Network Complexity and the Imaginative Power of Strategic

Spatial Planning

¹

Patsy Healey

Introduction

In the mid-twentieth century, planners assumed they could rely on the authoritative power of formal government structures of accountability and legit- imacy. Their contribution was to translate broad policy objectives and value orientations into spatial strategies and design schemes for the development of cities and neighborhoods. They typically operated with mental models of inte- grated socio-spatial relations operating across discrete territories, typically the city region. Today, these concepts seem naive and rigid in the face of the com- plexity of governance structures and practices that are to be found in areas we call urban regions, and the multiplexity of the time-space relations that stretch across and intersect to create the realities of such areas. These complexities demand new ways of imagining governance and urban region dynamics. The

“network” idea is a powerful force in shaping these imaginations, as stake- holder groups, planners, policy analysts, and other social scientists struggle to re-think urban regions and their governance. Governance is increasingly understood in terms of complex sets of policy communities (Rhodes 1997) or “epistemic communities” (Haas 1992), cross-cutting with attempts to build partnership and coalitions, arenas, and networks to create new policy discourses and agendas (Le Galès 2002, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003a, Hajer 2003). In such contexts, as Booher and Innes (2002) argue, authoritative power gives way to

“network power.” Urban regions are similarly understood, following recent geographical work and the advocacy of Castells (1996), in terms of dynamic relational webs, replacing nested hierarchies of administrative-functional spaces with an appreciation of the diversity of networks, each with distinctive 1111

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space-time morphologies and driving dynamics (Allen 1999, 2003; Graham and Healey 1999; Healey 1997a).

In a world of such relational complexity, the endeavor of developing strategies for the spatial development of urban regions presents an ambiguous challenge. On the one hand, the very context of dynamic complexity in a global- izing environment has created a new policy discourse that calls for more attention to coherent strategies to develop the “assets” and “qualities” of urban regions (Amin et al. 2000; Amin and Thrift 2002; Cooke 2002; Wheeler 2002).

On the other hand, the effort of understanding what an urban region is and drawing together a governance coalition capable of developing and maintaining an agenda focused at this scale presents, once relational complexity has been recognized, a huge intellectual and politico-organizational challenge. In this chapter, my particular concern is with the imaginations mobilized in episodes of such planning activity. By “imagination,” I mean the framing conceptions and focusing metaphors used in policy-making and planning work. What spatial conceptions do they embody and express? What notions of governance are presented through them? How do such imaginations get articulated? How do they accumulate the transformative power to frame policies, project ideas, shape the allocation of resources, and influence the exercise of regulatory power?

What kinds of simplifications, syntheses, and integrations are involved in such intellectual and political work? Scott (1998) provides a powerful argument that government inherently involves the mobilization of ways of “seeing.” These then lead to actions that seek to alter ways of acting to shape the perceived terrain according to such perspectives. He calls this “seeing like a state.” He highlights the necessity of the simplifications involved in arriving at some kind of perspectival synthesis on which to base collective action, but also underlines the dangerous exclusions and oppressions that such necessary simplification can produce. What are the prospects for developing spatial and governance imaginations that release creative energies and synergies and reduce exclusions and oppressions? Is such an enterprise an “impossible venture,” destined to drop back into just the kind of oppressive and exclusionary practices for which past planning endeavors have been so much criticized? I explore these questions by reflecting on recent experiences of strategic spatial planning in Europe.

The Spatial Imaginations Mobilized in Episodes of Strategic Spatial Planning

Efforts in policy formation with transformative power achieve this by devel- oping new concepts and ways of thinking that change the way resources are allocated and regulatory powers are exercised. They mobilize intellectual, rela- tional, and political resources that command attention, develop the power to

“travel” and “translate” into an array of practice arenas and transform these, rather than merely being absorbed within them. Those that accumulate sub- stantial power to become routinized may then “sediment” down into the cultural

Network Complexity and Imaginative Power

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ground that sustains ongoing processes and feeds into new episodes of policy formation (Hajer 1995; Healey 2004a, b). How far do the spatial imaginations being mobilized in episodes of strategic spatial planning in Europe’s urban regions have such transformative potential? I have discussed elsewhere an approach to analyzing concepts of place and space deployed in episodes of strategic spatial planning (Healey 2004c). Here, I focus on three issues rele- vant to the capacity to imagine territories in the context of “network complex- ity”: spatial consciousness, scalar consciousness, and relational dynamics.

I explore the extent of the transformative potential and the creative and inclusive possibilities that these imaginations may help to release.

Spatial Consciousness

Despite the efforts to build a spatial planning discourse at the European level, there are still substantial differences between national planning cultures (Newman and Thornley 1996; Commission of the European Communities 1997). One expression of this is in the extent to which concepts of place, spatial organization, and territorial identity are embedded in policy cultures and polit- ical assumptions. In the mid-twentieth century, planning policy cultures were intellectually dominated by concepts of urban form and physical structure. But the capacity of these concepts to “travel” and interrelate with wider policy cultures and political assumptions varied. A spatial consciousness informed by physical planning concepts was perhaps most strongly developed in the Netherlands, underpinned by geographical and technological necessities and a strong multi-level state. Within France and Germany, notions of settlement hier- archy and regional identity were sustained by longstanding cultural recognition of local territorial identities. In Italy, urban planning discourses and practices focused on the design of cities, while in the UK, the enduring emphasis of the

“planning system” was on the defense of the countryside. In both Italy and England, the cultural identities and lifestyles of elites gave support to spatial organizing concepts. The same may be said of the Scandinavian concern about the relation between built form and “nature.” These various physical planning ideas provided the intellectual resources that turned government planning systems and land use regulations into the practices that are both valued and heavily criticized today. The ideas about how to organize the urban landscape were energetically developed within a professional planning community with a strong trans-national dimension, while concepts developed “travelled well” in the particular opportunity structures of European (welfare) state-building.

But since this mid-century hey-day of spatial planning, the traditional

“spatial consciousness” associated with planning has been undermined by many factors. These include the force of sectoral policy development, the critique of the narrow determinism of architectural concepts of spatial organization and the growing influence of neoliberal economics in national politics and admin- istration. Planning practices in the 1970s and 1980s moved increasingly away from plans and strategies to focus on projects and regulations. Politicians and Patsy Healey

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other policy communities remembered the old spatial ideas and associated them with “constraints” on their own freedom of maneuver. Public financial strains recast the relations between the state and economic actors, many of whom saw little relevance in spatial organizing concepts. Traditional spatial concepts were left locked into governance processes and embedded in governance cultures, without, in many instances, a legitimizing intellectual discourse to support or refresh them.

This lack of explicit spatial consciousness was particularly strong in highly fragmented states where individual property owners were privileged, as in Belgium, or in highly centralized states, such as England, where in addition public policy has been strongly shaped by the commercial and financial sectors.² In such contexts, it has not been easy to re-awaken a spatial consciousness, despite vigorous contemporary efforts. Albrechts highlights the enormous polit- ical effort needed to create a momentum behind a capacity to “see” the Flanders region/state in spatial terms. He stresses the importance of re-awakening tradi- tional concepts of landscape, and combining these with a new image of unity in polycentricity, in the “Flemish Diamond,” deliberately intended as a “traveling metaphor” (Albrechts 2001; Albrechts et al. 2003; Albrechts and Lievois 2004).

Concerns about economic competitiveness and territorial cohesion provided the political “opportunity structure” for this planning effort.

Within England, more rural areas have retained strategies for conserving landscapes and traditional settlement qualities. But, with weak and financially dependent local government, it has been much more difficult for urban areas to see beyond specific projects and sectoral policies, to develop an “integrated”

and spatially differentiated view of the urban “territory.” The planning system itself has become largely a-spatial, with spatial allocation principles expressed in national policy guidance and then re-expressed in local guidance (Vigar et al.

2000). In this context, it has taken effective coalition-building initiated from outside formal government arenas to make a significant difference. In the UK as a whole, a pioneering example of the development of an explicit spatial con- sciousness is in Northern Ireland, where a new vocabulary of spatial concepts has been promoted in a regional development strategy that aims to challenge and displace the old, vivid, culturally embedded sectarian geography (Depart- ment for Regional Development 2002; Murray and Greer 2002; Albrechts et al.

2003; Healey 2004c). The strategy and its spatial vocabulary has been created at a moment when new politicians in a new devolved government have been interested in different ways of “seeing” their territory and developing “fair” prin- ciples to guide their decisions about investment and regulation in a politically very difficult context.

Spatial strategies can in some instances mobilize a spatial consciousness to do political work in institutional contexts that do not provide much encourage- ment for a territorial focus. It might be thought easier to innovate new spatial imaginations in situations where a spatial consciousness has remained strong.

The current struggles for “culture change” in the Netherlands suggest a different Network Complexity and Imaginative Power

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conclusion. Here, the efforts at national level to introduce a more relational,

“network society” imagination into national spatial strategy have so far been largely “captured” by the traditional conceptions of urban form that remain dominant in the planning policy community (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001).

How far these embedded discourses and practices will be able to survive a well-articulated struggle to displace them remains to be seen.

Some episodes in strategic spatial planning thus involve explicitly re-discovering and re-articulating a spatial imagination. Others seek to displace what are presented as out-dated concepts of spatial organization. In many other cases, the spatial dimension is much less explicit, a by-product of other con- cerns, such as providing land supply for demographic projections of new house- holds (a strong emphasis in English planning) or coordinating infrastructure and development (as in concepts of development “corridors”). These hardly reflect the contemporary understanding of the relational complexity of urban regions. Do more complex recognitions lie in the way scale and relational dynamics in urban areas are conceptualized?

Scalar Consciousness

By this term, I refer to the way in which an “area” or “territory” is imagined, both in relation to its external positioning and its internal differentiation. Many traditional development plans and planning schemes positioned themselves in a hierarchy of plans, approached their strategies within contained borders (usually legal-administrative) and sought to provide comprehensive detail over a narrow range of issues, primarily the allocation of sites to land uses. The force behind many of the new sub-regional strategies reflects the recognition that these borders no longer “contain” the relational reach of significant living and working patterns, let alone that of production and distribution chains. This has led to attempts to find territorial foci and boundaries that encompass expanding metropolitan areas and “city and countryside.” The search for bound- aries encourages a treatment of territory as a container, widening the dimension- ing of the container to capture the most significant relationships rather than working with concepts of discontiguous space and the multiple spatial “reach”

of different networks transecting a territory. Many of the current exercises in spatial planning continue to focus largely within defined borders, concentrating attention on the intra-territorial distribution of major infrastructure and develop- ment investments. Others are more oriented toward external spaces but tend to treat their territories as a homogeneous entity to be moved around a European and global map. Driven in particular by concerns for economic competitive- ness, these approaches emphasize re-positioning an urban area in global or European space (Healey 1998b). Such “container” and “positioning” treatments contrast with the focus on fluidity, openness, and multiple time-space relations emphasized by relational complexity ideas.

In contrast, the Netherlands Fifth National Policy Document (NPD) in its presentations eschews defining political borders, locating the Dutch economy Patsy Healey

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and society in a diffuse, “polycentric,” borderless European growth zone (VROM 2001). Internally, however, traditional divisions live on in concepts of settlement hierarchies and clear divisions between town and country. The Dutch debates are important because of the uneasy attempt to combine a geography of places with particular qualities and a geography of flows (of water and trans- port in particular). This is expressed in the Fifth NPD in terms of interrelating

“layers/strata,” each of which is driven by different forces operating at different timescales. Implicitly, each is connected to relations with a different scalar reach, though this is not so clearly expressed (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001;

Healey 2004c; Priemus and Zonneveld 2004). A spatial vocabulary of nodes and corridors is common in other European spatial strategies, often indicating how the corridors connect into some adjacent territory. Few strategies expli- citly develop the spatial implications of the co-existence in places of multiple relations, each with their own network morphologies and scalar reach, which lies at the heart of the relational complexity understandings. In many strategies,

“scale” is primarily understood in terms of levels of government jurisdiction, which again tends to treat territory as a hard-edged container. As a result, there is little pressure to displace traditional concepts, with their focus on bounded- ness and the internal cohesion of a narrowly understood range of territorial relations. This leads to a weak intellectual basis for spatial strategies, which makes them easy to challenge and demolish.

Relational Dynamics

This “thin” conception of scalar relations reflects the intellectual challenge of articulating and expressing multi-relational urban and regional dynamics in spatial terms. The importance of such an understanding is increasingly stressed in the introduction to strategies, often calling up sociological and geographical literature in support. But the ambition narrows down as strategies get developed into more traditional vocabularies of urban form and infrastructure networks.

The Netherlands Fifth NPD is a prime example (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001).

In the Northern Ireland Regional Development Strategy, too, a new discourse wraps around an old one (Healey 2004c).

In conclusion, and despite frequent use of the “network society” as a metaphor, current episodes in strategic spatial planning are having difficulty translating relational complexity concepts into a multiplex, relational spatial imagination (Healey 2004c). Instead, there is a strong tendency to revert back to traditional physicalist concepts about spatial order. These help in the traditional land use regulation tasks of allocating sites for development and developing criteria for guiding changes to local environments. But they fail to capture the dynamics and tensions of relations with very different driving forces and scalar relations as these co-exist in particular places and flow through shared chan- nels. They provide little guidance on “reading” the evolving dynamics of land and property markets, or the changing ways people are moving around and using metropolitan regions, or the signs of new social conjunctions that could Network Complexity and Imaginative Power

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either release creative energy or produce oppressive or violent confrontations.

Despite often invoked rhetorics of broadly based consultation and inclusive ambitions, many relations are ignored or inadequately considered because those taking the lead in strategy formation are unable to “see” the relations in ques- tion. This limits perceptions of diversity and makes deliberate exclusion all too easy to hide behind the mask of inclusionary rhetorics.

The result of such a weakly articulated relational spatial imagination is that either a narrow set of relations dominates the development of strategy, typically that of “economic competitiveness,” or strategies call into play narrow and static concepts of territorial cohesion and “integrated area development,”

focused on stabilizing and retaining old identities in the face of external chal- lenges. In these latter situations, there is a tendency for old myths, in which territory and community are somehow merged together in a mono-vocal con- cept of “heim” (Jay 1998), to suppress the recognition of vibrant, conflictual cosmopolitan, and inclusive “urbanity” (Sandercock 1998b).

My conclusion is that the transformative power of many episodes of strategic spatial planning discourses is currently undermined by serious imagin- ative weaknesses in addressing the concepts of relational complexity and translating them into their consequences for the spatiality of urban regions. As a result, either the strategies develop in a mono-vocal way, or multiple voices and discourses co-exist but do not co-encounter each other in the strategies.

This may lead to further narrowing as the ideas in a spatial strategy “travel”

differentially to arenas that shape resource allocation and regulatory practices, while a confused spatial imagination may also limit the “traveling capacity” of a strategy. Thus, just as the lack of arenas for collective actor formation that could develop debates about how to “see,” “hear,” “feel,” and “read” an urban territory inhibits the development of new spatial imaginations, so the lack of development into policy terms of a relational spatial imagination inhibits the emergence of government arenas that could “see, hear, feel, and read” the place- relevant dimensions of relational complexity.

The Governance Imaginations Reflected in Episodes of Strategic Spatial Planning

All collective action embodies in discourses and practices some conception of how governance is and should be performed. How do actors in arenas of govern- ance “see” their organization and capacities and the institutional landscape in which they operate? Within Europe, there has been vigorous debate in recent years on the transformation of the formal institutions and procedures of all levels of government, fueled by diverse objectives, from promoting more “competitive” local economies to reducing the “gap” between citizens, business, and the state, and diminishing so-called “democratic deficits.” Govern- ment is criticized as inefficient, bureaucratic, remote, and self-seeking. These often contradictory debates have resulted in all kinds of transformation and Patsy Healey

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