Judith E. Innes
Networks may well turn out to be the defining concept of the emerging era.
While networks have always existed, globalization, information technology, and the accompanying rapidity of change and increasing complexity of our social and political systems have greatly increased the importance of networks and our need to understand and work with them. Fortunately there are major litera- tures on networks dating back into the 1960s for scholars and practitioners to draw on, as well as literatures emerging today with the revival of interest in networks. Understanding what this work has to offer will be critical to effective urban planning in the century to come. It offers a rich set of ideas and empirical findings that can and should be integrated into planning thought and practice.
A good starting place for those new to the topic is a review article (Berry et al. 2004) for public managers. This outlines three intellectual tradi- tions in network thinking that are as relevant to planning as to public management. In the sociological tradition the authors identify three distinct schools of thought, each with potential for enriching different aspects of planning thought. Sociometry diagrams relationship networks among individ- uals and identifies patterns of interaction, cliques, and small-group dynamics.
It also has developed methods to look at the quality and intensity of inter- actions. The Manchester anthropologists believe in focusing both on structures of relationshipsandon the contents conveyed in these. They look at the roles of people in these networks and pay attention to embedded context and institutionalized expectations. They have developed measures of the quality of dyadic relations such as reciprocity, intensity, and durability and measures of macro network features such as density, reachability, or diffusion of informa- tion. This group includes the classic work of Claude Fischer (Fischer et al.
1977), who looked at place-based social networks and how they are linked to attachment to place and to the creation of authentic community. The Harvard 1111
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structuralists developed the mathematics of networks and were able to develop models to see the larger patterns of network dynamics.
In the political science tradition the authors also identify three streams of thought. The first links policy change, agenda-setting, innovation, and diffusion to networks. Another looks at agenda-setting through the lens of community power, interest groups, and issue networks of policy insiders. This includes the work on advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). A third stream of thought is linked to Ostrom’s institutional rational analysis and her research on collaborative management of common pool resources (Ostrom 1990).
Public administration scholars tend to focus on network management as they rely increasingly on decentralized forms of action where different groups are tasked with implementing aspects of public programs. They have written on intergovernmental management, typologies of networks based on field studies, the different skills needed for managers in networks as opposed to hierarchies (Gage and Mandell 1990), and the impacts of networks on policy outputs and democratic values (Provan and Milward 1995). Another line of research focuses on network performance and outcomes, as befits a field which tries to use networks instrumentally (Provan and Milward 1995).
Recent literature is exploding, emerging in part from the information tech- nology field, which addresses the workings of complex, far-flung networks. This looks for example at what is efficient and effective in terms of pathways and connectedness. The business literature explores such topics as how effective business strategy can involve a large organization working with an array of smaller and more nimble organizations. This kind of networked group can stay ahead of the rapid changes in society and respond quickly to external events and changes in technology and opportunities (Saxenian 1994).
I have laid out this brief summary in the hope that it will trigger ideas in the readers about intellectual traditions they can draw on to help build plan- ning thought for the network society. As a field we have barely tapped the potential of network thinking and certainly have not tightly linked our work with these highly pertinent bodies of research and theory. All three of the disciplinary traditions speak to key aspects of what we do in planning. The sociological tradition offers rich opportunities for new work on place-based networks and how they are changing and for linking them to non place- based networks. It can help us see the social and spatial consequences. Socio- metry can help us with understanding the small-group work that constitutes much of planning’s basic activity. This work allows opportunities for rigorous quantitative analysis and identification of network patterns that we cannot see without this kind of study. The political/policy science tradition offers much to those who think about and try to develop more effective planning practice and theory to aid that practice. The concepts and empirical research on how policy networks operate can help us to build theory and gain insights into what network planning and governance might look like. The public administration tradition can help us to work instrumentally with networks to accomplish goals. The information technology literature helps us to see large and complex network Judith E. Innes
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patterns that offer models and empirical evidence about which patterns produce which results. The business literature provides a model for how public agen- cies, jurisdictions and nonprofits can cooperate for greater productivity and faster response time to crises and urgent needs.
It is my view that ultimately understanding the role of networks in contemporary society and learning how best to build and take advantage of their power in planning will depend on the use of complexity thinking. In this view our complex social/political system is in the best case a complex adap- tivesystem – that is, one that operates on the basis of distributed intelligence, with all its actors able to work in their own local arenas with some shared heuristics, but also able to make their own self-interested decisions as they face their immediate environment. This involves considerable dialogue, and depends on a system that is not hierarchical and regulatory, but rather incentive-based.
It involves three features, diversity of players, interaction among them and selec- tion mechanisms that allow individual actors to use feedback from the environment so they can adapt their actions in a timely way (Axelrod and Cohen 1999). If these conditions can be met, complexity theory suggests that both urban systems and planning systems can be productively responsive to change and move to higher levels of performance.
The chapters in this section each have something different to say about networks and cities or networks and planning, as each looks at the idea from a different angle. Low’s focus is on networks in governance – on networks as part of the polity. In particular he looks at discourse networks, which, he says, are a key element of a networked polity. He illustrates this with the example of urban transport in Australia and adds to our understanding of how storylines and language help to empower certain networks and frame policy debates. Low also examines how discursive change, along with exogenous events, play a part in institutional change. He notes that hierarchy and markets cannot be relied on to deliver democracy, but that a more deliberative democracy can fit better to the reality of a network society. His argument is a valuable one in linking discourse, deliberation, and institutional change through the concept of networks.
Verma and Shin take as their starting place Castells’ concept of the network society and of networks, which they describe as a globally inter- connected and interdependent “behemoth” of firms, groups, territories, and populations. They explore the potential theoretical relationship of the “network society” to Habermas’ views of communicative rationality. They conclude quite correctly, I believe, that the communicative action paradigm is broad enough to accommodate the new reality. Indeed, my own work has linked networks particularly to collaborative planning, arguing that collaboration builds networks and helps them to work effectively in a variety of ways (Booher and Innes 2002).
Beauregard is interested in the literary and linguistic dimension of the network idea, exploring the metaphor of the “network city.” He compares along the way some of the other adjectives and metaphors that have been used to Commentary: Networks and Planning Thought
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describe the city, making the case that these descriptors help the scholar and planner to intellectually manage the complexity of the city. In his view the network metaphor is a particularly powerful one in that it opens into a variety of other ideas, gives form to the city’s complex and changing organization, and helps us see it in new ways. The networks are potentially self-organized, volun- tary, interest-based, collaborative, adaptive, and innovative. Beauregard’s attention to metaphor is valuable for planning thinkers. Too often we ignore the importance of language and figures of speech for shaping our ideas. His argument that the network concept can lead us in more interesting directions than some other city descriptions gives us food for thought.
Myers identifies the importance of networks, especially at the place-based local level and notes how networks are now making linkages across places.
He is interested in how networks can help with thinking about and doing plan- ning for the future – in how networks might stretch into at least the near-term future to help people to go beyond thinking solely about the present place. His chapter reminds us that planning is, indeed, about the future and that we need to explore ways that the network idea can help us advance planning’s fundamental purposes.
To move forward on integrating the ideas and potential of networks into planning thought and practice, as a community of scholars, we need first to familiarize ourselves with the ideas and accomplishments of scholars in other fields who have made important advances in the understanding and analysis of networks in many settings. Second, we need to design and imple- ment systematic empirical research (both quantitative and qualitative) to document the networks that exist in urban settings and planning processes today. We know very little about these though we talk about them a lot. This research should look at the linkages between actors as well as at the content of what flows through the network. If it is information, what kind? If it is heuristics or shared meanings, how do these come about? If it is power, how does the power play out and who benefits? We need to gather adequate data to identify patterns in networks and assess what kinds of patterns are productive and how they came into being. We should also look at how networks evolve over time and at what kinds of results emerge from networks. We need to find ways to identify the kinds of networks we want to encourage and the kinds we should change or even destroy (such as power elite networks, or criminal networks).
Professionals in policy fields will never be able to “use” networks in an instrumental way as they might a planning tool like zoning, because these are evolving, typically not bounded, and adapt constantly. We are all embedded in networks and they both constrain us and offer opportunities. We need to “go with the flow” while trying to improve that flow to achieve some of the outcomes that can at best emerge from networks. These include social cohesion, linkages of otherwise excluded groups into the opportunity system of the larger society, mobilization that requires many players acting on their own, integra- tion of various forms of knowledge into action and policy, and the building of 1111
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Judith E. Innes
deliberative democracy and a civil society which can better participate in public decisions. As we learn more about how different network patterns produce different results, we can do things such as create more densely linked networks through collaborative processes or encourage clusters of networked players in particular places or among particular unorganized interests. We can have an impact on the information and ideas that flow through networks, find ways to reward those who participate, and troubleshoot when necessary networks start to disintegrate.
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Commentary: Networks and Planning Thought
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