taken where this is considered necessary or appropriate for the political community as a whole. The concept of participation recognises that elites and experts cannot be trusted alone to deliver ‘what is best’ for communities. The planning project has thus become associated with promoting conceptions of urban life that recognise human diversity, acknowledging that humans need to give respect to the environmental conditions that sustain them and
understanding that human flourishing depends on giving attention to multiple dimensions of human existence, as realised in particular places. Within this conception, the planning project partly centres on providing understanding and expertise and making a contribution to public debate about place management and development possibilities. But it also has a practical focus on what is required to realise programmes, policies and projects in specific conditions. It gives attention to practical action, to doing place-governance work. This book provides a journey through examples of such work inspired by a planning orientation.
incidents, as the examples of Ditchling and Nazareth illustrate. Nevertheless, my meanings may not be the same as my neighbour’s. My social networks are likely to be different, though
transecting and interacting with those of my neighbours in various ways. It is the potentials and tensions within these transactions and interactions that arise as we co-exist in places that
create the demand for collective action – to promote the opportunities and potentials of place qualities, but also to make the inevitable frictions and tensions more tolerable.
With these general points as a context, Box 7.1 lists five distinctive attributes that are central to a progressive interpretation of the planning project in the contemporary period. First, the idea of planning emphasises that it is worth thinking forward into the future with some hope in the ability of collective action to produce better conditions and some belief that it is possible, by setting out on a collective trajectory, to resist pressures that might reduce potentialities and possibilities for some and all, and to open up opportunities that could enhance the future chances of human flourishing. This idea was expressed nicely by the philosopher William James a century ago:
that which proposes to us, through an act of belief, an end which cannot be attained except by our own efforts, and that which carries us courageously into action in cases where success is not assured to us in advance. (James 1920:82, trans. from original French by author)
This implies a rich and sensitive understanding of the complex ways in which people live in, move around and care about particular places, but it also emphasises that the future does not just happen. It is also in part ‘willed’ into existence by collective effort.
Box 7.1 Attributes of a twenty-first century ‘planning project’
An orientation to the future and a belief that action now can shape future potentialities.
An emphasis on liveability and sustainability for the many, not the few.
An emphasis on interdependences and interconnectivities between one phenomenon and another, across time and space.
An emphasis on expanding the knowledgeability of public action, expanding the
‘intelligence’ of a polity.
A commitment to open, transparent government processes, to open processes of reasoning in and about the public realm.
Secondly, a major strand of thought within the planning field centres on promoting ways to advance the liveability and sustainability of daily life environments, not just for the few but for the many. What is different now from earlier, twentieth century conceptions is that the ‘many’
are conceived not as a mass with common values and concerns, but as a plurality of individuals and groups, with potentially diverse values and ways of living. In such a conception, economic issues are not neglected. Instead, they are subsumed into a broader
conception of human flourishing in a sustainable planetary context.
Thirdly, the planning idea pays attention to the complex ways in which phenomena relate to one another, their ‘connectivities’. It encourages people to look for chains of impact, which
particular projects and activities create, and how these weave across time and space. It calls for consideration of relations between the various dimensions of our lives – home, work, leisure, etc. – and how we move around to reach them all. It cultivates attention not merely to our individual interests, but to the complex interdependences and obligations we have with other people, other places and other times, in the past and in the future.
Fourthly, the planning idea stresses the importance of knowing about the issues, experiences, potentialities and conflicting pressures that arise in any context of collective action. However, this ‘knowing about’ does not necessarily imply scientific or systematic knowledge, or
technical expertise, though these may be very valuable resources to inform collective action. It also includes all kinds of experiential knowledge and cultural appreciations. Translated into the field of place-governance, this implies drawing on people’s experiences of dwelling and moving around in time and space, but also on cultural expressions in all kinds of media, as well as the systematic sciences of urban and regional dynamics.
Fifthly, the planning idea values forms of government that do not hide their processes inside the procedures of bureaucracy or the cloaks and daggers of political gamesmanship. Instead, the ambition is to seek open and transparent ways of arriving at an understanding of what issues are at stake, how they could be addressed and what difference it might make, to what and to whom, if they were to be addressed in one way or another. The idea thus stresses carrying out policy argumentation in the open, in transparent ways. It is this element of the planning idea that has helped to create the paraphernalia of plans, policy statements, visions and strategies that, paradoxically, often then seem to clutter up the practice of planning in many situations.
Nevertheless, it is not the idea of open argumentation that is at fault here. The clutter arises partly from a failure to think through carefully what it means to argue in the open, but also because the planning idea itself has been drowned by other ways of doing governance work.
The planning project, then, understood as an orienting and mobilising set of ideas, centres on deliberate collective action; that is, on governance activity, to improve place qualities, infused with a particular orientation. Such an orientation is not necessarily lodged in organisations and government systems that carry the name ‘planning’. Because the idea of planning has often been subverted in the practices that invoke the name of planning, I refer to practices that are infused with the project’s values by the longer phrase ‘place-governance with a planning orientation’.
Both as a set of ideas and as practices seeking to realise them, the planning project has arisen in the particular context of complex, urbanised societies. In such situations, we humans, with our diverse experiences and aspirations, are ‘throwntogether’ (Massey 2005), in political communities and in places, and then have to sort out how to live with each other and with non- humans. When institutionalised, the idea will always be challenged and struggled over. If a stable strategy is arrived at in one period, however inclusive its intentions and however much it has liberated potentialities among most members of the relevant political community, it will also be experienced as a constraining piece of government infrastructure. And the danger of
capture by a narrow group of interests or a narrow definition of the project is ever present. The planning idea is always liable to lose its meanings if it settles unreflexively into an
organisational niche, discarding elements that do not seem to fit. So practices of place-
governance need to be subject to continual evaluation and critique to assess whether they still have any connection to a planning orientation. The general attributes of the planning idea that I have articulated here provide one way to evaluate place-governance practices, and to
challenge the subversion of planning-oriented governance practices by narrower, regressive interests.
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