No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Planning and Design as the Manufacture of Transcendence
Abstract
The traditions of design—in natural science, computation, theology, architecture, and literature and art—provide models for some aspects of planning. These models are especially concerned with order, coherence, meaning, structure, and judgment, and parallels or homologies among them. They also show how the making of wholeness (the “manufacture of transcendence”) is in tension with contingency, fetishism, and failure.
... Whereas the complexity of coordination in spatial planning increased with the centralization of the state and later its democratization (involving more actors), the history of spatial design is also tied to state development, but more indirectly, through the increase of patronage. Complex cities produced rich citizens and proud city governments that could engage in private and public works that were the product of a design philosophy, with the sum of city space given higher consideration than the separate parts (Braunfels, 1990;Rios, 2008;Krieger, 2000;Mumford, 1961). ...
This chapter investigates the potential contribution of design perspectives to the functioning of a planning system, as the network of organizations that embodies the coordinated organization of space in a given community. It presents an evolutionary approach and draws upon a review of planning and design literature to reconstruct the historical development of the disciplines (and professions) in different places. The chapter argues that such endeavor can be worthwhile and novel when deploying a perspective that is abstract enough to grasp the wide variety of empirical roles of planning, without defining a priori superior role distributions. It analyzes key aspects of the dialectics between planning and design perspectives in the evolution of planning systems. The six key aspects of the dialectics of planning and design require analysis include: institutionalization, flexible policy integration, professional and disciplinary traditions, the role of esthetics, overlap between planning and design, and transformation capacity.
... Whereas the complexity of coordination in spatial planning increased with the centralization of the state and later its democratization (involving more actors), the history of spatial design is also tied to state development, but more indirectly, through the increase of patronage. Complex cities produced rich citizens and proud city governments that could engage in private and public works that were the product of a design philosophy, with the sum of city space given higher consideration than the separate parts (Braunfels, 1990; Rios, 2008; Krieger, 2000; Mumford, 1961). Architectural design and the reflection on it, architectural theory, were quickly accompanied by the practice and theory of urban design (Braunfels, 1990; Rossi, 1982; Vitruvius, 20BC), although a separate profession developed only much later. ...
We develop an evolutionary perspective on spatial planning to investigate the potential contributions of design approaches to the coordination of spatial organization. After a re-articulation of the concepts of planning and design in this perspective, we distinguish six essential features of the planning/design dialectics in a community. These aspects ought to be understood when evaluating the risks and benefits of design perspectives in a planning system, and the potential for re-positioning design in planning. It is argued that relying on the rhetoric of any single actor or any single tradition of reflection on planning and design is deceptive, whereas the collective experience of learning and adaptation with actors and disciplines expands the scope of understanding and the pallet of possible adaptations.