of a Network Society?
Dowell Myers
The concept of a network society poses severe challenges for urban planning.
Networks challenge planning to break the confines of its spatial borders.
The practice of urban planning is spatially bounded because planners’ authority, if not responsibility, is restricted within borders sharply demarcated by govern- mental jurisdictions and units of political representation. Nonetheless, des- pite these political and administrative restrictions, the social and economic context for planning is heavily shaped by flows of activities that cross spatial boundaries and pass through locales.
Simultaneously, temporal dynamics also challenge the spatial confines of a present place. Over longer sweeps of time, the disjuncture between the local place and broader planning context grows ever greater. With the passage of time, networks have longer opportunity to work their influences on the local place. In particular, the local population is in flux. Migration networks trans- form the place by importing a large proportion of the population to replace others who have departed. And over time the ebb and flow of investment capital favors some places more greatly than others.
Even though bounded by space and time, the present place constitutes the strategic site within which residents and elected officials are self conscious of changes that confront them and which they wish to control. These local actors may be less conscious of how the social networks in which they participate shape development of shared meaning, valued conceptions of local identity, and the multiple, conflicting place identities that are socially constructed (Healey 1999). Multiple, competing narratives arise from interest groups in each place (Molotch 1976; Throgmorton 2003b). These place-based outlooks and debates 1111
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sharply control the ability of the present place to interact with regions beyond local borders and futures not yet present.
In this chapter I consider the challenges of “the network society” for urban planning. The heart of the problem is that planning practice is imprisoned in an orientation to “the present place.” How can planning better incorporate changes from beyond the local borders? In turn, how can planning prepare local contributions for the larger region beyond the borders? Given the confines of present consciousness, it is always difficult to plan the future. The odds of consensus about problems and solutions are always weighted to the shared experience of the local place or to the memory of its recent past. Finally, how can planning help residents achieve a satisfying self-identity that is based, in part, on attachments to a local place even while it changes in response to regional or global forces?
These are weighty challenges to consider. Satisfying answers are not easily found, but the juxtaposition of these multiple challenges suggests the need for a more richly formulated response. Indeed, the locally grounded perspective of urban planning is beginning to illuminate new facets of the network society that have yet to be appreciated.
The Prison of “the Present Place”
Spatially Fixed Boundaries of Planning Authority
The practice of urban planning in the US and in most democratic societies is conducted largely at the local level. Local governments control the develop- ment process and local residents fiercely defend their home rule of land use and other matters within their communities. Urban planners strive to improve the quality of places within their jurisdictions, leaving discussions about regional or national development issues to others.
The relative importance of planning for broader areas varies from country to country, as well as between states in the US. To varying degrees, financial incentives from higher level governments, or outright control of infrastructure or other vital elements, may be able to enforce local respect for goals of extralocal areas. In general, however, the democratic process strengthens local voters’ control over matters within their own communities.
The Orientation of Urban Planning to the Present
Planning is not only conducted within local places, it is also oriented toward the present, even while espousing an intention to address the future. Given plan- ning’s professed goals, it may seem paradoxical that planning is so oriented to the present, rather than the future, but the predominant forces direct planners’
attention to the present. Planners aim to be responsive to local stakeholders, and the democratic process directs attention to current concerns of voters and elected officials. The latter operate with time horizons limited to the next election, as well as to the pressures of short-term budgetary cycles. And the Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”
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voters are most sensitive to current problems and perceived deficits. Even when planners try to lead a forward oriented investigation into longer term goals of advance planning, the decision-making process is locked in the present. Local citizenry and officials evaluate the planning alternatives in light of their current goals and perceptions of the world.
Planners also may have shied away from addressing the future for pro- fessional reasons, namely to avoid “the twin hazards of uncertainty and disagree- ment” (Myers 2001b). It goes without saying that necessary consensus in support of collective planning is undermined by dissension over goals, as well as by uncertainty about the causes and solutions of problems. The future is especially problematic because facts in the future are impossible to test, verify, or legally defend, and both facts and goals for the future are difficult to agree about. Accordingly, local consensus is achieved more easily with regard to current problems or shared knowledge of recent local events. Only with more highly skilled narratives might planners create persuasive stories of local futures that are embracive of extralocal forces and ethical duties to a broader geographic sphere (Throgmorton 2003b).
Confrontation with the Network Society
The result of these forces is that urban planners have been driven to be strongly focused on the local area and the present. Planning practice has been impris- oned in the “present place,” making it little able to address either regional needs or concerns of the future.
This contrasts sharply with demands imposed by the network society (Castells 1996). Global communications allows capital and enterprise to dis- tribute freely across a broad terrain. With improved regional transportation systems, local places have become ever more tightly wired to the economic and social forces of the surrounding region and even the globe. The paradox noted by Castells and others is that the process of global integration and hyper commu- nication is accompanied by an opposing force of local fragmentation. Residents search for self-identity in relation to ascribed or acquired self-characteristics, including a sense of belonging and attachment to places.
Nonetheless, in this integrated spatial context, residents and leaders of a local place cannot control its work force, employment base, cultural messages, or many things other than the local land uses and physical appearance. Control of the physical place becomes a surrogate for control of the social, economic, and perceptual. Even that control is difficult in the face of relentless pressures.
Not only is the spatial separatism of the local place challenged as never before, but its temporal isolation is also under stress. Castells emphasizes how the pace of work, of enterprise development and of industrial evolution has been accelerated. For example, where once we had factory towns that provided stable work and residence environments for two or three generations of time, now we have an economic life cycle that seems much more ephemeral. Today, change is more of a constant and looking toward the future a more frequent necessity.
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Figure 3.1 offers a diagram of spatial and temporal relations that contrasts the network society with the prison of the “present place” in urban planning.
Whereas planning is focused at the local level and in present time, the network society expands the activity sphere of local places by embedding them in regional, national, and global forces. The network society also stretches the time frame to include the near term, the period in which the next economic change or other innovations will be introduced.
Breaking the Restrictions of the Present Place
Responsibilities of the Place to the Surrounding Region
The space–time discordance between urban planning and the network society is not easily resolved. However, that discrepancy will make planning ever more powerless to cope with the changes under way in many local areas. This chal- lenge may prove a healthy opportunity for urban planning, because the issues exposed are ones that have undermined planning success for many years.
Residents in local places often feel that their current place has no neces- sary linkages to the surrounding region or world at large. Even though the
Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”
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Global
National
Regional
Local
Present Near- term
Long- term Network
Society
The Present
Place
Figure 3.1 Planning’s “Present Place” Prison Relative to the Network Society
roadways permit most residents to commute outside to work, there is no presumption of reciprocal responsibilities to the region. Some years ago, Frank Popper coined the term LULU (locally unwanted land uses) to characterize the garbage dumps, prisons, half way houses, and low-income housing projects that were needed in the region but which were not considered to be desirable in most communities.
Planners who serve in the “present place” may well recognize the wisdom and ethical duty of their community to share in these regional responsibilities.
However, local citizens and elected officials are prone to act in ways that are more locally self-serving. The planner who serves the interests of his/her community usually finds it difficult to argue for regional responsibilities.
The challenge being faced in much of the US is how to adapt the precepts of home rule to the needs of larger regions. Communities that cannot address reciprocal ties at this level will have an even harder time responding to the national and global forces of the network society. European nations may be better able to address extralocal concerns through a multi-level governance based on the concept of subsidiarity, namely that government decisions should be taken at the appropriate geographic scale for a given function.
The Place as Temporary Residence in the Network
One way in which local places are most clearly impacted by larger areas is the movement of local residents into and out of the community. Although this has always been true, in recent decades the spatial integration of popula- tions has been extended to the international arena (Castles and Miller 1993).
For some communities and regions, the population influx and outflows have become so large that the implicit assumptions of urban planners and urban theorists have been completely overturned.
The transience of local residents accentuates the classic distinction of policies based on people versus those based on place. The experience of the two diverges when residents are mobile, either moving in or out. The policy implication is that investments targeted to a place may benefit people for a sustained time only if the residents are permanently rooted in that locale.
The divergence between history of people and the place in which they reside is highlighted in an essay on “Demographic Dynamism,” in which I have documented the pervasive assumptions of urban theory that the history of the residents and the city are synchronous (Myers 2001a). Evidence collected from census data revealed that more than 60 percent of adults in the Chicago or New York regions were born in the vicinity, but only 27 percent of adults in the Los Angeles region were born in California. (Among the dominant white majority, more than 80 percent of adult New Yorkers were born in the region, but still only 31 percent of Los Angeles residents were born in California.) Massive numbers of Los Angeles residents either migrated from elsewhere in the US (white or black residents) or from abroad (Asians and Latinos).
This high rate of mobility has reciprocal effects on social networks. Not having grown up in the region, Los Angeles’ residents are much less likely to Dowell Myers
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be rooted by parents and kinship networks, or to have deep longstanding social connections. Indeed, many of these residents may not have any memory or personal knowledge of what Los Angeles was like in the 1950s or 1960s. The opposite conclusions hold for residents of New York or Chicago. In fact, despite its reputation as a global city (Sassen 1991), with so many homegrown resi- dents, New York does not reflect the impact of the network society as fully as does Los Angeles.
Often the new arrivals to a place have different goals and ambitions for the place than do longtime residents. The group that is arriving and growing in numbers will increasingly assert its view of desired changes (or non-change) while those who are longer established often exercise an entrenched political position to resist the views of newcomers (Spain 1993). An apparent contra- diction may be that the old time, long-settled residents who claim seniority and special status for their views may in fact be on the way out (if for no other reason than old age and death). The newly arrived, short-term residents could well represent the future, although that is contested by the oldtimers.
The example of new immigrants is especially challenging to planners. By definition, these are mobile people newly arrived in the community. A key ques- tion is whether they will settle permanently or whether they will move on to other communities later in their lives. The dilemma for local planners and government officials is that an investment to help new immigrants adjust to life in their new country may not be repaid at a later time if the upwardly mobile immigrants carry their newly developed assets to another community (Myers 1999). In such cases, it makes much more sense for a higher level of govern- ment to fund the investments in new immigrant residents, but the current philosophy of devolution in the US has thrust more of the service burdens to lower levels of government. That strategy seems inconsistent with the practical effects of the network society.
In sum, the longstanding discrepancy between history/future of residents and history/future of place has been accentuated under the network society.
Some communities and regions are feeling this more acutely, but all places serve as only temporary destinations for at least a portion of their residents.
Planners can no longer afford to assume that the people found residing together in a place at one point in time have always been, and will always be, linked together in that place.
Challenges of a Network Society
Can Present Residents Plan a Future Place?
Planners imprisoned in the present place face not only spatial but temporal confines. Just as planners find it difficult to address needs or reciprocal rela- tions beyond the local borders, so are those planners trapped in short-view improvement activities. The “twin hazards of uncertainty and disagreement”
Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”
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about the future (Myers 2001b) drive planners to seek consensus around issues that are most tangible in the present.
One approach to enlist citizen participation in planning the future has become very popular in North America. “Visioning” is a group exercise that encourages residents to imagine desired changes in their communities or regions. Although successful at mobilizing audience attention in some contexts, the technique has been faulted for several reasons, including the false hopes created, lack of follow through, and disconnection between citizen imagina- tions and professional projections of feasible outcomes (Helling 1998; Grant and Orser 2002).
Given the divergence cited above between history of residents and history of place – the transiency of local residence – there is a deep problem of how today’s residents are to plan tomorrow’s place. Only if we assume the future residents will be the same people as today’s, or at least that they will hold similar goals and preferences as today’s, can this process be reasonably legitimate.
The argument here is different from the standard rationale for a regional framework for establishing needs and sharing resources. That rationale is based on class disparities in the internal spatial structure of regions (Orfield 1997).
The present argument complements that point of view but emphasizes the temporal discontinuities and inequities that surround decision making in the present place. Local citizen desires for the future often conflict with regional needs for the future.
Two examples illustrate the pitfalls. One is the common situation of housing construction in a community. Is housing a desirable goal for people who are not yet residents? Residents of today pass judgment on the desirability of new housing, but the prospective future residents of that housing have no voice. Indeed, one of the greatest imbalances in the democratic planning process is that the future residents of housing have few advocates relative to the many current residents who already have housing and who see few benefits of new construction (and indeed only costs of added congestion, loss of open space, and possibly new fiscal burdens). Even though we know a certain amount of new housing will be needed for young people coming of age, it is often diffi- cult to get existing local residents to acknowledge that truth and accept a share of the obligation to future generations.
A second example is the planned reuse of a retired military airbase in Orange County, California, a formerly suburban area south of Los Angeles that is now home to three million residents. The future use of the El Toro airport has been hotly contested and local residents are sharply divided. (About 60 percent of elected officials and residents oppose building a new airport, while 40 percent support it.) Although air travel demand has grown rapidly along with the population, many residents long for a future that reflects the low- density suburban past. They have voted to turn the air field into a large park, even though regional air traffic has already surpassed the combined capacity limits of Los Angeles International Airport and several smaller air fields.
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Contradictory Demands for Control of a Localized Identity
Even as global integration proceeds through digital communication and a homogenizing mass culture, the counterforce is a movement toward fragmen- tation of places and more individualized choices of identity. Whether based on inherited ethnicity or religion, on group memberships from the past, or on new lifestyle choices formed around leisure pursuits, members of Western societies are seeking distinction and identity as a defense against the anonymity of mass integration.
The local place of residence forms a key component of this identity.
Castells (1997: 60) highlights the importance of these “territorial identities.”
People socialize and interact in their local environment and build social networks among their neighbors. Castells argues that a process of social mobilization must occur in order for “people to cluster in community organizations that generate a feeling of belonging and, ultimately, a communal cultural identity.
People must engage in urban movements through which common interests are discovered and defended.” However, the same dynamic is also at work among the business community and local development interests, whose own social mobilization is founded on what Molotch (1976) calls nurturing of “the growth machine.”
Members of social networks occupying the same space often find them- selves in conflict, because their group projects have opposing objectives, whether it be the local development and business interests versus neighborhood and environmental activists, or whether it be the longtime residents of a community versus a network of newly arrived immigrant entrepreneurs (Fong 1994).
Castells (1997: 66–7) explains how local citizen movements evolve and develop their strong attraction for local residents.
When the world becomes too big to be controlled, social actors aim at shrinking it back to their size and reach. When networks dissolve time and space, people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic memory . . . These defensive reactions become sources of meaning and identity by constructing new cultural codes out of historical materials . . . This form of identity building revolves around resistance identity.
It leads to a new meaning of project identity.
Of the three main sets of goals Castells posits for urban movements, two may be especially tied to contests over “the present place.” Both the affirma- tion of local cultural identity and the conquest of local political autonomy (and citizen participation) firmly wrap residents’ self-identity and newfound meaning within the borders of their place. This is well illustrated by the Orange County case above of the proposed airport.
As Castells (1997: 61) notes, this may be seen as a “defensive identity”
– defensive against the unpredictable and uncontrollable. This actually has been deliberately fostered by local and federal governments. Such urban movements Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”
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