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Urban contingencies at work: the influence of planning doctrines, disciplines and practices on planning for urban sustainability
Abstract
Cities worldwide are positioned at the forefront of sustainability problems and challenges that stem from contemporary crises, e.g., urban, social-environmental, climate, health and financial. These crises pose critical, urgent questions regarding how to plan for urban sustainability. As sustainability discourses increasingly shape urban policy agendas worldwide, urban planning – as a professional field of knowledge, policy and practice – must prioritise key considerations to address the unprecedented sustainability challenges of twenty-first-century cities. Against this backdrop, this positioning chapter develops an ‘urban contingency’ approach to planning for urban sustainability that consists of three contingencies of place, i.e., doctrines, disciplines, practices, which are grounded in situated governance configurations, contextualised histories, and planning cultures. The main argument of the chapter is that urban planning should prioritise reassembling established, place-specific urban configurations shaped by structural development factors, institutions and agencies rather than relying on the adoption and implementation of decontextualised, allegedly replicable urban policies and best practices.
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A fixation on 'scaling up' has captured current innovation discourses and, with it, political and economic life at large. Perhaps most visible in the rise of platform technologies, big data and concerns about a new era of monopolies, scalability thinking has also permeated public policy in the search for solutions to 'grand societal challenges', 'mission-oriented innovation' or transformations through experimental 'living labs'. In this paper, we explore this scalability zeitgeist as a key ordering logic of current initiatives in innovation and public policy. We are interested in how the explicit preoccupation with scalability reconfigures political and economic power by invading problem diagnoses and normative understandings of how society and social change function. The paper explores three empirical sites - platform technologies, living labs and experimental development economics - to analyze how scalability thinking is rationalized and operationalized. We suggest that social analysis of science and technology needs to come to terms with the 'politics of scaling' as a powerful corollary of the 'politics of technology', lest we accept the permanent absence from key sites where decisions about the future are made. We focus in on three constitutive elements of the politics of scaling: solutionism, experimentalism and future-oriented valuation. Our analysis seeks to expand our vocabulary for understanding and questioning current modes of innovation that increasingly value scaling as an end in itself, and to open up new spaces for alternative trajectories of social transformation.
This paper explores the value of Stuart Hall’s approach to conjunctural analysis for examining the complex relations between ideology and planning. By “thinking conjuncturally” we explore planning as a site where multiple social, economic and political forces coalesce; ideology is one of these forces whose role and influence must be tracked alongside others. To illustrate this we draw on recent and ongoing planning reforms in England and their relationship with housing development. Highlighting the faltering role of a particular ideological formation in ‘suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments’ (Hall, 2011, 713) around housing and planning, the paper draws attention to planning as a space where ideological struggle takes place within the frame of a broader, contingent cultural hegemony. This struggle may help to reaffirm that hegemony but it can also open space for alternative visions to be articulated, with potential to transform dominant logics of planning and reveal routes to practical and progressive action.
This article contributes to the debate about ideologically motivated planning reforms. It aims to advance the debate by exploring how change is legitimised through forms of rhetorical persuasion. It shows how political ideologies become embedded in planning policies and practices through strategies of legitimation aimed at justifying specific ideas, beliefs and values as self-evident and inevitable. These legitimation strategies rely on distinctive rhetorical appeals to steer planning discourses, policies and institutions. By using short illustrative examples of 'ideology in action' from Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, the article shows that various combinations of rhetorical appeals to logos, ethos, pathos and doxa (logic, character, emotion and identity) are often simultaneously at work to naturalise contested planning reforms.
Spatial consciousness may refer to individual or collective awareness about real-world spatial phenomena and processes.This entry begins by framing the “spatial” while linking it with the realm of the “conscious” by proposing a conceptual articulation that differs between three distinct but interrelated perspectives on consciousness in relation to space, namely phenomenal, representational, and intentional. The entry then elaborates an account of spatial consciousness from the perspective of planning as a spatial discipline, departing from the early experiences of planning as a modern project, followed by contemporary understandings and illustrative examples. On the basis of these respectively conceptual
and applied accounts, the entry finally reflects on the role of spatial consciousness in practice and in the expanding canon of academic planning literature, from its Western tenets to a postcolonial, global perspective, and considers a series of theoretical and practical implications.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is marked by the consolidation of sustainability as a key guiding principle and an emphasis on cities as a potential solution to global development problems. However, in the absence of an agreement on how to implement sustainable development in cities, a set of urban policy solutions and ‘best practices’ became the vehicles through which the sustainable development agenda is spreading worldwide. This article shows that the rapid circulation of Bogota´ as a model of sustainable transport since the 2000s reflects an increasing focus of the international development apparatus on urban policy solutions as an arena to achieve global development impacts, what I call the ‘leveraging cities’ logic in this article. This logic emerges at a particular historical conjuncture characterised by: (1) the rising power of global philanthropy to set development agendas; (2) the generalisation of solutionism as a strategy of action among development and philanthropic organisations; and (3) the increasing attention on cities as solutions for global development problems, particularly around sustainability and climate change. By connecting urban policy mobilities debates with development studies this article seeks to unpack the emergence, and the limits, of ‘leveraging cities’ as a proliferating global development practice. These urban policy solutions are far from being a clear framework of action. Rather, their circulation becomes a ‘quick fix’ to frame the problem of sustainable development given the unwillingness of development and philanthropic organisations to intervene in the structural factors and multiple scales that produce environmental degradation and climate change.
This book is about an art in which the Netherlands excels: strategic planning. Foreign observers will need little convincing of the merits of Dutch planning. They will want to know whether routine explanations (small country, industrious, disciplined people hardened by the perennial fight against the sea) hold any water, and they will want to know where to look for the bag of tricks of Dutch planners. Dutch readers need to be convinced first that planning in the Netherlands is indeed effective before contemplating how this has come about. Our message for both is that, to the extent that Dutch planners do live in what others are inclined to see as a planners' paradise, it is a paradise carefully constructed and maintained by the planners themselves. This smacks of Bernard Shaw describing a profession as a conspiracy against laity. However, all knowledge and all technologies are 'socially constructed', meaning that they are the products of people or groups pursuing often conflicting aims and coming to arrangements about what is to pass as 'true' and 'good'. So this takes away the odium of Dutch planners having their own agenda. Positioning ourselves We are in the business of interpreting Dutch planning, and at the same time committed to improving it. This makes us part of the situation which we describe. This situation is characterized by the existence of two divergent traditions, urban design and the social-science discipline called 'planologie'.
Planning theory has shifted over time in response to changes in broader social and philosophical theory as well as changes in the material world. Postmodernism and poststructuralism dislodged modernist, rational and technical approaches to planning. Consensualist decision-making theories of the 1980s took forms of communicative and collaborative planning, drawing on Habermasian concepts of power and society. These positions, along with refinements and critiques within the field, have been hegemonic in planning theory ever since. They are, in most cases, presented at a high level of abstraction, make little reference to the political and social contexts in which they are based, and hold an unspoken assumption that they are of universal value, i.e. valid everywhere. Not only does this suggest important research methodology errors but it also renders these theories of little use in those parts of the world which are contextually very different from theory origin—in most cases, the global North. A more recent ‘southern turn’ across a range of social science disciplines, and in planning theory, suggests the possibility of a foundational shift toward theories which acknowledge their situatedness in time and place, and which recognize that extensive global difference in cities and regions renders universalized theorising and narrow conceptual models (especially in planning theory, given its relevance for practice) as invalid. New southern theorising in planning is drawing on a range of ideas on societal conflict, informality, identity and ethnicity. Postcolonialism and coloniality have provided a useful frame for situating places historically and geographically in relation to the rest of the world. However, the newness of these explorations still warrants the labelling of this shift as a ‘southern theorizing project’ in planning rather than a suggestion that southern planning theory has emerged.
Social equity and global impacts are missing from measures of cities' environmental friendliness, write David Wachsmuth, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Hillary Angelo.
List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors viii Series Editors Preface xiii Preface and Acknowledgments xv Introduction Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global 1 Aihwa Ong Part I Modeling 27 1 Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts 29 Chua Beng Huat 2 Urban Modeling and Contemporary Technologies of City-Building in China: The Production of Regimes of Green Urbanisms 55 Lisa Hoffman 3 Planning Privatopolis: Representation and Contestation in the Development of Urban Integrated Mega-Projects 77 Gavin Shatkin 4 Ecological Urbanization: Calculating Value in an Age of Global Climate Change 98 Shannon May Part II Inter-Referencing 127 5 Retuning a Provincialized Middle Class in Asia's Urban Postmodern: The Case of Hong Kong 129 Helen F. Siu 6 Cracks in the Facade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai 160 Chad Haines 7 Asia in the Mix: Urban Form and Global Mobilities Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai 182 Glen Lowry and Eugene McCann 8 Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty 205 Aihwa Ong Part III New Solidarities 227 9 Speculating on the Next World City 229 Michael Goldman 10 The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism 259 Ananya Roy 11 Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi 279 D. Asher Ghertner Conclusion Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams 307 Ananya Roy Index 336
This paper argues that a planning system that allows its policies and practices to gradually lose spatial consciousness and spatial coordination capacities within and across different levels of planning administration is less likely to make national and regional plans and strategies matter or have a say in future spatial development processes. The reasoning behind this argument stems from the case of Denmark, where a structural reform that changed the country's geographies of inter-governmental arrangements in 2007 significantly transformed the configuration and functioning of the national planning system. Originally designed to support the principle of equal development through spatial planning policies aimed at the promotion of equal access to public and private services across the national territory, the Danish planning policy framework has increasingly evolved towards expressing a lack of explicit spatial consciousness in its current plans and strategies. At the same time, the Danish planning system seems to reveal narrower measures of spatial coherence in terms of horizontal and vertical coordination and integration of sectors and policies within and across different levels of planning administration. Based on an analysis regarding the evolution of planning policies and an examination of the current governance landscape influencing planning practices at national and regional levels, the paper attempts to generate an understanding concerning how the underlying rationale and the institutional relations of Danish spatial planning have been reoriented over time.
It is often suggested that a defining feature of planning is its interventionist nature which requires connecting knowledge to action. With the upsurge of evidence-based planning, much is rehearsed about the utilitarian necessity of making such connection. What is less widely discussed is the epistemological nuances and challenges of knowledge-action relationship. This essay aims to contribute to the latter by conceptualising planning as practice of knowing. This is to shift the focus from knowledge as something that planners have to knowing as something that planners do. I would argue that, rather than thinking about knowledge as having an instrumental place in planning, it is more useful to think about planning as practice of knowing that involves knowing what, knowing how, knowing to what end and doing. Seen in this way, practice of knowing is a dynamic process that is situated and provisional, collective and distributed, purposive and pragmatic, and mediated and contested.
This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis-a moment in urbanization processes-but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.
The past two decades have seen an impressive expansion of municipal engagement with climate change. Yet while interest has broadened, actions remain shallow. This is in part because climate policies fit uneasily into existing bureaucratic structures and practices. Effective climate programmes require adaptive and innovative responses that span departmental divisions. This challenges siloised municipal offices that are embedded in their own organisational cultures and technical practices. Understanding those challenges is crucial to understanding urban responses to cli-mate change, but they remain critically understudied. This paper helps to fill that gap by looking at the experiences of two cities, Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA) as they attempt to put in place integrated responses to climate change. To do so, it brings together complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions in sociology and geography. This hybrid critical framework is used to elaborate on both the organisational bar-riers that inhibit effective responses to climate change, and approaches that can be used to enable change and innovation.
Making and applying the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) is an example of ‘Europeanization’. Europeanization is the outcome of the interaction between actors with various motivations. In the case of the ESDP process, these motivations reflect the spatial planning traditions and the institutional set‐ups of the relevant actors. As a preliminary, the paper describes the ESDP. It then analyses the motivations, reflecting as they do their spatial planning traditions and institutional set‐ups, of four key actors without whom the ESDP would not have been what it is: France, the Netherlands, Germany and the European Commission. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects of European spatial planning after enlargement.
This article establishes a framework for thinking about sustainable development in the metropolitan context by investigating the origins of the sustainability concept and its meanings when applied to urban development, surveying historical approaches to planning the urban region, and analyzing ways in which a context can be created for regional sustainability planning. Sustainability is seen as requiring a holistic, long-term planning approach, as well as certain general policy directions such as compact urban form, reductions in automobile use, protection of ecosystems, and improved equity. Based on the experience of three sample regions, the article suggests a long-term strategic approach in which vision statements, coalition building, institutional development, intergovernmental incentive frameworks, indicators, public involvement, and social learning help create a regional context in which sustainable development is increasingly possible.
Problem: As planners grow increasingly confident that they have settled on the right concepts and methods to conduct stakeholder-based collaboration, they are not considering what can be achieved through other collaborative approaches.Purpose: We aimed to explore how creating a network of place- and stakeholder-based collaboratives using communities of practice could strengthen individual collaboratives and achieve network synergies.Methods: Using a case study approach, we draw out lessons for collaborative planning from our research on the U.S. Fire Learning Network (FLN), a collaborative initiative to restore ecosystems that depend on fire. We analyzed data from over 140 interviews, hundreds of documents including restoration plans, newsletters, meeting summaries, maps, and various other reports, and observations at more than a dozen regional and national meetings.Results and conclusions: We conclude that the FLN nurtures expertise in ecological fire restoration and collaborative planning by linking multi-stakeholder collaboratives to regional communities of practice. Moreover, this linkage creates and sustains a network of collaboratives that amplify the potential for fundamental change in the culture and practice of fire management.Takeaway for practice: A community of practice is an effective approach to collaboration in situations where the purpose is to expand expertise rather than to resolve conflict and reach consensus. Moreover, a community of practice can link stakeholder-based collaboratives to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Realizing this potential requires questioning the universality of some of the core principles of stakeholder-based collaborative planning and diversifying the collaborative planning toolkit.Research support: This research was supported by the Northern Research Station of the U. S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.
Davoudi S. The legacy of positivism and the emergence of interpretive tradition in spatial planning, Regional Studies. This paper draws on the positivist and interpretive conceptualizations of space, place and time to present a framework for exploring how spatiality and temporality are articulated and represented in spatial planning. It focuses on five aspects of planning: the conception of spatiality; spatial and scalar structuring; the treatment of time and future; the use of evidence in plan-making; and representation and visualization. How the two traditions have influenced planning, particularly in the United Kingdom, is discussed and illustrated by historical and contemporary examples. The paper concludes that while an interpretive approach is emerging in some areas of planning, positivism has retained its dominating influence.
How do we (re-)imagine planning in a world which is increasingly out-of-sync? This is an important question because as a field of knowledge, policy, and practice that regards time as absolute, linear, and tameable, planning has yet to seriously engage with contemporary social science debates conceiving time as not only relative, diverse, and variegated. Our provocation in this chapter is to argue that planning mistreats, and has a problem, with time. Drawing on ‘critical time studies’, we engage with nascent scholarship on time and temporalities in and of planning to argue for a new approach of ‘planning without the clock’. Assessing the degree of leverage of critical time approaches to theorising planning we then reflect on the prospective role of planning and planners in a world ‘out-of-sync’. In conclusion, we call for greater engagement with developing ‘temporal’ tools, methods, and vocabularies to enable planners to place time front and centre of planning deliberation
In this commentary I reflect upon the possibilities for action to deliver sustainable and just urban environments. I depart from the questions that inspire this special issue: what is it about cities that enables them to make a substantial contribution to environmental dilemmas? And how did cities become the darling trope of the international environmental policy regime? I use the metaphor of ‘the Crystal Palace’ to situate proposals for sustainable urbanism in a spectrum of options between naïve idealism and full-fledged cynicism. I argue that between those two extremes there are multiple alternatives to advance sustainable futures. Urban political ecology (UPE) is in a privileged position to reveal the contradictions inherent in the current incarnation of sustainable urbanism. That is why UPE scholars cannot miss the opportunity to produce context-relevant research to change urban sustainability policies and beliefs. In the second part of this commentary, I explore a case study already presented elsewhere in the special issue. The case of the successive unsuccessful projects for Olympic candidacy in Jaca (Spain) shows the impact of a series of speculative design exercises to build a technocratic eco-city. However, Jaca’s Olympic dreams have historical and cultural roots in the town. Its inhabitants have both propelled and contested the Olympic project at different moments over the evolution of the project. Progressive forms of environmentalism also emerge from the encounter between urban history and utopian thinking.
This paper starts from the premise that regional planning as it is known is now defunct and something that we need to get used to. Identifying those disruptive elements that have undermined traditional forms of institutionalized regional planning, it is argued that contemporary planning debates are too obsessed with the institutional planning frame and have become distracted from the changing content of the real-world picture. The aim in this paper is to reassert the purpose and values of planning by rediscovering the content, conceptualize multiple and fluid forms of planning frames, and reposition the planner as an orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures.
This Special Issue starts from the premise that the concept of ideology holds significant analytical potential for planning but that this potential can only be realised if ideology is brought to the fore of analysis. By naming ideology and rendering it visible, we hope to bring it out from the shadows and into the open to examine its value and what it can tell us about the politics of contemporary planning. The articles in this Special Issue therefore seek to contribute to established academic debates by exploring some of the ways ideology can be deployed as a tool in the analysis of planning problems. This article introduces the Special Issue by exploring the various accounts in the articles of (1) what ideology is; (2) what its effects are; (3) where ideology may be identified and (4) what different theories of ideology can tell us about planning. There inevitably remain many un-answered questions, paths not taken and debates left unaddressed. We hope other scholars will be inspired (or provoked) to address these omissions in the future.
A city-region strategy to achieve sustainable urban development is proposed in the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and related planning guidelines. This concept originates in planning ideas from the early 20th century, has since been subject to extensive and shifting theoretical debate, and has been tested in practice in various parts of the world. Yet, the guidelines propose a city-region concept with limited response to recent theoretical development, or the critique that Global North-inspired ideas may be less useful in other parts of the world. The paper concludes by suggesting different starting points to implement the goals of the NUA.
This concluding chapter argues for a new role of planning in shaping metropolitan futures and reflects on the value of the book’s thematic-temporal-phronetic (TTP) framework—a meso-level approach to better understand the dynamics of contemporary metropolitan change. We begin by revealing the extent to which institutions, policies, spatial imaginaries and planning are influencing metropolitan development through a synthesis of the key outcomes emanating from the totality of the book contributions. The chapter then returns to the TTP framework to reflect on its tripartite rationale as well as its significance to international comparative research. Set against this context, the chapter then identifies four sets of issues that seem highly relevant to both shape future styles of governance and planning, and provide metropolitan regions with modes of working that could make a difference. We finally conclude with three open propositions relating to thematic, temporal and phronetic priorities for future research targeting the planning and governance of metropolitan regions.
Keywords
TTP framework
City futures
Regional futures
Agile planning
Metropolitan regions
Planning seeks to shape sociospatial outcomes but is also, by nature, future oriented. Yet, planning theory and practice have paid relatively little attention to ongoing debates about changing social relations to time. Building on a wide range of disciplines, we review the multiple temporalities through which lives are lived, the modern imposition of clock time, postmodern acceleration phenomena in the Anthropocene, and their implications for planning’s relationship to the past, present, and future and for planning theory. We discuss how thinking more and differently about time might challenge and improve planning by helping theory do better justice to the complexity of practice. We conclude by outlining eight propositions for rethinking planning’s relationship to time.
Achieving urban sustainability is amongst the most pressing issues facing planners and governments. This book is the first to provide a cohesive analysis of sustainable urban development and to examine the processes by which change in how urban areas are built can be achieved. The author looks at how sustainable urban development can be delivered on the ground through a comprehensive analysis of the different modes of governing for new urban development.
Modern social sciences have been committed to the improvement of public policy. However, doubts have arisen about the possibility and desirability of a policy-oriented social science. In this book, leading specialists in the field analyse both the development and failings of policy-oriented social science. In contrast to other writings on the subject, this volume presents a distinctively historical and comparative approach. By looking at earlier periods, the contributors demonstrate how policy orientation has been central to the emergence and evolution of the social sciences as a form of professional activity. Case studies of rarely examined societies such as Poland, Brazil and Japan further demonstrate the various ways in which intellectual developments have been shaped by the societal contexts in which they have emerged and how they have taken part in the shaping of these societies.
In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio‐technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio‐technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.
The expansion of globalising cities into global city-regions poses fundamental questions about how best to govern the new metropolis. Partly because of the relentless pace of change, these newly emerging metropolitan spaces are often reliant on inadequate urban-economic infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements. Moreover, as the demand for more ‘appropriate’, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance increases, new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict are emerging around issues of increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the collective provision of services, and further governmentalised remapping(s) of state space. We identify four central tenets of the metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These, we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the emerging new metropolitan paradigm.
In this essay, I reflect on the way planning concepts, techniques, instruments and the general idea of ‘planning’ itself flow from one place to another, particularly in the context of the transnational flow of planning ideas. In the past, our conception of such flows was underpinned by linear and singular models of development pathways – the ‘modernization’ myth. This rendered them apparently benign and positive contributions to ‘development’. Today, such concepts have been replaced by a recognition of contingency and complexity, which highlights the particular histories and challenges of localities in different parts of the world, and the damaging consequences when external ideas about planning and development are planted upon specific histories and geographies. This refocusing in turn raises questions about any general meaning of ‘planning’ as a universal good technology for complex urbanized societies. The paper reviews these shifts in conception, and then considers firstly how, as planning academics and practitioners, we should build narratives around particular ‘travelling’ planning ideas, to help critical learning in places where such ideas get to ‘land’. Secondly, I suggest how the idea of ‘planning’ itself might be approached, as a general concept contingently evolving through the experiences and debates we engage in as a ‘community of inquirers’ through which we compose and construct our field of interest. In such a formulation, the general idea of planning is lodged in the tradition of experience, innovation, debate and critique which have accumulated around the practices of managing co-existence in complex urbanized societies.
This paper recognises the need to study the complex relations between spatial
planning and cultural contexts in a more comprehensive way. The objective is to
contribute to a theoretical basis and conceptual framework for a systematic analysis
of spatial planning, that is, planning practices related to a cultural and social context,
on the basis of a complex system of criteria. This may contribute to achieving a better
understanding of the complex relationships between the cultural context—including
the specific socioeconomic patterns and related cultural norms, values, traditions,
and attitudes—and spatial planning as an operative instrument of territorial policy by
introducing the term ‘planning culture’. Therefore, as culture is subtle and complex in
nature and is based on fluid concepts, theoretical approaches of cultural change are also
introduced to provide a more dynamic conception of planning cultures to analyse and
understand recent changes in spatial planning.
As an enduring social project, planning needs to come to terms with the social realities of 21(st)-century cities. Most Western cities today are demographically multicultural, presenting the challenge of a new urban condition in which difference, otherness, and plurality prevail. This essay asks whether there is a planning imagination capable of ressponding, to the challenges of diversity. I suggest and provide examples of four key qualities of such an imagination: political, audacious, creative, and therapeutic. Embracing these qualities constitutes a cultural change in planners' modes of thinking and practice.
Though it appears difficult to find instances where planners use information to make decisions, this perception is due to
a limited conception of information. Three examples show the power of information, but require a view of information as subjective
and socially constructed. Its influence comes through myths which tacitly shape policy, through negotiation over concepts
and methods and through standard operating procedures. This information defines rather than solves problems and is often implicit.
Its influence depends on its being constructed through a social process involving users. The danger that it can become institutionalized
and misleading must be addressed through the method of critique, assuring open debate over its assumptions.
In the present volume, the authors offer a unique overview of the evolution of regional planning doctrine from its American beginnings in the 1920s to its present world-wide status. This historical approach throws into relief the options that were rejected, the influence of environmental events, alternative formulations that were neglected, and the new forms of doctrine that are emrging now. In the final chapter, a new agropolitan approach to regional development is proposed that seeks to overcome the contradictions in present planning practice. This approach is based on a concept of human needs and is particularly suitable to newly industrializing countries in Asia and Africa where the need for territorially based regional development is the most urgent. An Appendix presents a detailed case study of economic development through public participation and self-help, drawn from Ulashi (Bangladesh). - from Publisher
This acticle revisits Throgmorton's 1996 claim that planning can be thought of as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future. It responds to three broad lines of critique, connects the claim to contemporary scholarship about 'transnational urbanism' and the 'network societym,' and revises the author's initial claim. This revision suggests that planners should tell futute-oriented stories that help people imagine and create sustainble places. It further argues that, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, planners' stories will have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally-grounded common urban narratives. It recognizes that powerful actors will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories.
This analysis of the communicative acts of a senior planner during two episodes in a working day contributes to the study of planning as an interactive practice. The types and forms of knowledge used and the communicative work undertaken are examined. The paper identifies the way power is exercised through communication. It shows planners how to make their expertise available and, transparent to the clients and communities they serve.
A minimum necessary condition for sustainability is the maintenance of the total natural capital stock at or above the current level. While a lower stock of natural capital may be sustainable, society can allow no further decline in natural capital given the large uncertainty and the dire consequences of guessing wrong. This “constancy of total natural capital” rule can thus be seen as a prudent minimum condition for assuring sustainability, to be relaxed only when solid evidence can be offered that it is safe to do so.
We discuss methodological issues concerning the degree of substitutability of manufactured for natural capital, quantifying ecosystem services and natural capital, and the role of the discount rate in valuing natural capital. We differentiate the concepts of growth (material increase in size) and development (improvement in organization without size change). Given these definitions, growth cannot the sustainable indefinitely on a finite planet. Development may be sustainable, but even this aspect of change may have some limits. One problem is that current measures of economic well‐being at the macro level (i.e., the Gross National Product) measure mainly growth, or at best conflate growth and development. This urgently requires revision.
Finally, we suggest some principles of sustainable development and describe why maintaining natural capital stocks is a prudent and achievable policy for insuring sustainable development. There is disagreement between technological optimists (who see technical progress as eliminating all resource constraints to growth and development) and technological skeptics (who do not see as much scope for this approach and fear irreversible use of resources and damage to natural capital). By maintaining natural capital stocks (preferably by using a natural capital depletion tax), we can satisfy both the skeptics (since resources will be conserved for future generations) and the optimists (since this will raise the price of natural capital depletion and more rapidly induce the technical change they predict).
The sustainable city has now become a leading paradigm of urban development throughout the world. Although the practices, discourses and ideologies associated with the sustainable city have been widely disseminated, analyses of sustainable urban development remain surprisingly anodyne. Drawing upon the insights of regulation theory, this paper attempts to develop a critical engagement with the sustainable city as a space of socio-ecological regulation. Focusing upon two examples of sustainable urban development in practice—the first, the struggle over work-place environments in Stoke-on-Trent; and the second, the reinsertion of nature into the Black Country urban region—this paper explores the regulatory geography of the sustainable city and the environmental visions and practices with which it is associated.
This paper sets out to illustrate the value of the notion of planning doctrine in urban planning history. Planning doctrine is a perspective within which planning issues are framed, and possibilities and solutions emerge; it includes ideas about appropriate spatial structure as well as appropriate mechanisms (public/private/and so on) for achieving change. The paper uses the idea of planning doctrine in discussing key strands in the history of planning in Cardiff, south Wales since the early twentieth century. It argues that the development of a planning doctrine provides a key to the pattern of Cardiff’s planning and connects the city’s planning to a broader national and regional context. Since the mid‐1950s a planning doctrine has clearly shaped the plans for the city. Moreover, doctrine has been nurtured, sustained and modified (but not renounced) as economic and political circumstances change because it has a valuable function in sustaining a broad socio‐political consensus in support of the main priorities and directions in the city’s planning.
This paper introduces the concept of Spatial or Territorial Impact Assessment as a new tool for balanced urban or regional planning from a long-term sustainability perspective. It then argues that modern scenario methods may be a useful complement to pro-active and future oriented urban or regional strategic thinking. A cognitive interactive model for scenario analysis is next presented and its advantages are outlined.
Planning Sustainability: Implications of Sustainability for Public Planning Policy
- M Kenny
- J Meadowcroft
Kenny, M., & Meadowcroft, J. (1999). Planning Sustainability: Implications of Sustainability for
Public Planning Policy. London: Routledge.
European spatial planning systems, social models and learning. DisP -The Planning Review
- V Nadin
- D Stead
Nadin, V., & Stead, D. (2008). European spatial planning systems, social models and learning.
DisP -The Planning Review, 44(172), 35-47.
Planning in the Anthropocene
- W E Rees
Rees, W. E. (2018). Planning in the Anthropocene. In M. Gunder, A. Madanipour, & V. Watson
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