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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 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).
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
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
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
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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”,
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Planning C 34(7): 1284–1305.
Cordato, R.E. (2007) Efficiency and Externalities in an Open-Universe, Auburn, AL: The
Ludwig von Mises
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Open
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121–30.
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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):
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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
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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;
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.
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
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.
References
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:
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
Press.
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.
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).
References
Allmendinger, Ph., and G. Haughton (2012), Post-Political Spatial Planning in England: A
Crisis in
Consensus?, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 89–
103 Allmendinger, Ph., and G. Haughton (2013), The Evolution and Trajectories of English
Spatial Governance:
‘Neoliberal’ Episodes, Planning, Planning, Practice and Research, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 6–26
Anderson, P. (2000), Renewals, New Left Review, No. 1, Jan.–Feb. 2000
Baeten, G. (2009), Regeneration of the South Bank: Reworking the Community and the
Emergence of
Baeten, G. (2012b), Normalising Neoliberal Planning: The Case of Malmö, Sweden, in T.
Tașan-Kok and
G. Baeten (eds), Contradictions of Neoliberal Planning, Berlin: Springer, pp. 21–42
Barnekov, T., and D. Rich (1977), Privatism and Urban Development: An Analysis of the
Organised
Influence of Local Business Elites, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 431–444
Bengs, C. (2005), Planning Theory for the Naïve? European Journal of Spatial
Development, www.nordregio.
se/Global/EJSD/Debate/debate050718.pdf (accessed 21 April 2016)
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Housing, Theory
and Society, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 1–18
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Geoforum, Vol.
25, no. 4, pp. 453–470
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9, No. 1,
pp. 101–107
Brownill, S. (1990), Developing London’s Docklands: Another Great Planning Disaster?
London: Sage Cochrane, A. (1999), Just Another Failed Experiment? The Legacy of the
Urban Development
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Urban Development Corporations, London: Sage, pp. 243–258
Crouch, D. (2011), The Strange non-Death of Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Polity
Deakin, N., and J. Edwards (1993), The Enterprise Culture and the Inner City, London:
Routledge Desfor, G., J. Laidley, Q. Stevens, and D. Schubert (eds) (2012), Transforming
Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and
Flow, London: Routledge
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pp. 91–98 Edwards, J. (1984), UK Inner Cities: Problem Construction and Policy
Response, Cities, Vol. 1, No. 6,
pp. 592–604
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of the State? In
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Gunder, M. (2006), Sustainability: Planning’s Saving Grace or Road to Perdition? Journal
of Planning
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9, No. 4,
pp. 298–314
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Deconstruction
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(eds), Planning
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Urban Governance
in Late Capitalism, Geografiska Annaler B, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 3–17
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Intellectuals: A
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Corporations, in
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
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
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
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