Leonie Sandercock
Planners and reformers since Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes have desired to make the city an object of knowledge and thus a governable, and even a perfectible space. Ways of seeing and understanding the city inevitably inform ways of acting on the space of the city, with consequences that, in turn, produce a modified city that is again seen, understood, and acted on. The city is both an empirical reality and an imagined environment. Images and metaphors (the city as machine, as organism, as laboratory, as network . . .) have shaped not only the fabric but also the experience of the city. In the development of modern cities, symbolic constructs deserve a place of equal importance alongside the emergence and institution of certain governmental rationalities. If these are two ends of a spectrum of ways of seeing the city, then we might place Healey at one end, Throgmorton at the other: Healey with her focus on institutions and governance, Throgmorton’s on story and storytelling (or representation, if you like). Yet each, in these chapters, is grappling with an emergent or perhaps newly dominant metaphor for the city in the context of globalization, that of the network: the city embedded in the network society.
Both authors here extend their earlier work on planning as a communicative activity, by locating it in a larger frame, that of the global political economy with its space of flows. Yet neither loses sight of more local “economies” of relational networks, attachments to specific places, and even “a sustainable econ- omy of spirit” (Throgmorton). What the two chapters have in common is their core concern with “transformation.” Each comes at this in radically different ways. Healey’s subject of analysis is strategic spatial planning, Throgmorton’s is the power of stories. Healey seeks to imagine the institutions through which more inclusive and socially just cities might be brought into being. Throgmorton wants to suggest how planners can imagine and create sustainable places by making space for community stories. Both are trying to free up and shift our 1111
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ways of thinking about and “seeing” city-regions. For Healey, the challenge is to develop new kinds of spatial and governance imaginations that are more attuned to the realities of the network society. For Throgmorton, the challenge is to see planning as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future, but now recognizing that planners are embedded in an intricate, global-scale web of relationships.
In the end, the challenge for planners is to begin planning based on the imagery of webs, nodes, and links; to find ways to construct stories that reconfigure the web in persuasive and compelling ways; and to construct new forums which enable public and democratic argumentation.
In order to grasp significant differences, as well as what is shared between these two important contributors to planning theory, we might ask: what theories of transformation, of knowledge, and of power are embedded in each author’s work?
Patsy Healey, arguably the most well-read scholar in the planning community, and also one of the most widely informed about a range of plan- ning cultures, here draws on case studies of the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and UK (Cambridge) city-regions in order to think and theorize about the network complexity of contemporary urban areas. (By network complexity, Healey means recognizing that what produces the socio-spatial patterning of an urban region is the result of multiple webs of relations, each with its own space-time dimen- sions.) In these and other European cases of strategic spatial planning episodes of the past decade, Healey is interested in the spatial and governance imagin- ations that are mobilized, asking to what extent these recent experiences reflect a positive engagement with “network complexity.” Theoretically, she argues (after Amin and Thrift 2002) that in the present period, the urban region is a key locale in which new ways of integrating the concerns of a multiplicity of webs of relations provide a ground on which a multi-vocal and multi-relational conception of place and territory can be built. Acknowledging that both coun- tries have developed a rich repertoire of spatial strategies/imaginations in the past fifty years, Healey foregrounds the governance cultures in each place as presenting quite different obstacles and opportunities. In practice, however, both case studies reveal limited adaptations/evolutions toward more network-oriented spatial and governance imaginations: each case is limited, in her own words,
“by their own imaginations, by the embedded power of alternative imaginations and practices and by competing imaginations of policy agendas and models of governance transformation.”
In spite of the limited achievements of her chosen episodes of strategic spatial planning, Healey does not conclude that efforts to create persuasive strategies that are more inclusive, multi-vocal, and grounded in a deeper under- standing of the complex dynamics of urban and regional relations are “impossible ventures.” She goes on to speculate about the transformative potential and the creative and inclusive possibilities that network-oriented spatial and governance Leonie Sandercock
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imaginations may help to release. She posits a theory of transformation that goes like this. Developing new spatial imaginations and governance processes takes time (to explore, to learn, to think, to struggle, to diffuse). Changes evolve in many small ways, through time, eventually coming together in transforma- tive moments. The challenge for academic and policy communities is to push the concept of network complexity further. Here we see a Foucauldian under- standing of knowledge and power sitting in tension alongside a modernist one.
This is a curious argumentative strategy, insofar as it appears to be theor- izing from practice, but actually develops a normative/prescriptive turn when the case studies fail to yield sufficiently positive examples of transformation.
However, what the reader gains is more understanding than has hitherto been articulated in the planning literature regarding the dynamic sensibility involved in a network complexity approach to urban region governance. This is a valu- able contribution precisely for this head-on engagement with and elaboration of the concept of network complexity.
Throgmorton, unlike Healey, beginswith a normative argument about the power of story to create sustainable places, and does not allow himself to be sidetracked by pesky case studies. His is a different argumentative strategy. He both restates and revises his argument from Planning as Persuasive Storytelling (1996), responding to various critics before expanding his original argument.
What is new here is his attention to diverse, locally anchored common urban narratives (five of them are described) and his relating of these to Buell’s five dimensions of place-connectedness (Buell 2001) and to his own arguments about planning as persuasive storytelling in a global scale web of relationships.
Also important is the attention Throgmorton gives to negotiating the emotional conflicts that are often at the heart of resistance to change.
What I find troubling in Throgmorton’s (implicit) theory of transformation is the apparent assumption that telling persuasive stories is enough. In spite of his nuanced discussion of the “planner as author” and his recognition of the need for multiple stories to be told, we are left with questions about assumed receptive listeners, and about the institutional arrangements through which multiple stories might manage to get told. His theories of knowledge and power remain unstated, leaving this reader queasy on two matters: how the “good stories” of sustainability and justice will be heard above the din of the “bad old stories” about profit, progress, fear of the other, and so on; and the unresolved contradiction between the (modernist) planner as bearer of stories of sustain- ability and the (postmodern) planner as the creator of spaces for diverse community stories to be heard. Who adjudicates these diverse and conflicting stories? Who gives which stories the power to matter? This “political economy”
of story is as yet the missing piece of the puzzle.
Throgmorton appears to have missed the real point of the political economy critique of his work. Misreading it as an ideological attack (a neo-Marxist perspective is better than a communicative one), he dismisses what is really an important body of work that maps the shifting and multiple scales and spaces of economic and migration flows, of ideas and innovations. In so doing, the Commentary: Imagining Urban Transformation
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understanding of the network society that he mobilizes is inevitably a restricted one, and is not fully translated into a planning issue.
Throgmorton attempts to engage with the relational challenges of the network society but, unlike Healey, he does not really engage with the intellectual or political challenges. He eschews thinking about new ways of seeing planning (beyond the advocacy of story as a new tool, and spatializing the storytelling imagination), and he eschews discussion of governance and institutions, remaining firmly in the communicative realm. Within this realm, however, Throgmorton has gone further than most planning scholars in articu- lating the power of story to imagine desirable transformations in our cities, to inspire citizens to act, and to believe that their actions will have effects. In this way, his work is a powerful contribution to what he calls “a sustainable economy of spirit.”
Leonie Sandercock
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