Planning and design, as disciplines and (self-conscious and self-labeled) professions, have different histories. Planning in this sense is a product of the 20th century (Allmendinger, 2002;
Platt, 2003), while design (first architecture) is self-identified at least since ancient Greek times. Planning and design perspectives, as defined above, are bound to be much older, as their emergence can plausibly be linked to Neolithic city formation, or the Neolithic revolution itself. Villages, agricultural land use, trade, and cities required specialization, role formation, diversification of land use, and much higher levels of spatial coordination (Luhmann, 1995;
Seabright, 2010). The lineages of spatial planning and spatial design perspectives are quite different though. Although the complexity of coordination in spatial planning increased with the centralization of the state and later its democratization (involving more actors), the history of spatial design is also tied to state development, but more indirectly, through the increase of patronage. Complex cities produced rich citizens and proud city governments that could engage in private and public works that were the product of a design philosophy, with the sum of city space given higher consideration than the separate parts (Braunfels, 1990; Krieger, 2000;
Mumford, 1961; Rios, 2008).
Architectural design and the reflection on it, architectural theory, were quickly accompanied by the practice and theory of urban design (Braunfels, 1990; Rossi, 1982; Vitruvius, 20bc),
although a separate profession developed only much later. Landscape architecture came later, as its emergence required the removal of more conceptual obstacles (Waldheim, 2006). One can say that only during the renaissance, the concepts of landscape, the perception of human power, and the traditions of garden architecture and city design were developed far enough, and the political structures were centralized enough, to bring forth what we would call landscape architecture (Van Assche, 2004). It took an understanding of our surroundings as somehow unified, somehow structured, and an idea that people were allowed and capable of grasping and improving that structure (Hunt, 2000, 1992). The beauty of forests and meadows had been sung long before, but in the Middle Ages, it was inconceivable to design a
picturesque rural landscape (Glacken, 1967; Hunt, 1992). Once landscape architecture became thinkable and practically possible, the tradition started to develop, accompanied by modes of reflection that brought styles, fashions, and disputes with them (Swaffield, 2002; Wimmer,
1989). At different points in time, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and painting infused the young discipline with new ideas (Hunt, 1992; Le Dantec and Le Dantec, 1993). Sternberg (2000), writing after a few centuries of capitalism, considers the essence of urban design (but the argument applies to landscape architecture as well) as the re-integration of the (concept of) human living environments, whose unity was fragmented by commodification and the ensuing spatial, economic, legal, and conceptual parceling.
The fashion of reflection on design that emerged in the renaissance spurred the practice of design (Luhmann, 2000), while the intellectual ambitions of rulers became more and more visible in large-scale design interventions. It obviously required money, manpower, and expertise, and with economic growth and political consolidation in postrenaissance Europe, similar evolutions could be observed everywhere. The new nation states France and Spain developed city-design schemes that were not thinkable before the centralization of power and the intensification of reflection (Braunfels, 1990; Van Assche, 2004). In France, in the 18th century, engineering became an integral part of city planning, and city planning became the blend of design, science, and politics, which many still recognize as its essence (Gutkind, 1970; Van de Vijver, 2003). In the Europe of the baroque period, good design was seen as the application of universal rules and the judicious deviation from those (Hall, 1997; Choay, 1969). The rules were seen as rules of form, and application of the rules was expected to lead to a certain appearance.
City design became a part of both the scientific and artistic canons in the 17th century, the
century of absolutism and centralized monarchies (Braunfels, 1990). There was little reflection on the coordination of actors and on planning as we defined it, but the practice of planning was emerging, as even in absolutist Europe, larger projects (with the exception of parks and
palaces) did involve a variety of actors that did more than just following orders. The forms of civil governance and local democracy that rose to prominence in the city development of the 11th and 12th centuries survived the Middle Ages, and new designs were rarely unilaterally imposed on cities (Waterhouse, 1993). Cities had an independence, and their internal political ecology was still very much alive and very complex in the age of nationalism and
centralization (Mumford, 1961).
Thus, one can speak of actors that had to look for some form of coordination and one can speak of planning. The strong family-likeness of baroque and neoclassical designs tend to veil the case- and site-specific negotiations that are behind them. Architects, with a technical and artistic background, were responsible, and the same architects were schooled in the arts of politics and diplomacy since the Middle Ages (Benevolo, 1980), when the chief architect of large churches had to be a skilled politician amid a wealth of civil and religious organizations that all wanted something different.
While the practice of landscape architecture was born in 18th-century England, once the design of large areas – transcending the size of private grounds and the language of geometry – was established, it took a hold on the European imagination very quickly (Hunt, 1992; Swaffield, 2002). The landscape architect as a role emerged, a tradition of reflection took off, and the practice of landscape architecture was transferred in the late 18th century to urban areas. First,
the landscape architect was restricted to parks that were made to look more “natural,” but in the course of the 19th century, the whole city fabric became observable as a landscape that could be manipulated and improved. The difference with the older city design traditions was not only the possibility of more natural forms, a different design language (cf. Spirn, 1984), but the possibility to make visions that included old and new elements, natural and artificial
elements, and the possibility to combine different languages of form in the same urban fabric (Madanipour, 1997; Rossi, 1982; Van Assche, 2004). Certainly older cities did have these features in reality, but they were not part of the imagination of the city designer.
In that same 19th century, nation states became fully consolidated and centralized, but these new strong containers of power were permeated by a new ideology, a combination of democratic empowerment and technoscientific control (Scott, 1998). Both citizens and the territory could be reshaped by scientific means, and the optimal functioning of the state and the elevation of the community required such combination of social and physical engineering (Gunder, 2010). In the United States, with its rapidly growing urban areas, park and parkway systems were widely applied, examples of large-scale landscape architecture under the
auspices of the planning state (Mumford, 1961). In Europe, around the turn of the 20th century, many countries had developed various policies, plans, and departments that contributed to spatial planning (Hall, 2002; Sutcliffe, 1981). City planning transformed easily into rural planning, regional planning, and transportation planning, as design became less and less a consideration, and as scientific evidence and bureaucratic/procedural approaches took the upper hand. The scientific reflection on “planning” started to distinguish itself from early sociology, and from the more architecturally driven traditions of city design and landscape architecture (Hall, 2002; Handlin and Burchard, 1966).
What became called “urban design” in the second half of the 20th century (Cuthbert, 2010), practiced by architects, landscape architects, city planners, artists, and also by professionals opting for the new label, drew on a myriad of older traditions, including town planning (in its design orientation), landscape architecture, architecture, and art. Initially, the label referred mostly to esthetic approaches of small-scale city spaces (squares and street-scaping), but later, its semantics expanded, to include larger scale designs, environmental, social, and economic considerations—although Cuthbert (2007) observes that different professions and schools return to their own preferred definition, entailing that some versions still restrict the
phenomenon to large-scale architecture. With the more inclusive definitions, the overlap with planning grew, as well as with landscape architecture and architecture (e.g. in the architecture urbaine tradition).
Even if these broad developments can be traced in European and American history, an understanding of the current roles of planning and design in a specific place, as well as transformation options, requires first of all a mapping of the evolutionary paths in the governance of a community. In other words, the actors, rules, and organizations developed differently in different communities, and the history of their interactions is what mostly shaped the current set of institutions (cf. Greif, 2006; Luhmann, 1995; North, 2005; Van Assche et al., 2011). It is in the broader history sketched that ideas, political structures, and scientific tools became available to shape the spatial environment. Which tools where used when, and by
whom, is a product of political games and institutional evolutions at a smaller scale (cf.
Cuthbert, 2006; Nielsen and Simonsen, 2003). In areas with very strong local governments (as in the United States), the deepest understanding can be gained by looking at local evolutions, while in Europe, where the nation state was clearly the essential container of power, the evolution of national administrations and policies has to be included more explicitly as a
context for local games. In the words of Kunzmann (1999), “An Italian planner trained in Milan would not find herself comfortable in the Ruhr convincing traditional Labour governments that protecting the environment is more important than the development of industrial areas on virgin lands” (p. 512). The pathway of governance shapes the evolution of a planning arena (cf.
Geddes, 1968[1915]; Harvey, 1989). In evolving governance, different actors vie for a position of power, for impact on spatial organization: different governmental organizations, scientific disciplines, professional roles, and an array of economic actors (Flyvbjerg, 1998;
Hillier, 2002).
Mapping of actors, rules, policies, and documents is not enough to understand the dialectics of planning and design. It is essential to discern what the roles of these actors and documents are and which effects they have on spatial decision making. In addition, each actor creates its own perspective and interprets the history of the planning system and of society differently
(Luhmann, 1995; Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008). Talen (2009: 146) traces form-based coding back to the codex of Hammurabi, about 4,000 years ago, a reconstruction of history that is not untrue but certainly framed by the contemporary design approach of new urbanism, and the associated identity politics. Consequently, actors tend to have a different image of their own present and future roles than what would be ascribed to them by other players (Gunder and Hillier, 2009). Cuthbert (2010), in an insightful overview of readers on urban design, duly notes that some consider the field to be born at Harvard circa 1950, tied to (small-scale)
“project design” and carried out by architects, while others find “staking the claim for urban design on the basis of naming a phenomenon that has existed since Catal Huyuk, let us say 10,000 years, seems far-fetched to say the least” (p. 446).
In order to understand the evolution of specific roles of planning and design perspectives, we believe that the following six key aspects of the dialectics of planning and design require analysis: (1) institutionalization, (2) flexible policy integration, (3) professional and
disciplinary traditions, (4) the role of esthetics, (5) overlap between planning and design, and (6) transformation capacity. Once again, we intend to delineate the dialectics between these two perspectives, not between the actors that bear their names.