Part II
What Are Planners Trying to Do?: The Justifications
economic, institutional, and structuralist perspectives and placing the profession in the political-economic context of the relationship between the private market and government (both the local and national states). Overall the selections point to the contradictory aims of planning and the difficulties presented in trying to resolve the tensions among them.
We begin, in Chapter 7, with Patsy Healey’s defense of the planning project. Healey, who is perhaps Britain’s most influential contemporary planning theorist, is notable for attempts to bridge the gulf between academic theorizing and planning practice. She begins with three stories of planning conflicts and uses them to illustrate the kinds of divisions that arise in the planning process. These involve clashes among different community interests, between
members of the community and politicians, and between planners and the public. How planning is institutionalized is key to the ways in which these oppositions are mediated. She points to what is now a widely accepted truth about planning – that it is an inherently political activity not simply a technical exercise, even in the case of scientists predicting the environmental consequences of development. In her account of planning dilemmas, she indicates the constant tension among goals, as is spelled out by Scott Campbell in his article on the planner’s triangle (“Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities,” see Chapter 11, this volume). Healey emphasizes that planning “for the many” cannot assume the existence of a unified public interest but rather a plurality of interests, often conflicting. Planning, in her view, consists of explicitly
formulated, intentional collective action. Her essay, however, does not explain what to do when consensus does not develop, as in the case she presents of Nazareth, where the two sides remained implacably opposed and where planning brought latent conflict to the surface.
Ash Amin, who respects Healey’s vision of planning as mediation among differing social interests, nevertheless considers that this view does not adequately address risk (Chapter 8, this volume). First, he argues that deliberation does not sufficiently address aspects of urban life that are not controllable and that interact to create a whole transcending the sum of its parts. Second, he contends that skepticism toward expert judgment fails to deal with the need to devise substantive responses to the hazards of urban life. He critiques the theories of urban pragmatists who, while believing that planners should articulate visions of the good city, do not describe what could be the content of these visions. He sees potential trade-offs between expert judgment and deliberative democracy rather than assuming the latter will always
produce the best outcome. Thus, while he does not defend a concept of planning as the rule of experts, neither does he doubt the need for technical expertise nor dismiss the efforts of
planners to shape agendas.
The dichotomy between regulation and laissez-faire has been a staple of planning theory
debates. More recently it has become subsumed within discussions of neo-liberalism. Although Americans usually define the term “liberalism” as supportive of leftist programs, neo-
liberalism’s roots are in nineteenth-century economic thought that would be considered conservative within contemporary debates. Neo-liberalism thus calls for free markets,
individual autonomy, and businesses unhindered by government controls. Usually incorporating arguments for privatization, deregulation, and competitiveness, neo-liberal proponents argue that planning introduces inefficiencies, restricts freedom, stifles entrepreneurship, and limits economic growth. The argument for competitiveness extends beyond the economist’s concern
with competition among firms to the contest among cities and regions to retain, attract, and develop industries and facilities that contribute to economic growth. This focus leads governments to subsidize private entities, use their capital budgets to build sports venues, convention centers, and iconic public buildings, and give low priority to welfare and social services.
In a 1985 essay Richard Klosterman sums up the debate between advocates of free-market liberalism and defenders of planning. Even though this piece was written two decades ago, before the term neo-liberalism had gained currency, it identifies the ways in which the argument for privatization had already taken hold. This article had been included in the first two editions of this reader. We are returning it in this fourth edition because it still represents the best exposition we could find of the arguments for and against planning (Chapter 9, this volume). Essentially Klosterman shows how irreconcilable values underlie the two
viewpoints and that no empirical test can validate the superiority of one over the other, since the criteria of evaluation differ.
Klosterman begins by outlining the standard market failure model, whereby planning steps in to address the periodic shortcomings of the free-market system. This is perhaps the safest ground for planning, since it justifies government intervention based on its ability to improve and assist the functioning of an efficient market. He comments, however, that arguments based wholly on efficiency ignore questions of distribution. He lists some additional defenses of planning: planners address the shortcoming of the political system, which militates against long-term thinking and lacks the capability to achieve collective goals; and planners possess unique professional expertise that allows them to reach reasoned judgments. In taking note of the Marxist critiques of planning as primarily serving the interests of capitalism, he agrees that they offer insights into the nature of planning in capitalist societies, but judges them to offer little practical guidance. He leaves open the potential of planning to attain its theoretical claims.
In Chapter 10, this volume, Heather Campbell, Malcolm Tait, and Craig Watkins respond to Klosterman’s challenge. Writing 20 years later, they start by placing planning within the context of a world in which the precepts of neo-liberalism have become globally dominant but avoid pessimism. Rather than indulging in abstract arguments of justification or critique, they seek to develop a realistic argument for better planning in an imperfect world. They discuss a public sector where the arguments of “new public management,” by which the public sector acts like a private entrepreneur, have been particularly influential. They develop their argument by
analyzing a case of “ordinary” planning to discover what choices were available for planners.
They conclude that the planners working on the case of central city redevelopment in Exeter had little understanding of real estate dynamics and failed to exploit the opportunity presented by public land ownership. According to their analysis, if the planners had held an overarching vision of the desired outcome, they would have produced a better redevelopment scheme even if not the best imaginable. While accepting the neo-liberal emphasis on growth and markets, the planners could have fostered competition and promoted several smaller-scale projects rather than acceding to the massive proposal of a single, conservative developer.
Campbell et al.’s discussion points to the centrality of the goal of economic growth in
contemporary planning doctrine. Other professed aims include environmental preservation and social justice. In Scott Campbell’s contribution (Chapter 11, this volume), he questions
whether the idea of sustainability is a useful rallying cry for the urban planning profession. Its broad promises attract a wide and hopeful following but also undercut its strategic credibility.
The remarkable consensus in favor of the idea is encouraging but also reason for skepticism, since sustainability can mean many things to many people without requiring commitment to any specific policies. The danger is that in the end, though all will endorse the principle of
sustainability, few will actually practice it. The result would be simply superficial, feel-good solutions: by merely adding “sustainable” to existing planning documents (sustainable zoning, sustainable economic development, sustainable transportation planning, sustainable housing, and so on), this would create the illusion that we are actually doing sustainable planning. (This is reminiscent of the addition of the term “comprehensive” to planning 50 years ago,
“strategic” planning in the 1980s, and resilience in the new millennium [see Gleeson, Chapter 12, this volume]).
Campbell argues for a broader definition of sustainability. He develops the idea of the
“planner’s triangle” to distinguish the field’s three fundamental goals – economic development, environmental protection, and social justice – and more importantly, to articulate the resulting conflicts over property, resources, and development. At the theoretical center of this triangle lies the sustainable city but the path to this elusive center is neither direct nor simple; instead, as the struggle for sustainability becomes more advanced, it will also become more sharply contentious, since it will involve increasingly explicit and sobering trade-offs between interest groups in society.
Increasingly the term “resilience” has substituted for sustainability in the discourse of planning.
Stimulated by the threat of climate change and recent disasters caused by earthquakes, forest fires, hurricanes, and typhoons, use of the term encompasses sustainability but also refers to dealing with risk. Like sustainability it is innocuous and subject to varied interpretations. The most prevalent interpretation involves responding to threat not simply through avoidance but through adaptation – for example, by letting forest fires burn themselves out, restoring
wetlands, and constructing structures near shorelines on stilts to accommodate flooding. In Chapter 12, Gleeson takes issue with the seemingly benign emphasis on resilience, asserting that unlike sustainability, it is not an essentially progressive concept. Ash Amin (Chapter 8, this volume) considers risk as endemic to the urban world and requiring expert knowledge for responding to it. Gleeson, however, warns against a facile transfer of concepts from biological science and ecology to planning, seeing its potential to be used to mask the distribution of benefits from plans justified in terms of resilience. He worries that the analogies to natural processes in discussions of resilience disguise the agency exerted by the powerful. Although he accepts that resilience planning can be a progressive move, he worries that it may be used to justify adapting to global warning rather than trying to prevent it.
Gleeson’s distinction between sustainability and resilience may be overdrawn. Often environmentalism, regardless of the labels placed on it, has been a refuge for propertied people seeking to preserve their privileges. Opposition to affordable housing has frequently
been framed in terms of protecting natural environments. Even if residents are not consciously promoting ethnic exclusion, they often resist higher densities as threatening pollution from greater traffic or putting too much pressure on water systems and sewers. Just as cost–benefit analysis does not distinguish between winners and losers, the science mechanically
incorporated into resilience planning may likewise ask the least advantaged to bear the costs of adaptation, for example, by demarcating areas of low-income population for displacement because they are environmentally sensitive.
In her article on spatial justice and planning Susan Fainstein directly addresses the question of how planning can produce a more just city (Chapter 13, this volume). She is particularly concerned with the trade-off between economic growth and justice that Scott Campbell depicts. She defines urban justice in terms of the three principles of material equality,
diversity, and democracy, sees them as existing in tension with each other, and gives priority to equality. Although she regards the vision of a just city as utopian, she nevertheless sees it as a template against which to evaluate the policies of existing cities and compare them to each other. She thus looks at three cities – New York, London, and Amsterdam – to determine how they stack up against the criteria she establishes. She concludes by listing specific policies for planners that would increase social justice. She emphasizes the importance of substance – i.e.
the content of policy – rather than process – i.e. the procedures by which a plan is developed.
Critics of her approach, however, have contended that just outcomes will only occur as a consequence of fair and open processes (see the selections by Fischer and Forester, Chapters 17 and 18, this volume).