics or clever rhetoric rather than acknowledgement of common
interests. Another main argument of Mouffe’s (1999: 755) is that ‘(p)olitics aims at the
creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the
creation of an “us” by the determination of a

Tore Sager
“them”’. She sees it as impossible in these circumstances to eradicate communicative
distortions and make planning inclusive. Meaning can emerge only by advancing one point
of view at the expense and exclusion of other viewpoints, rendering any discourse
authoritarian – or so the critics say. Most CP theorists seem unmoved by this argument, as
they see the distortion-less situation as an evaluative ideal, not as a realistic destination of
politics and planning in practice. Moreover, CPT does not mystify the other by treating her
as always violated by being neces-sarily misunderstood. Mouffe’s argument comes close
to giving the peaceful outcome of any real-life discussion an authoritarian stamp, not only
the debates and deliberations of CP.
Mouffe (1999: 755) stresses the importance of

distinguishing between two types of political relations: one of antagonism between ene-
mies, and one of agonism between adversaries … An adversary is a legitimate enemy, an
enemy with whom we have in common a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles
of democracy.

Equality, liberty, and respect for one another’s beliefs (reciprocity) are among these
principles. Deliberative democrats point out that Mouffe cannot explain the transformation
from hostile, destructive relations to agonism without a notion of consensus among
‘friendly enemies’ sub-scribing to the ethico-political principles (Bond 2011). The need is
surely for a meta-consensus rather than full agreement on the substance of plans. The
recourse to ‘conflictual consensus’ in Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy nevertheless
raises the question of how deep-seated the contrast between agonistic planning and critical
CP is, especially when it comes to practice.
Concluding Remarks
Neither conflict nor deliberation can be allowed to delay decisions about plans forever.
Lengthy planning processes add costs, delay benefits, and can be a democratic problem.
Voting without preceding attempts at alleviating conflict is not intrinsically more
democratic than delibera-tion exploring the potential for negotiated agreement. Minorities
can end up being ill-treated both with an agonistic and a communicative approach to
planning. Empirical results do not yet indicate which approach best caters for the interests
of the weakest parties. It even remains to be seen whether there is a significant difference
between the outcomes of CP and agonistic planning in practice.
Every social theory can be criticized from some relevant perspective. No form of govern-
ance or procedure for reaching a recommendation or a collective decision is without a weak
spot. This is certainly so also for CP. Academia has a predilection for reductionist
speculation purporting to disclose the ‘real’ function of a theory, usually miles apart from
the intention of its originators: Is the dialogical face-to-face kind of planning an attempt to
spread the ‘ideology of intimacy’ in the public realm? Increased emphasis on the
communication of personal knowl-edge might be conceived as a danger to public culture,
because it contributes to the denial and depreciation of impersonal life. Alternatively, is
CPT an attempt at resurrecting the dignity of public planners in the wake of public choice
theorists’ attack? Economists in this field were a heavy influence on neo-liberal thinking.
They insisted that all actors – public as well as private – should be treated as self-regarding
utility maximizers, thus ending public planners’ charade of being benign altruists. Or is CP
just a Third Way political technology facilitating the inter-weaving of social democracy
and neo-liberalism? Consumer sovereignty, consultation, user assessment, and client
information fit well both with neo-liberalism and CP, and might make neo-liberal policies
appear more edible to social democrats. Despite such dismal and reductionist

Communicative Planning
complaints that it ‘is nothing but this or that’, CP is still a conspicuous part of the planning
theory discourse. A simple Google search reveals that authors link CP firmly to topical
themes, such as e-democracy, use of social media, resilience, sustainability, multicultural
cities, creativity, partnership, and neo-liberalism.
The main ideas of CPT have for many years been crossing national borders (Tag-Eldeen
2015). The increased interest among Chinese planners is a noteworthy trend. Yingjie et al.
(2013) identify emerging elements of CP in China, and discussions of CP are appearing in
Chinese language in that country’s rapidly growing planning literature (Wang et al. 2012).
This indicates that the central idea of CP, that dialogue among contending parties in the
process of preparing for collective decision can benefit a broad range of interests, has
relevance under very different political regimes. The widespread acclaim for awarding the
Nobel Peace Prize for 2015 to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet is a further
indication. ‘The Quartet paved the way for a peaceful dialogue between the citizens, the
political parties and the authorities and helped to find consensus-based solutions to a wide
range of challenges across political and religious divides’ (Norwegian Nobel Committee
2015). Embedded in this is an invitation to see dialogue and the search for consensus on
how to move forward, as much more than a potential cooptation technique.
References
Allmendinger, P. (2001): Planning in Postmodern Times. London: Routledge.
Allmendinger, P. (2009): Planning Theory (Second Edition). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bedford, T., J. Clark and H. Harrison (2002): ‘Limits to new public participation practices
in local land use
planning’, Town Planning Review 73(3): 311–31.
Bond, S. (2011): ‘Negotiating a “democratic ethos”: moving beyond the agonistic-
communicative divide’,
Planning Theory 10(2): 161–86.
Booher, D.E. and J.E. Innes (2002): ‘Network power in collaborative planning’, Journal of
Planning
Education and Research 21(3): 221–36.
Dworkin, G. (1983): ‘Paternalism: some second thoughts’, pp. 105–111 in R. Sartorius
(Ed.): Paternalism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fainstein, N. and S.S. Fainstein (2013): ‘Restoring just outcomes to planning concerns’,
pp. 32–53 in
N. Carmon and S.S. Fainstein (Eds): Policy, Planning, and People: Promoting Justice in
Urban Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fainstein, S.S. (2014): ‘The just city’, International Journal of Urban Sciences 18(1): 1–18.
Flyvbjerg, B. and T. Richardson (2002): ‘Planning and Foucault: in search of the dark side
of planning
theory’, pp. 44–62 in P. Allmendinger and M. Tewdwr-Jones (Eds): Planning Futures: New
Directions for Planning Theory. London: Routledge.
Forester, J. (1989): Planning in the Face of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Forester, J. (1992): ‘Critical ethnography: on fieldwork in a Habermasian way’, pp. 46–65
in M. Alvesson
and H. Wilmott (Eds): Critical Management Studies. London: Sage.
Forester, J. (1993): Critical Theory, Public Policy, and Planning Practice: Toward a Critical
Pragmatism. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Forester, J. (2013): ‘On the theory and practice of critical pragmatism: deliberative practice
and creative
negotiations’, Planning Theory 12(1): 5–22.
Foucault, M. (1980): Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Friedmann, J. (1973): Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning. Garden
City, New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday.
Gutman, A. and D. Thompson (2004): Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University
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Habermas, J. (1977): ‘Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power’, Social
Research 44(1): 3–24. Habermas, J. (1998): On the Pragmatics of Communication (Editor:
Maeve Cooke). Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press.
Harper, T.L. and S.M. Stein (2006): Dialogical Planning in a Fragmented Society. New
Brunswick: CUPR

9
NEOLIBERAL PLANNING
Guy Baeten
One could provocatively wonder whether neoliberal planning actually exists, since neither
plan-ning practitioners nor planning theorists commonly mobilize the term neoliberalism
to capture the contemporary planning condition (Baeten, 2012a). At the same time, leading
authors agree that neoliberalism remains a ‘keyword for the understanding of regulatory
reforms of our time’ (Brenner et al., 2010), which would certainly include (the dismantling
of) planning regulations. Neoliberal planning can be understood “as a restructuring of the
relationship between private capital owners and the state, which rationalises and promotes
a growth-first approach to urban development” (Sager, 2011). It is not a neatly defined set
of policies, but rather a ‘restructuring ethos’ based on a strong belief in the virtues of the
market and the limited possibilities of state intervention (Peet and Watts, 2004). For
Springer (2010), neoliberalism simultaneously exists as a hegemonic ideology promoting
the superiority of market solutions, as a policy that effectively increases the power of
private actors in planning, and as governmentality: an ‘assemblage of rationalities,
strategies, technologies, and techniques’ that allows neoliberal principles to rule in
planning practices without major contestation. For Harvey (2005), neoliberalism is
ultimately ‘the restoration of class power’ after the position of the financial and economic
elites in the western world was threatened by socialism and high levels of state interference
in the 1970s – an interpretation that gains credibility when observing the ‘birth’ of
neoliberal planning in Chile and Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The neoliberalization of planning implies a partial retreat by planning as a public institution
from its conventional core, namely the improvement of the built and natural environment
through some sort of concerted effort. This ‘retreat’ should not be read as a mere
withdrawal but a complex reworking of relations between state and market in which the
state does not simply ‘lose power’ but gains a more proactive role in the introduction of
market principles in plan-ning through local, national and international regulatory reforms
(Eraydın 2012), alongside the reinforcement of the repressive role of the state. Further,
neoliberal planning, both as idea and practice, does not constitute a clear break from a
previous regime of planning, but will always be a hybrid between existing planning regimes
and subsequent gradual neoliberal transformations (Baeten, 2012b). As Peck and Theodore
(2010: 170) have pointed out, “mobile policies rarely travel as complete ‘packages,’ they
move in bits and pieces – as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models –
and they therefore ‘arrive’ not as replicas but as policies already-in-transformation”.
Brenner and Theodore (2005: 102) suggest that neoliberal practices are

Guy Baeten
always “articulated through contextually specific strategies” and hence should be studied
at the local level to lay bare their spatio-temporal particularities. We will take the merger
of neoliberal ideas with spatial political-economic circumstances as a leading thread to
reconstruct the spatio-temporal development trajectory of neoliberal planning.
Pioneering
Neoliberal thought actually has multiple beginnings in various places – a phase that Peck
(2008) has called ‘proto-neoliberalism’. The cradle of neoliberalism as we know it is
usually traced back to the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, where Friedrich
Hayek, Milton Friedman and more than 30 other prominent liberal thinkers gathered to
discuss how to renew and re-energize the liberal tradition in a world ruled by Keynesianism
and socialism, and recently threatened by the rise of fascism and Nazism. The Society has
had regular meetings ever since and established an expansive global ‘neoliberal thought
collective’ over the years in close coop-eration with conservative think tanks (Mirowski
and Plehwe, 2009). However, it was not until the military coup by General Pinochet in
1973 that these thinkers were offered an opportunity to turn their liberal principles into a
practical foundation for the organization of a national econ-omy – and of planning.
Economics students from the Catholic University of Chile had been trained for decades at
the University of Chicago, where Hayek and Friedman were teaching, and at some other
prominent US universities. These ‘Chicago Boys’ had prepared a blueprint (called El
Ladrillo or ‘The Stone’ because of its size) for the liberalization of markets in, then
socialist, Chile, and Pinochet, in search of liberal economic policies, appointed many of
these US-trained economists to key posts at government institutions and universities. One
close ally of Pinochet, former naval officer Roberto Kelly, was put in charge of the National
Planning Office which implemented the National Urban Development Policy in 1979. The
plan was highly programmatic and in line with the liberal economic principles outlined in
El Ladrillo (Valdes, 1995). It did not regard land as a scarce resource in itself: land was
scarce because of planning restrictions that forced the city to grow ‘vertically’ through the
construction of high-rise build-ings. Without planning restrictions, the city would grow
‘naturally’ or ‘horizontally’ as the vast majority of people would prefer a house with a
garden. According to the plan, rescinding the artificial limitation of land supply would also
result in lower land prices. To let ‘the market’ do its work, the plan lifted restrictions and
the metropolitan area of Santiago expanded from 36,000 hectares to 100,000 hectares,
almost tripling the potential land market instantly. This resulted in unprecedented urban
sprawl and, following speculation, increasing land and housing prices. Meanwhile, illegal
settlements or campamentos were systematically removed and some 150,000 families were
forcibly displaced to peripheral settlements without acceptable facilities, resulting in sharp
segregation (Kusnetzoff, 1987). While the 1979 plan for Santiago can be regarded as the
first ever neoliberal plan, and it established the basic features of neoliberal planning that
remain constitutive today: an unbridled belief in the natural superiority of the market to
allocate land in the most efficient way; a principled distrust in state planning per se as it
distorts the market; the mobilization of the state to dismantle its own planning functions;
the outsourcing of planning functions to the private sector; and the reinforcement of the
authoritarian state to fulfil repres-sive functions (such as forced displacement) that private
actors cannot achieve.
Shortly after the Chilean experiments with neoliberal planning, neoliberal planning’s most
iconic form, the Urban Development Project, and its most iconic form of organization, the
public-private partnership (PPP), would materialize in Britain in the early 1980s where the
newly appointed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had inherited a crisis-ridden economy
accompa-nied by serious social unrest, strikes, and riots in decaying inner cities. In the
aftermath of the

Neoliberal Planning
particularly violent 1981 riots in Toxteth, Liverpool, the then Minister for the Environment
Michael Heseltine was sent on a mission to Liverpool and reported back to the prime min-
ister under the apt title “It took a riot” (The National Archives, 2011). He proposed to
abolish the (left-leaning) county councils and to place urban regeneration under central
govern-ment control. He suggested cooperating with the private sector “to a far greater
degree than hitherto”, including the 30 banks, pension funds and insurance companies he
had visited during his mission. Urban Development Corporations (UDCs), first in
Liverpool and London and later throughout the country, put into praxis the call for
economic regeneration to solve the inner-city problems. A focus on economic regeneration
to solve other problems was already present in Labour’s 1977 White Paper ‘Policy for the
Inner Cities’ (Edwards, 1984), and soon became the cornerstone of British urban policies
through the 1988 ‘Action for Cities’ policy document (Deakin and Edwards, 1993). UDCs
were given extensive powers, including land acquisition and the abolition of local planning
regulations and procedures. Just like in Santiago a few years earlier, the British state would,
in an authoritarian manner, partly dismantle its own planning infrastructure and transfer it
to private companies.
Barnekov and Rich (1977) demonstrate in an American context how PPPs in the field of
inner-city regeneration emerge in the spirit of so-called ‘urban privatism’, independent of
Chicago-style neoliberal theorizing. Their research was based on case studies of
‘development committees’ bringing together political and corporate leaders in American
cities in the 1960s after local corporate leaders started to show a strong interest in urban
redevelopment due to the emergence of inner-city decline in the USA in those days. In an
attempt to restore favourable conditions for capital accumulation in the aftermath of the
Fordist crisis, the Reagan adminis-tration continued to implement the policies initiated by
the Carter administration, including serious cut-backs in federal budgets such as income-
maintenance and rent support which hit the urban poor disproportionately. Florida and
Jonas (1991) describe Reagan’s implicit urban policy as
a set of experiments in political-economic “destructuring” based on selective elimina-tion
or redirection of the income-maintenance and social programs of Great Society, the re-
routing of federal spending from Democratic constituencies in the older cities to
Republican strongholds, a transfer of administrative responsibility from the federal
government to states and localities, and an overall reduction of the social wage.

Strongly influenced by neo-conservative thinkers such as Charles Murray (1984), the

Reagan administration was convinced that the (urban) poor were disencouraged to support
themselves due to benefit dependency. Florida and Jonas (1991) insist that the increase of
(mainly black urban) poverty was no accidental by-product of these austerity measures but
an explicit goal: reducing benefits of various kinds would get the poor ‘back on their feet’.
The penalization of the poor and consistent social austerity policies have remained a key
feature of neoliberalism ever since.
Normalizing
Since the foundations for neoliberal planning were laid through these pioneering urban
policy reforms in Chile, the United States and Great Britain, neoliberal planning practices
have been spread across the globe, first in the developed world, and by now largely across
the globe (see, for example, Lees et al., 2015). Neoliberalization is a slow incremental
process that mutates over time and space. Peck and Tickell (2002) call the first phase of
neoliberal policies ‘roll-back

Guy Baeten
neoliberalism’ – the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s which sought to
roll back the state and its influence over labour markets, ownership of the means of
production, welfare provision, financial markets, land use planning, and so on. It was built
upon a diagnosis of the 1970s’ economic crisis as a crisis of overregulation and unnecessary
interference of the state in matters economic. Paradoxically, the retreat of the state required
a strong state to push through reforms that restored the power of the market. Jenkins (2006)
calls Thatcher a ‘true apostle of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’, or in her own words:
“I believe in a strong state, strong to break the power of socialism” (p. 106). The social fall-
out of rolling back the state – increasing poverty, rising segregation and income
polarization between rich and poor, growing social exclusion, long-term unemployment –
gradually forced neoliberal governments to rethink the neoliberal project. The 1990s saw
the introduction of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’ – the ‘Third Way’ of Blair and Clinton that
reinvigorated the interference of the state, not in economic matters, but in social and penal
matters specifically dealing with the “aggressive reregulation, disciplining, and
containment of those marginalized or dispossessed by the neo-liberalization of the 1980s”
(p. 389). As in the pioneering Chilean experiments, the state under neoliberalism once more
showed its Janus face: on the one hand it seeks to withdraw from the ‘overregulation’ of
capital and labour, and on the other hand it assumes a proactive role in the management,
suppression and punishment of the poor (see Wacquant, 2008 and 2009, for a detailed
analysis).
The rolling-out of neoliberalism into urban planning was famously abstracted by Harvey
(1989) as a transition from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism. Managerial
cities were primarily focused on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to
the urban population, while entrepreneurial cities in an age of heightened interurban
competition more than ever before had to concentrate on the attraction of investment and
employment. Cities can achieve this, first, through exploiting and promoting production
advantages, which can be natu-ral resources, location, but also tax incentives and the
attraction of skilled labour forces – today known as the creative classes. Second, the city
can compete for increased consumption through the promotion of tourism, the physical
upgrading of the urban environment (for example, spectacular architecture and the removal
of unwanted sights and bodies), consumer attractions such as sports stadia and shopping
centres and the organization of mega-events. Third, cities can concentrate on the attraction
of command and control functions in finance and information industries which necessitates
heavy investments in prime transport and communication infra-structures in order to
prepare the city to become an informational city or a post-industrial city with service
exports as an economic basis. Finally, cities continue to compete for large govern-ment
contracts in the military industries and other research-intensive industries.
By now, cities across the globe have deployed these strategies to various degrees and in
various combinations, and it is remarkable how ‘normal’ and ubiquitous these policies
appear in contemporary urban settings. Indeed, Keil (2009) has suggested that the twin
processes of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism have recently been complemented by a
new form of neo-liberalization: roll-with-it neoliberalization. It means “the normalization
of neoliberal practices and mindsets, the . . . acceptance of the ‘conduct of conduct’ of
neoliberalism, a manner . . . ‘of inciting the subjects to conduct themselves after the model
of the enterprise and the general norm of competition’” (p. 232). Roll-with-it is self-
referential since it does not refer to some-thing that has to be annihilated (like roll-back had
to bring down the overregulating state). It exists by itself, without strong counterdiscourses
about alternatives: it is the way things are. Planners today, after all, simply do not refer to
their planning ideas and practices as ‘neolib-eral’ or ‘third way’ (Jackson, 2009), rendering
contemporary planning’s ideological foundations largely invisible. It is important to keep
in mind that these forms of neoliberalism exist side by
Neoliberal Planning
side and do not simply supersede each other. Moreover, the relation between these different
forms of neoliberalisms takes on different forms in different places (for a refined account
of ‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ in an English planning context, for example, see Allmendinger
and Haughton, 2013).
Established Tools and Policies
Planners now have a set of neoliberal tools and policies at their disposal that goes largely
uncon-tested and is applied worldwide to different degrees and in different forms. Tore
Sager (2011), based on an extensive literature survey, has named 14 such typical neoliberal
planning policies and tools that have somehow gained a ‘natural’ status in the planners’
toolkit. We will highlight some of the most prominent of these: city marketing, attraction
of the creative class, Urban Development Projects and PPPs.
City marketing, while in itself older than neoliberalism, especially started drawing the
atten-tion of researchers when Glasgow surprisingly won the title of European Cultural
Capital in 1990 and managed to fundamentally change its image from a clapped-out
industrial town to a hip and cool cultural centre of North Britain through systematic
marketing efforts. Paddison (1993), Boyle and Hughes (1994) and Kearns and Philo (1993),
among others, were astounded by its impact but also by the blatant way in which the history
of Glasgow was reimagined and rewritten to fit the new economic exigencies. They already
pointed at the obvious danger and injustice of writing away certain neighbourhoods, places,
buildings, historical events, memories and individuals, while underscoring others, in an
attempt to commodify a place ready for con-sumption. In spite of these critiques, city
branding has become a global neoliberal planning tool which paradoxically has led to more
uniformity, not diversity, among cities since the promotion of signature architecture, mega-
events and fine dining have become universal templates that are no longer able to
strategically position cities vis-à-vis other equally aggressive urban centres (Lui, 2008).
Closely related to city marketing is neoliberal planning’s arguably most prominent contem-
porary paradigm: the idea that successful urban economies are dependent on the attraction
of the creative class. Florida’s (2002a) claims are bold and simple: it is the creative class
that gener-ates employment and those cities that manage to attract them will be prosperous:
“Places have replaced companies as the key organising units in our economy” (p. 30). Now
it is ‘cool’ cities with cutting-edge music and art scenes, tolerant gay neighbourhoods, and
other ‘soft’ features that will prosper best in an age of competition for creative people:
“Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race” (Florida,
2002b). Florida’s prescriptions for planning flourishing urban economies have been proven
wrong over and over again: it is prosperous places with available employment that attract
talented people, not the other way around (Peck, 2005; Hansen and Niedomysl, 2009; Scott,
2006); most creative people live ordinary lives that are not distinguishable from other
people (Lang and Danielsen, 2005); cities that do attract large numbers of creative people,
such as Berlin or New Orleans, have not wit-nessed positive economic outcomes (Malanga,
2004); and creative class policies paradoxically exclude the low-income segments of the
creative class (NION, 2010). Yet, cities across the globe continue to take inspiration from
Florida’s ideas. Their immeasurable appeal lies not in their accuracy, sophistication or
academic superiority but in their indirect message that cities do have their fate in their own
hands – a message that appeals not least to planners in rustbelt cities in the absence of any
credible alternative.
Urban Development Projects (UDPs), as pioneered in the London Docklands (Brownill,
1990), by now belong to the most common planning templates to establish or radically
renew city

Guy Baeten
districts, which often comprise a mix of housing, offices, signature architecture, shopping
malls, transport facilities, exhibition halls and cultural centres. An extensive survey by
Swyngedouw et al. (2002) of 13 UDPs in Europe reveal some characteristics that most
UDPs to a greater or lesser extent share. First, large-scale UDPs are used as a “vehicle to
establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures” (p. 547). A specific
part of the city, often qualified as deprived and in need of regeneration, is carved out and
subjected to exceptional planning procedures that (partly) sideline conventional municipal
planning authorities. Existing demo-cratic participation mechanisms are abolished or
applied in a formulaic manner, hence creating a democratic deficit. Second, these ‘stand-
alone’ projects are either not at all, or poorly, integrated in the planning of the rest of the
city. As a consequence, both their integration in and socio-economic impact on the rest of
the city remain ambiguous. Third, UDPs often contribute to a further polarization in the
city through the establishment of new real estate dynamics that attract high-income groups
to specific places in the city while simultaneously stimulating (forced) displacement of
low-income groups to impoverished parts of the city. They have also been criticized for
pushing social problems such as poverty and unemployment further afield and for failing
to connect to local communities. This is partly because the financing of regeneration
projects often comes from land sales for property development which means that other
regen-eration objectives are put in the shadow of land sales and property investment (Raco,
2005). This created a democratic deficit in planning since the control of major development
projects was effectively handed over to non-elected, appointed committees (Imrie and
Thomas, 1999). UDCs have proven successful as far as the sheer level of construction of
offices, transport net-works and housing is concerned (Imrie and Thomas, 1999). They also
demonstrated in physical, concrete terms the limitations and weaknesses of the existing
planning system and possibilities of these new ways of planning governance (Cochrane,
1999). In spite of their obvious shortcom-ings, UDPs as planning vehicles have been used
to implement large-scale projects that vary from waterfront development (Desfor et al.,
2012), to Olympic Games sites (Poynter and MacRury, 2009), to railway station
neighbourhoods (Peters, 2009).
Like city marking, PPPs precede neoliberal forms of planning but have come to be regarded
as one of its prime manifestations. As mentioned, PPPs can be traced back to the 1960s
when corporate leaders started to cooperate with city officials to tackle American inner-
city decline. PPP remains a notoriously vague concept: they appear in several different
forms and under dif-ferent acronyms. However, what they have in common, according to
Hildyard (2014: 6), is that “they provide private companies with contract-based rights to
flows of public money or to monopoly income streams from services on which the public
rely”. These ‘flows of public money’ can take the form of (1) cash subsidies: the
government agrees to provide a cash subsidy for a project; (2) payment guarantees: the
government agrees to fulfil the obligation of being the purchaser; (3) or revenue guarantees:
the government sets a minimum variable income for the private partner and makes up for
loss.
Proponents claim that PPPs are beneficial because private ownership brings competition
and thus lower prices; the private sector brings disciplines to public projects; PPPs bring
improved efficiency and lower costs, thus, better value for money: the public sector does
not have the resources and PPPs lower the costs by bringing in private finance; PPPs spur
economies that will trickle down to low-income groups and PPPs are therefore an
instrument to enhance welfare. The critics, on the other hand, claim that the improved
efficiency, lower costs and poverty reduction arguments are not valid since infrastructure
does not automatically lead to improvements for low-income groups and does not
necessarily reduce costs (Stephenson, 1991). Miraftab (2004) points at the false promise of
PPPs as a win-win situation (the public sector secures private investment while pursuing
the betterment of local living and working conditions)

Neoliberal Planning
since PPPs most often act as a ‘Trojan horse’ for further privatization of formerly public
services which in the end do not benefit deprived groups and neighbourhoods. Ultimately,
PPPs “are less about financing development than about developing finance” (Hildyard,
2014: 10).
Crisis and Its Aftermath
By the 2000s, it had become difficult not to be overawed by the seemingly global hegem-
ony of neoliberal thinking. Prominent scholars such as Perry Anderson (2000: 7) stated that
“Neoliberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe”, and Edward Said
(2000) claimed that “Neoliberalism has swallowed up the world in its clutches”. The 2008
finan-cial crisis would change that. In its immediate aftermath, Peck (2010) believed
neoliberalism had reached a zombie-like state, dead but alive, and Smith (2008) compared
the condition of neoliberalism with a dead rattlesnake that can still strike in its nerve-driven
afterlife, while the journal Development Dialogue (2009) was quick to introduce and
discuss the term postneoliberal-ism. However, as it rapidly became clear after massive state
interventions to keep the financial institutions (and hence neoliberalism) afloat, these early
‘hopeful’ positions had to be revised in the light of the ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’.

It is necessary to start from acceptance that political and economic elites will do eve-rything
that they can to maintain neoliberalism in general and the finance-driven form of it in
particular. They have benefited so much from the inequalities of wealth and power that the
system has produced, compared with the experience of strongly redistributive taxation,
strong trade unions and government regulation during the social-democratic era. … They
will cling to this model tenaciously.
(Crouch, 2011: 119)
Both Berry (2014) and Peck (2012) have recently demonstrated how the recovery of post-
crisis neoliberalism goes hand in hand with a new round of roll-back neoliberalism through
sustained ‘austerity urbanism’.
While the literature on understanding the reasons behind and nature of the financial crisis
is vast, the impact of the financial crisis on planning remains underresearched. Holgersen
(2014, 2015) has looked at the response of the city of Malmö, Sweden, to the breakdown
of construction activities in 2008–9. The municipal government reacted by offering
municipality-owned land at bargain prices to private construction companies since building
activities had to continue at any cost. More than anything, the 2008 crisis has demonstrated
an absence of credible alternatives to existing neoliberal planning and regeneration
practices. But it also illustrates both the resilience of neoliberal planning and the successful
restoration of ‘business-as-usual’ planning; that is, pre-crisis neoliberal planning.
Meanwhile, urban regeneration, or more specifically green regeneration, is put at the very
core of the way out of crisis by some of the most prominent international institu-tions. The
World Bank (2013) claims that “Cities can become global engines of green growth”, the
United National Environmental Program (2011) believes that “Cities can and should play
a leading role in greening economies”, and the OECD (2013) is convinced that “Urban
policies are crucial for achieving national environmental and green growth goals”. If the
urban green economy or the production of eco-cities (Joss, 2009) will become the future
cornerstone of eco-nomic growth as these very powerful organizations seek to promote,
then we are entering a new variation of neoliberalism in which urban (green) planning will
play a paramount role.
The biggest contemporary challenge for future planning, then, is certainly not its very
survival: there will be more (privatized) planning than ever before to meet the call for green

Guy Baeten
planetary urbanization, alongside the continuing neoliberal desire for the annihilation of
space through spectacular transport infrastructures, for the overhaul of city centres to attract
tourists, investment and the creative class, and for the marketing of places in an imagined
geo-Darwinian globalized world. Paradoxically, then, in times when planning is met with
considerable disre-gard (see, for example, Gleeson and Low, 2000) and even acts as the
very ‘scapegoat fantasy’ for neoliberalism’s failures (Gunder, 2016), planning has a bright
future under neoliberal conditions. The expansion of neoliberalism, in blatant contrast with
its own discourse, necessitates an ever stronger state, not just to bail out financial
institutions when needed but also to pro-actively and relentlessly (re)shape neoliberalism’s
spaces, places, cities, flows and bodies. Planning, whether practised in architect consultant
firms or in the town hall, plays a pivotal role in the formation and continuation of
neoliberalism.
In the process, it rewards the planner with the aphrodisiac of winning planning proposal
competitions, competing on a global scale, pushing through and implementing spectacular
development schemes, or bandying about rapidly increasing visitor numbers. A new
neoliberal planning subjectivity has downgraded customary concern that once steered
planning theory and practice: “What has happened to planning’s traditional concerns about
fairness, equity, and social justice which no longer seem to be burning planning questions
when they should be more than ever before perhaps”, wonders Gunder (2006).
Past the Political?
This cooptation of planning practice by neoliberal interests, alongside the realization that
neo-liberalism had successfully survived yet another financial crisis, has most recently
triggered a debate around the (post-)political nature of contemporary planning. Purcell
(2009) argues that communicative or collaborative planning is an excellent vehicle for
neoliberals to maintain hegemony while ensuring political stability:
What the neoliberal project requires are decision-making practices that are widely accepted
as “democratic”. But that do not (or cannot) fundamentally challenge exist-ing relations of
power. Communicative planning … is just such a decision-making practice. …
communicative action reinforces existing power relations rather than transforms them.

(p. 141)
Bengs (2005) insists that communicative planning’s prime role is to lubricate the neoliberal
project, and Sager (2005) ponders whether communicative planners are the naive
mandarins of the neoliberal state. Grange (2016, 2014, 2012) laments the planning
community’s fear of conflict and antagonism. She wants to make planners aware again to
what extent their practice is driven by consensual neoliberal ideology and she stresses the
need for ‘fearless speech’ if planning wants to take up a more transformative role in society.
For Gunder (2010), planning has become the ideology of neoliberal space. Influenced by
the notion of the post-political, Allmendinger and Haughton (2012) have analysed recent
reforms in planning law and discern a reinvigorated effort in English planning to force
consensus and displace dissent to other arenas (such as the Court): “What we are witnessing
appears to be a new moment in the post-political management of dissent and the continuing
selective displacement of the handling of controver-sial issues to alternative modes and
scales of planning” (p. 101). Baeten (2009) reconstructs the history of planning and
community on the South Bank in London from the resistance against office development
in the 1970s and 1980s, to the introduction of partnership planning under

Neoliberal Planning
New Labour in the 1990s, to recent regime changes in which dissent and conflict have been
virtually eliminated through the successful cooptation of all stakeholders, whether
originally antagonistic or not.
While it is undoubtedly true that consensus and the suppression of dissent are all-pervading
features of contemporary planning, we should cast doubt over the perception that, lately,
plan-ning has somehow entered a new stage that some would label ‘post-political’. When
going back to the original writings of Rancière, Badiou, Žižek and Swyngedouw, among
others, it becomes clear that these authors understand the post-political condition as
‘normal’, as the way things usually are. ‘Political’ moments, not the least for Rancière
(1998), are rare events. The general understanding of politics – a set of procedures that
organizes collectivities and powers, distributes places and roles for people, and legitimizes
that order, should, according to Rancière (1998), not be understood as ‘politics’ proper but
rather as what he labels ‘the police’. It is primarily

an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of
saying and sees that those bodies are assigned … to a particular place and task; it is an order
of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not,
that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.

(p. 29)
The police order ultimately determines the distinction between those who have a name and
those who have not, those who can speak and will be listened to and those who will not be,
in short those who have a part and those who have not. Politics, then, is not about managing
and sustaining this order through negotiation and consensus (Dikeç, 2002). Politics is the
opposite of ‘the police’. Politics arise when the police order is broken, when bodies are
shifted away from the places assigned to them. An important implication of this is that
politics do not auto-matically occur simply because power relationships are at work. Power
relationships might exist between groups and result in conflict but not necessarily in politics
as the police order might be left untouched.
Seen through this lens, urban planning is not necessarily political simply because power
relationships between different stakeholders with conflicting interests exist and are dealt
with at the negotiation table. Planning politics, following Rancière’s thinking, would only
occur when someone leaves their negotiation role and puts forward a claim that threatens
the existing police order, existing plans, or existing negotiation procedures that underlie
and reproduce existing inequalities in urban neighbourhoods. The post-political condition
of planning, in which com-municative or collaborative or other fashionable planning
regimes seek some form of consensus around land allocation within the given parameters
of an economic regime (for example capital-ism), is then the ‘common’ state of planning.
In line with the post-political literature, political planning would rarely erupt, and the
support of economic hierarchies would be a banal condi-tion of planning, before, during
and probably after the neoliberal age. As Allmendinger and Haughton (2012: 94) remind
us:
Planning tends to adapt very quickly to reflect the dominant ideology and priorities of the
age. This is not too surprising, perhaps: planning is, after all, the main mechanism through
which the state seeks to manage land use changes. As governments change and societal
concerns and priorities alter, so planning adapts and evolves through what Reade (1987)
termed a shifting consensus. Such shifts in the purpose of planning and the accompanying
tools have been criticised as being superficial, masking an enduring, more market-
supportive function.

Guy Baeten
After all, according to Harvey (1978: 231), “The commitment of the ideology of harmony
within the capitalist social order remains the still point upon which the gyrations of
planning ideology turn”.
What next?
Planning theory has a notorious normative current, and planning theorists on the left are
inclined to overload planners with demands that they ought to stand up against existing
power configu-rations, or that they should fearlessly speak out against blatant spatial
injustices. They can’t. Neither do politicians, academics or activists as long as the left has
no overriding alternative vision of society at hand that could possibly compete with the
eloquent and smooth neoliberal mythologies (see Merrifield, 1993; Smith, 2008). This, of
course, has pervasive impacts on the nature and content of much of contemporary planning.
But we have to remember that neoliberal thinking, certainly in its early days when
Keynesianism was hegemonic, was a mar-ginalized intellectual stream. For decades,
Hayek, Friedman and others were rowing upstream until the Fordist/Keynesian regime
came to a grinding halt in the late 1960s and early 1970s and politicians started looking for
economic policies beyond Keynesianism. Until then, neoliberal thinkers were frustrated,
and jealous of the success of the socialist body of thought. In ‘The Intellectuals and
Socialism’, Friedrich Hayek (1949: 384) laments the absence of an appealing liberal
programme that could withstand the attraction of socialism:
[W]e must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We
must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of
courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia … a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare
the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely
practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible.
We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be
the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles
and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must
leave to the politicians … The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the
success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the
support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily
making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote … if we can regain that belief
in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The
intellectual revival of liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world. Will it be
in time?

The contemporary frustration on the left is strikingly similar: one only has to replace
‘liberal’ with ‘socialist’ and vice versa in the quote above. Planning will not pursue fairness,
equity and justice if planning cannot draw ideas from a broader alternative utopia that has
sufficient legiti-macy like neoliberal ideas have just now. In the absence of such a utopia,
we cannot impose normative world-changing fantasies on the planning community.
If planners are forced to ‘mindlessly’ implement profit-maximizing land-use decisions
while unable to tackle their potential detrimental environmental and social fall-out, then
any form of ‘sustainable’ planning becomes impossible under neoliberal conditions.
The challenge lies in how to continue to pursue the integration of economic, environmental
and social issues in land-use decisions when economic concerns are prioritized while social
and environmental concerns are coopted to fit into the profit-maximizing agenda. Growth,
then,

Neoliberal Planning
becomes a goal in itself that overrules other concerns, something that stands in contrast
with the
conventional balance-seeking spirit that typically pervades planning (Baeten, 2012b).
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10
NEO-PRAGMATIST
PLANNING THEORY
Charles Hoch
Introduction
Pragmatism has a popular cultural meaning that often generates misleading interpretations.
The pragmatist lacks principles and integrity, believing that the ends justify the means. The
prag-matist shaves corners and clips wings to keep moral problems within reach and so
shirks moral accomplishment. These distortions honor the pragmatist focus on practical
consequences and the provisional quality of human purpose. However, they ignore the
pragmatist commitment to collaborative inquiry that uses inclusive and intelligent problem
solving to advance social learning. The common sense appeal of the pragmatist approach
can open the door to cynical manipulation and caricature. But the pragmatist approach also
offers an especially attractive theoretical framework for urban planning because it focuses
explicitly on human judgment as purposeful, anticipatory and future oriented.
This chapter provides an overview of the re-emergence of pragmatist ideas among planning
theorists from the 1980s through 2015. After a brief introduction, the first part of the chapter
covers five contributions that neo-pragmatist ideas brought to planning theory debates
among scholars primarily in North America: power, fact–value dichotomy, problem
solving, incre-mentalism and structure agency. The second part explores some of the cross-
fertilization of pragmatist ideas with European postmodern and poststructural social theory.
PART I
Pragmatism and Planning Theory
Patsy Healey wrote an essay (2009) that offers a cogent account of North American neo-
pragmatist planning theory. She argues that pragmatist ideas re-emerged in response to the
social upheaval and social critiques that emerged in the wake of the late 1960s’ social
protest movements in the United States and Europe. The urban riots in US cities, the
protracted war in Vietnam, and increased sensitivity to environmental pollution challenged
not only current pol-icy, but confidence and belief in the systems of liberal governance and
the rationales proposed in their defense. The revival of more encompassing structural
critiques using Marxist-inspired

Neo-Pragmatist Planning Theory

political economy and ecologically inspired environmentalism gained traction among
planning intellectuals offering systematic replacements for discredited welfare state
liberalism.
Healey uses an article by Rittel and Weber (1973) to frame the crisis. The essay warned
planning scholars that the urban problems they hoped would be solved through rational
analysis remained wickedly untamed. Rittel and Weber argued that the social problems
planners seek to solve cannot be tamed by rational order, but stubbornly resist such
formulation. They detail how the underlying presuppositions of the engineering and policy
sciences that planning theory used to justify professional judgment (e.g., deterministic
models) would not work for complex urban problems. Healey describes how the work by
John Friedmann (1973) and Donald Schön (1983) adopted pragmatist ideas to reconceive
these complex dilemmas as problems susceptible to social learning. Friedmann developed
his ideas focusing on forms of democratic planning, while Schön and Martin Rein (1994)
focused on recasting how professionals can use democratic intelligence to enhance learning
among their clientele.
Pragmatism emerged as a philosophical response to the success of scientific knowledge as
a persuasive and powerful mode of inquiry. The successful application of insights from the
natural sciences fueled technical innovation and invention accelerating the Industrial
Revolution and urbanization. The emergence of modernity not only expanded the rational
means for mastering navigation, railways, manufacture, mining, agriculture and the
uncertainty of nature across the globe; but intensified the spatial interdependence and
interaction among these human systems, generating new forms of uncertainty among
emerging nations and colonies; as well as within and among rapidly expanding urban
regions. Instead of trying to redeem the salience of philoso-phy as the intellectual
foundation for scientific reason, the pragmatists embraced the practice of scientific inquiry
as the focus for philosophical reflection.
In the US, the pragmatists argued for a more hopeful conception of modernity in the shadow
of Civil War trauma, the closing of the frontier and massive waves of immigrants whose
labor produced an unprecedented bounty of goods. The exploitation of these workers and
the whole-sale destruction of natural resources were concentrated in urban and rural areas
and became the object of reform for settlement house reformers such as Jane Adams,
landscape architects such as Fredrick Law Olmstead, housing advocates including
Benjamin Marsh, and many other mid-dle- and working-class activists (Hays 1957, 1959;
Wiebe 1967). The concept of a progressive movement that historians later coined to
describe the many reform efforts owes some of its intellectual legitimacy to the early
pragmatist ideas linking social action and knowledge with democratic participation (Levine
2000). These disparate and ideologically diverse reformers shared a commitment to the
practical power of modern scientific knowledge as a remedy for urban problems. Pragmatic
ideas proved popular as justification for the application of science to practical affairs. Urban
planning emerged as a focus for professional collaboration that tapped this knowledge even
as splits emerged between those who insisted on a division between profes-sional expertise
and political involvement (Fairfield 2010; Peterson 2003) and those who argued for
integration. For instance, Mary Parker Follett (1998 [1918]) studied Dewey and envisioned
the political work of governing and administration as an integration of purpose and
intelligence. The practice of democracy, on her view, spreads responsibility as it integrates
through delibera-tion what to do and how to do it.
Pragmatist planning theory follows the same tack. Instead of casting theory as a conceptual
foundation for planning practice, pragmatists imagine theory as a different kind of
deliberative social practice. In the spatial planning world pragmatists avoid prescriptions
tied to methodo-logical rigor and certainty; making plans that fulfill rational expectations.
The pragmatist scholars focus instead on the relevance of social knowledge for the situation
at hand attending to the

Charles Hoch
meaning and impact of future consequences. They study what people making plans and
plan-ning institutions do to cope with messy, complex social and political problems that
accompany modern urban development.
Power and Planning: Forester
John Forester has emerged as one of the most popular proponents of a critical pragmatist
approach to planning theory. Forester studied at Berkeley in the 1970s influenced by the
insights of the post positivist language philosophy of Austin (1965) and the later
Wittgenstein channeled through the approach to political theory adopted by Hannah Pitkin
(1972) and prag-matist philosopher Richard Bernstein (1978). He was also influenced by
the pragmatist systems thinking developed by C. West Churchman (1979) and the critical
theory of Jürgen Habermas (1970, 1979).
Forester understood that the promise of professional expertise delivered through well-
intentioned bureaucratic reform did not offer an adequate response to systems critique and
the structural political economy accounts of power tied to global capitalism. Adopting a
pragma-tist approach enabled him to focus on power in a more integrated fashion. The
conditions of modern life that reproduce systemic interdependence not only exploit and
dominate, but also generate opportunities for resistance and innovation. Forester uses the
insights of language phi-losophy, critical theory and pragmatism to identify how
differences in cognitive capacity, gaps in organizational function, legitimation challenges,
shifting emotional attachments and beliefs shape choice and action. He elaborates a robust
conception of planning practice that urges practitioners to recognize the inherently political
feature of their work, and describes how to grasp this as an asset rather than impediment
(1989, 1999, 2009). Forester combines interview and observation of planners and managers
to interpret how practitioners engaged in various institutional bureaucratic settings conduct
deliberations. How did these people embrace the contingent features of the situation
engaging others with practical possibilities for change?
Forester also expands the critique of social injustice inspired by the political economists
beyond the focus on class relations. Forester shows how planning relies upon deliberations
about practical judgment that include how exploitation, subordination and domination can
undermine the promise of meaningful discourse. The pragmatist approach integrates
structural, systemic and personal power asymmetries within specific situations framing
deliberations about practical possibilities for each context. The horizon for action does not
flow from abstract ideals about sincerity or legitimacy, but attention to the complex
competing claims and expectations for justice, efficiency and solidarity expressed in
politically charged deliberations about ambigu-ous and uncertain claims (Forester 2009).
Forester adopts a progressive participatory liberalism. Critical of instrumental conceptions
of pluralist democracy he shows how the work of public professionals requires learning
how to collaborate and conduct democratic inquiry that invites and addresses social
complexity, inequality and diversity setting and solving problems for places.
Resolving Fact and Value: Harper and Stein
The work by Thomas Harper and Stan Stein has offered some of the most explicit links
between the pragmatist ideas of philosophers and their relevance and use for planning
theory. They explicitly reviewed several philosophers and political theorists in a 1994 paper
that summarized the neo-pragmatic view: Quine, Davidson, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Putnam,
Rorty, Habermas and Walzer. The quick overview helped planning analysts understand that
philosophy in the United States adopted a strongly analytical focus in the 20th century.
Philosophers focused

Neo-Pragmatist Planning Theory

on improving the stature and relevance of logical analysis and rationality as a framework
and foundation for scientific and moral inquiry. The new pragmatist philosophers,
especially Rorty, critiqued this quest for rational correspondence, reviving and expanding
the reach of the prag-matist ideas from Dewey, James and Peirce.1 Harper and Stein (1994)
identified the following list of claims attributed to the neo-pragmatist philosophical
approach:
1 Non-foundational: knowing tied to social learning and not some other authority
2 Anti-essentialist: we learn concepts through use and not correspondence with a core
definition 3 Anti-dualistic: facts and values differ not by category, but by use relevant to
context and
consequence
4 Non-reductive: the dynamic systems we make and inhabit cannot be broken into parts 5
Non-relativistic: truth varies with consequences in context, but not randomly or without
purpose
6 Fallibilistic: truth claims subject to revision based on future inquiry and changing
conditions 7 De-emphasizes theory: knowing the meaning of an idea comes from using it
and not just
possessing it
8 Incremental justification: trial and error remain central to how we learn to adapt –
prudential 9 Integrates different frames of belief: focusing on outcomes enables people
holding different
beliefs to find common ground
10 Democratically pluralistic: including deliberation from people holding diverse beliefs
and
goals improves the quality of democratic judgments
11 Community vs. individual based: integrity is not something I possess, but something we
each acquire through practice with others
12 Rejects incommensurable differences between communities: we make and reproduce
our social lives as clever social animals. The differences we invent and use are all subject
to change. Recognizing and improving (or destroying) imaginative forms of solidarity
always possible.

Harper and Stein sidestep the fact–value divide by taking Darwin’s conception of evolution
to heart. Humans emerged not as rational animals but through species-specific random
variation and natural selection. Each of us acquires a version of rationality depending on
our unique developmental paths with biological contours shaped by genetic inheritance and
environmental setting. Cartesian doubt – the sort of philosophical thinking that imagines
an intellectual escape from the messy details of causal interdependence and social history
fails us because each of us lives and conceives as embodied persons living a life journey.
The pragmatists turned away from this Cartesian doubt with its focus on an epistemic
foundation for truth within each individual and focused instead on the conduct of social
inquiry using the norms of scientific study to com-prehend how the world works and what
this means for democratic governance of public affairs and the flourishing of individuals.
Harper and Stein’s list can be sorted into those pragmatist claims that critique the pursuit
of rational certainty (items 1 through 7) and the pursuit of the good (items 8 through 12).
These critiques apply not only to philosophical arguments, but the conventional
understanding many planners use to describe and justify what they do. Planners should
consider getting pragmatic as they seek justification for their arguments and ideas (being
right), as well as when they try to identify, compare and reconcile competing purposes
(doing good). Practitioners have too often learned to treat the first sort of problem as a
technical problem of analysis or expertise, and the second sort of problem as an ethical
problem for professional judgment (Hoch 1984). The pragmatist approach avoids the
separation. Right and good merge as we conduct joint inquiry

Charles Hoch
about problems we experience. We imagine solutions and evaluate the future effects in
terms of specific social purposes relevant for the situation we face. Instrumental and
interpretive mean-ings, together, shape practical judgment. But how does such inquiry
work?
Problem Solving: Blanco
The wicked problems that planning addresses cannot be grasped adequately using
conventional rational expectations. We cannot develop knowledge to explain, predict and
control complex problems. However, a pragmatist planning can and should describe and
interpret these problems imagining alternatives that resolve them. How does this work?
Hilda Blanco (1994) uses the pragmatist concept of abduction to explain the composition
of alternatives in plans. She cri-tiques efforts to adopt deductive and inductive analysis
from scientific inquiry. Abduction does not offer prediction or explanation, but plausible
possibility – educated hunches about what to expect in some future imagined context. These
imagined options offer cognitive grip as people compare the meaning of a simulated change
in light of current circumstances.
Blanco retains and revises the rational model using concepts from Peirce and Dewey to
show how each elaborated a form of critical social inquiry that gave abduction a prominent
role in how people conceive and respond to problems. Blanco adopts their insights to show
how a pragmatic account of plan making starts with the encounter of a problem in a specific
situation and not with goals. As people compose alternative accounts of an imagined future
each intro-duces select variations in the order of events. These plausible options might shift
the purposes in play, recasting the meaning of potential constraints and solutions. The
deliberation with others about the form and meaning of the future effects each option might
entail describes the plan. Plans do not implement goals, but articulate goals in relation to
specific contextual conditions offering practical alternatives for action and choice. Blanco
celebrates Peirce’s conception of abductive thought, but her conception of planning
channels what philosopher Steven Fesmire (2003) considers is Dewey’s idea of imaginative
planning. Dewey integrated the consideration of consequences, obligations and virtue as
aspects of imaginative plan making. He envisions each contributing to the qualities of
practical action needed to address a specific situation. The dra-matic rehearsal of detailed
practical action invites the sensitive application of virtue, the detached assessment of net
benefits and the claims of duty. These are composed into a plausible narrative comparison
or elaborated as contrasting tests detailing assessments of future effects framed within an
imagined order. The plans we imagine may compose stories about future action that narrate
how prudent judgments reconcile competing claims about expected consequences and
respect for prior obligations. Problem setting and solving for the pragmatist contribute to
the quality of rational judgments used to anticipate and prepare for the future in specific
ways. It combines representation and intention (Hoch 2007).
Trading in Synoptic Rationality for Progressive Incrementalism
Pragmatism can help people cope better with complex problems, not because it resolves
long-standing philosophical disputes, but by shifting attention away from philosophy as the
final arbiter of theoretical respectability. The planning intelligentia to the extent they want
to establish a theoretical enterprise independent of and somehow more fundamental than
the knowledge of practice, should consider pragmatism as a competing framework. The
pragmatic orientation does not settle the issues central to the quest for basic or grand theory,
but makes the pursuit appear tangential and inconsequential to the business of coping with
pressing problems of the day. Harper and Stein argue that Charles Lindblom’s (1959)
critique of synoptic rationality and
Neo-Pragmatist Planning Theory
emphasis on incrementalism were pragmatic in just this fashion and so a good example of
a pragmatist approach to problem solving.
Harper and Stein interpret incrementalism as a contextually sensitive experientially atten-
tive form of deliberation. Even cast narrowly as Lindblom’s partisan adjustment among
parties holding competing interests, the meaning of agreements still include consequences
widely con-ceived. The policy options, action alternatives or potential projects need not be
held hostage to a greedy synoptic rationality, but can be evaluated through purposeful
systematic comparison. Taking into account the contextual interests, concerns and
expectations among the parties and their constituents encounters practical limits that
become part of any spatial plan for a place and any meaningful agreement among those
involved in making the plan. Deliberate incremental adjustment enables the plan makers to
recast options in light of prior attachments. This happens as parties listen to others and
weigh the differences among future outcomes for a plan they could adopt. Increment in this
sense does not mean ‘small’ and so unimportant, but cognitively acces-sible, experientially
relevant and morally acceptable to someone unfamiliar with how the option works and what
it entails (Fung 2007).
Relational Pragmatism
Patsy Healey recognized the efficacy of American pragmatism as she struggled to reconcile
the practical consequentialism with more ambitious structural demands for social justice
and egali-tarian democratic inclusion. Her influential book (1997) on collaborative
planning made the case for inclusive participation among those likely to be touched by the
consequences of a plan. Healey has consistently adopted a relational approach linking a
pragmatically inspired concep-tion of collaboration with a critical sensitivity to
encompassing social and territorial relationships. She has developed a more refined
conception of democratic planning that responds to the con-ditions of institutional and
territorial complexity and plurality across the globe (2007). Healey elaborates a functional
vocabulary that she hopes will encompass and interpret complex changes in urban regions
– especially those changes susceptible to purposeful and useful modification and those that
resist. She uses the concept of strategy to capture the more informal, flexible and dynamic
assessment of relations susceptible to change within politically sensitive frames of
purposeful action. Healey envisions planning as inclusive strategic thought that informs
policy. Strategy refers to savvy decision making by clusters of stakeholders negotiating
provisional col-lective agreements about problems of vulnerable interdependence, common
special interests or other contextual situations demanding collective action. The geographic
and functional classifi-cation of so many relationships challenges the reader to interpret
individual planning judgments in light of their prospects for generating important changes
in spatial policy and ensuing pro-jects. Healey keeps the pragmatist sensibility, but in the
end she focuses on forms of political governance that, in her view, extend beyond planning.
The relationships she studies include institutional and geographic relationships that
promise in her account to offer a more progres-sive because inclusive alternative for spatial
development than dominant corporate alternatives.
PART II
Postmodern Critique
Inspired by postmodern and poststructural theory from philosophy and the social sciences
in Europe, some planning theorists challenge the foundational quest for an epistemic trump
and the

Charles Hoch
confident pursuit of scientific progress as unambiguously transparent and benign. They
criticize pragmatist conceptions of planning for ignoring how power relationships
undermine the delibera-tions they champion and adopting a contextual relativism that fails
to grasp the impact of structural causes and so overlooks innovations that might effectively
challenge and replace the source of systemic problems (Allmendinger & Tewdwr-Jones
2002; Balducci et al. 2011; Hillier 2011).
The critique of pragmatism for failing to deal with power relationships flows mainly from
a difference in vocabulary. The critics insist that power refers to forms of economic,
political or social domination, exclusion, exploitation and subjection that inescapably
impose themselves. Pragmatists on this account naively describe power in terms of
economic, political or social legitimacy, inclusion, solidarity and consensus (Mouffe 1996).
The pragmatists imagine that each person is capable of the full range of vice and virtue,
good and evil and that what we learn to believe and how we are taught (socialization or
encultura-tion) to act locates us along the continua of multiple power dimensions.
Pragmatists recognize that we acquire our moral capacity and practice within the context
of specific cultural and institutional settings that include every sort of power relationship.
Ethics always includes social and political motivations, circumstances and effects. The
moral meaning of our action depends on the contextual efforts we each face acquiring
standing as an individual whose actions speak louder than words. These contexts include
institutional, cultural and natural conditions that shape the limits and meaning of our effort.
So neo-pragmatists do not ignore power, they just recognize that its inevitable presence
does not trump or preclude creative practical moral effort to resist and recast the nasty and
destructive plans with less repressive and more useful ones. This makes knowledge for plan
making a central part of the effort to achieve practical grounds for the moral recovery of
individual freedom in places where this possibility seems remote (Dewey 1927; Bernstein
2010; Forester 2009). The modernism of experimental pragmatism, with its emphasis on
democratic inquiry, does not align with the efficiency-focused expertise of hard-boiled
instrumentalism that has little to say in response to postmodern critique. But reviving and
using pragmatist ideas that foster involvement and inclusion offers a useful and coherent
response. Snider (2000) sums this up nicely:
A century ago, pragmatism recast the terms of the debate between idealists and empir-
icists; today, it provides a bridge between modernism’s faith in human reason and progress
(Gergen, 1992, p. 211) and the seemingly relativistic, or even nihilistic, aspects of
postmodernism (Auxier, 1995).

The pragmatic theorist does not possess any less passion for freedom than the poststructural
theorist. Pragmatic planning theorists criticize the naturalization of uncertainty as an
inevitable force removing the possibility for individual freedom (Hoch 1984; Harper &
Stein 2006; Verma 1998). The difference is that pragmatic theory recognizes that practical
consequences matter for the beliefs we hold and that the current conventions and techniques
rely upon and reproduce a complex moral mixture of good and bad, stupid and clever,
useless and useful. This makes purposeful planned compromise an important resource for
improving the mixtures, even as it entails conflicts (Hoch 2007). The pragmatic theorists
focus here on kinds of democracy because they do not believe people possess the
knowledge and authority to prescribe a more complete moral order, nor do they want to
sacrifice the promise of individual effort to obtain it. That is why pragmatists end up
embracing versions of liberal democracy both as a resource for planning knowledge and a
target for improvement (Forester 1989; Harper & Stein 2006; Verma 2010).
This does not mean that pragmatic theorists squeamishly avoid or snuff out conflict
(Hoch 1992, 1994; Forester 1989, 1999, 2010). Pragmatists focus on what people do to
subject

Neo-Pragmatist Planning Theory

a subordinate, punish a peer, cheat a client, subvert a rule, repress a wish, fix a bet, tempt
the weak, humiliate the vulnerable and so on; asking what difference this makes for the
parties touched by the situation at hand. The complexity of human personality and social
involvement precludes taking a theoretical position independent of the interactive flux and
flow of judgment and action. Planning provides a tool that we can use to compose and
compare choices for what we can and should do to anticipate and cope with the problems
encountered as we make our way in the interactive flux. Planning cannot protect us from
temptation to evil or the willful embrace of destructive personal and social acts.
The pragmatists turn to action and research rather than abstract theory to provide practical
insight and evidence about the consequences for purposeful plans (Forester 1983, 1989;
Hoch 1987, 1988, 1992, 1994; Innes & Booher 2010). The differences in method and
meaning that ensue in these assessments remain open to debate and refinement. This liberal
conception of mutual learning does allow for revision by those who adapt it, even large
dramatic revisions. Insisting on adversarial conflict or agonism alone will not offer crucial
protection for the liberal polity especially facing complex problems. It can fail to offer
practical hope as antagonists seal off from one another. Neo-pragmatists do need to
recognize and conceive differences more clearly and fairly, and this requires greater
tolerance and acceptance of social conflict. They also need to recognize and conceive forms
of solidarity and collective tools that we can use to cope with complexity and plans can do
this. The wish for consensus might be too simplistic and exclusive, but expectation for a
shared threshold of civility and social order seems necessary for plan making that would
remedy unnecessary and destructive forms of uncertainty. People can and do learn how to
make plans that better assimilate and balance antagonistic difference and shared civility.
This requires less attention to philosophical arguments about ultimate truth and more on
how cognitive, psychological, economic, political, spatial, . . . conceptions of the
relationships gener-ating practical problems combine causal attribution and purposeful
action. The ideas about how our world works and what we should do to change it cohere
as people make plans for the future.
Pragmatism Unbound
Roberto Unger (2007) offers an ambitious revision of pragmatist ideas that recognizes the
contin-gent and provisional qualities of human social experience. We should not hand off
our capacity for critical awakening and individual development to the forces of nature or
social structure. He bridles at liberal compromise that treats the legacy of social convention
as something only suscep-tible to incremental adjustments. Unger reconstructs the
pragmatist ideas of contingency, agency, experimentalism and focus on the future rejecting
a too restrictive naturalism and scientism.
Unger goes on to argue that efforts to realize the future should not rely upon blueprints
fueled by the contours of structural critique, but the active engagement of ordinary people
in practical efforts to expand and improve the cooperative democratic features of economic,
social and political life. The meaningful emancipation of individuals requires a vibrant
political plural-ism among ‘provisional conjectures’ that anticipate and articulate practical
steps forward. But Unger does not offer much practical advice for how we might make
plans to turn his prophetic pragmatism into useful reforms.
Cosmopolitan Pragmatism
Meg Holden and Andy Scerri (2014) explore how ideas from French critical pragmatists
con-tribute to understanding the kind of inclusive critical experimentation that Bridges
explores in his work. Holden shows how the complex and messy social interactions that
accompany the

Charles Hoch
active creation and response to plans for a place in liberal systems include forms of
justification that exceed the boundaries of any one mode of deliberation. Compromise and
not consensus becomes the crucial threshold for political agreement and collective action.
The French schol-ars Boltanski and Thévenot (2006 [1991]) identify multiple social orders
to explain political compromises formed in complex contested social situations that
accompany urban planning conflicts. For instance, in their analysis the economic and civic
orders parallel and overlap one another as competing justifications for the objects and
actions centered in a specific urban dis-pute. The justification offered for each domain
appeals to a general good that exceeds the reach of that specific order. For instance,
arguments for profitability and sustainability each appeal, respectively, to a more inclusive
good that draws upon institutional practices and conditions that frame the legitimacy of
such appeals. Finding common ground justifying these domains generates a new practical
horizon for convergence and joint action if not consensus. Holden and Scerri contend that
these sociological insights extend the practical scope and efficacy of plan-ning claims about
problem situations beyond concerns about the quality of deliberation among stakeholders
to include the institutional, technical and material relationships that frame practical changes
in social habits. Boltanski and Thévenot appear neo-pragmatic because they provide a
theory that integrates the provisional influence of objects and events in the problematic
situa-tions where discursive orders compete for attention and support.
In their effort to avoid the seemingly idealist and relativist features of the collaborative
prag-matist approach, Holden and Scerri distance themselves from the hopeful liberalism
that Dewey set in motion and that still inspires scholarship by Forester (1989, 1999), Innes
& Booher (2010), Harper & Stein (1996) and Hoch (2010). Botanski and Thévenot, like
Latour (1988), offer a systematic scheme to capture the complexity of discursive practice
that encompasses space, objects and tools as well as language. However, they remain tied
to the philosophical distinc-tion between the epistemic and ontological; knowledge and
reality. They hope to escape the philosophical critique that focusing on practical situations
as the context for understanding social conflict and action will yield only partial truth
claims. Their sophisticated analytical scheme recognizes the pragmatic relevance of
compromise as the proper medium for deliberative demo-cratic practice among multiple
actors. But the analytic dualism precludes making a normative commitment to a good
compromise. Hence they focus on discursive justification rather than persuasion classifying
the resolution of competing orders of value (market, industry, sustainabil-ity, civic
solidarity, . . .) mediating between knowing and being. The collaborative pragmatists frame
discourse as persuasive deliberation that promises to yield compromise plans offering bet-
ter consequences than no plan. The interpretation of the outcomes includes assessing the
kinds of justification people made discussing the plan, but also the impacts on changes in
belief and the problematic conditions contributing to the problem.
Gary Bridge (2005) provides an expansive conception of pragmatist planning that, like
Unger, envisions a more radical pluralism envisioning options for the future of places
always under construction. He assimilates the postmodern focus on difference to a less
skeptical and more engaged sensitivity to not only deliberations, but more expansive
practical experiences. Bridges reinterprets the Chicago School of Sociology, arguing that
the conception of com-munity and communication includes discourse, but also the
unconscious emotional and social habits that shape the contours for meaningful individual
action. He proposes a pragmatist rationality that embraces the recognition and pursuit of
individual identity and difference across multiple communities – what Dewey called
publics. He frames this transactional rationality as a robust form of integration binding
instrumental, emotive and interpretive dimensions of complex relationships within
provisional judgments about ends and means. Bridges explores how these work in different
urban places and settings as situations susceptible to embodied

Neo-Pragmatist Planning Theory

social actions along complex continua that defy hierarchical order. The seemingly mundane
dimensions of social interaction often overlooked in dualistic and deterministic conceptions
of order provide multiple instances of resistance, innovation and compliance. The prospects
for change appear more practically hopeful, studying the many different ways that people
respond to shifting situations.
Barnett and Bridge (2013) take on the claim that poststructural agonistic conceptions of
democracy trump liberal conceptions of consensus-based democracy. They craft a neo-
pragmatist alternative. On their view poststructural accounts focus on theoretical
differences that often exag-gerate conflict. As a result they ignore the demands of
coordination, institutional design and public good that accompany any effort to put radical
forms of democracy to practical use for planning. Barnett and Bridge use the work by
pragmatist political theorists (Bohman 2007; Fung 2007; Dryzek 2005) that argue for a
more robust democratic inclusion among multiple publics that recognizes and integrates
differences through pragmatic deliberation.
Conclusion
Pragmatism does not tell us what ends to pursue, but offers a kind of inquiry that compares
the value of different courses of action alternately weighing means and ends – facts and
values. It binds together what longstanding dualistic thinking kept apart – knowledge and
action (or per-haps a bit more precisely) theoretical reflection and practical judgment.
Pragmatism provides an antidote to the quest for certainty by exploring how multiple
publics can democratically antici-pate and prepare for different contingencies using
practical and scientific knowledge to inform purposes and plans for a contingent and
uncertain future.
Pragmatist planning theory supports the historical division of intellectual labor and
technical innovation that has produced astonishing feats of invention and engineering; but
does not con-fuse the power of such specialized rationality as a resource for practical
judgment. For instance the advertising slogan ‘Smart Cities’ for the pragmatist does not
mean adopting the technical innovations of high tech corporations as a guide for slum
removal and highway development. Nor does it mean adopting clever professional
expertise as a substitute for familiar institutions and conventions. The pragmatist
understands that high tech innovations rely upon a vast cul-tural infrastructure of shared
social convention and learning. The effectiveness of specialized knowledge relies upon this
taken-for-granted context – a context often ignored or dismissed by undemocratic elites.
The pragmatist insists that plans for change include the knowledge and experience of
people likely to be touched by the consequences. Their involvement offers crucial insight
about the practical meaning of the imagined effects for proposed changes, but also
acceptable and feasible means for reconciling complex differences in useful and legitimate
compromise.
A neo-pragmatist planning theory sidesteps theoretical foundations for practical insight and
improvement. Instead of knowing first what to do and how to do it, the pragmatist
emphasizes contextual inquiry closely tied to social learning, practical experimentation and
democratic deliberations. For the pragmatists everyone plans, so improving plans for
complex social and spatial problems requires improvement in the craft of plan making in
different cultural, institutional and geographic settings. The scaffolding of spatial breadth
and tempo-ral reach remains intact across the variety of uses, but not rigidly scaled or
tightly defined. The complexity of human interaction and interdependence requires flexible
and provisional practical judgments about the arrangement of future settlement. Then neo-
pragmatist plan-ning theory focuses on how to conduct such judgment more intelligently
and wisely using inclusive democratic inquiry.
Charles Hoch
Note
1 Rorty (1982, 1998) was popular and controversial. His work stimulated an enormous
amount of debate
among philosophers and also among scholars studying the social sciences and professions.
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