those who do planning work are caught in the centre of this ambiguous attitude (see Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1 The ambiguous position of planners.
I argue in this book that the politics of place cannot be bypassed. More than half of us now live in urban areas of one kind of another, and have a stake in working out how to combine our own opportunities for flourishing5 with those of others with whom we co-exist. As thinking
creatures always interacting with the rest of the natural world, and with pasts and futures, we also cannot avoid being concerned about how the way we live now may compromise future conditions for life, for ourselves and for others. It therefore matters in the twenty-first century how we, as social beings in political communities, approach the challenges of place
management and development.
What does it mean to approach place-governance with a planning orientation? Answers to this question evolved significantly through the twentieth century. An enduring concept embedded in the idea of planning is the belief that it is worth acting now to try to bring into being some aspiration for the future. A planning way of approaching place-governance therefore emphasises some aspirations about future place qualities. But what qualities and whose aspirations get to count?
A century ago, as urbanisation proceeded apace in rapidly industrialising countries, the
planning project was promoted for several reasons (UN-Habitat 2009). For some, the ambition was to display the power of leaders and their commitment to ‘modernising’ their cities. There are still leaders today whose ambitions have created the skyscraper displays of Pudong in Shanghai or Dubai in the Gulf States. Such ‘grand projects’ have been as much about display and beautification as about providing space for urban activities. Another motivation for taking up the planning project was to manage the process of urban expansion. In developed countries in the early to mid-twentieth century, and increasingly now in the urban megalopolises of the developing world, national and municipal governments have sought to control urban expansion by regulating how land is used and developed. Major concerns in attempts to regulate urban expansion centred throughout the twentieth century on relating land development to
infrastructure provision, and protecting areas where people live from polluting industries. The mechanism of ‘zoning’ land for particular uses arose from these concerns. Such concerns remain an important idea in the planning project today, emphasising the value of the convenience and operating efficiency of urban areas. A third motivation for the planning project was to make a contribution to redressing the social inequalities that have been a persistent feature of urban life. While the emphasis on beautification seemed to pander to the aspirations of affluent elites, efficiency and convenience were valued by the expanding urban middle classes. But poorer citizens and marginalised minority groups have faced hard
struggles to get a foothold from which to satisfy basic needs and access to urban opportunities.
Many of those promoting the planning project a century ago were motivated by finding ways to improve housing and living conditions for the poorest. Concern for justice in the way in which urban opportunities are distributed remains an important idea within the planning project.
A century ago, the planning project was conceived primarily in terms of its role in improving the physical fabric of cities. It was closely linked to concepts of the progressive ‘modernising’
of cities, though there were struggles over whether this modernisation should reflect the
ambitions of elites or the aspirations of ordinary city dwellers. However, as the century wore on, much more attention was given to the social and economic dimensions of the way in which places change and develop. Advocates of the planning project became concerned with how local economies developed and how places experiencing economic hardship could be helped by development initiatives. This in turn encouraged more attention to understanding social and economic dynamics, especially through systematic social scientific analysis. Understood in this way, the planning project could be associated with bringing knowledge to bear on public
policy choices (Friedmann 1987). But this still left open the question of what and whose knowledge got to count, the issue that preoccupied the residents in Greenpoint/Williamsburg.
For many, it seemed once again that it was the knowledge of elites that counted, a distant
‘them’, far from the worlds of ‘us’. This perception came to exist even in states formally committed to promoting the welfare of their citizens, as that welfare often seemed to be articulated in paternalist, top-down ways.
In the second part of the twentieth century these critical voices grew in volume. As projects informed by planning ideas rolled out across city cores, neighbourhoods and peripheries, protest movements and lobby groups began to articulate some serious failings of the planning project. Some of these protests helped to build the positive planning experiences presented in this book. One critique charged the planning project with being little more than a creature of business elites driven by capitalist profit making rather than any concern for the wider
collective interest. Others argued that the institutions and practices of formal government planning systems were being used systematically to oppress minorities or, in some post- colonial situations, to allow urban political elites to cream off the benefits of urban development for themselves. Manuel Castells showed in a study of a French city how the machinery of the planning system was used systematically to advance the interests of business and property owners, while limiting the possibilities of working-class residents (Castells 1977).6 Oren Yiftachel (1994, 1998) later highlighted how planning mechanisms were used in ways that discriminated against Palestinians in Israeli towns. Sub-Saharan African countries provide several examples of political elites using planning systems to maximise personal or tribal benefits.7 Such experiences and accounts encouraged a critical view of the planning project, as too close to the values of modernising elites and/or potentially corruptible by forms of politics with little concern for the collective interest of a political community.
These criticisms, however, were only in part about the planning project as such. They were just as much about the way in which the institutions and practices set up to advance deliberate place management and development could be subverted by powerful groups. How can
governance practices and cultures develop with the capacity to prevent such subversion? How is it possible to undertake place-governance work that gives more attention to people’s varied experiences and aspirations about living in urban areas? It is here that the planning project during the later part of the twentieth century came to draw on wider debates about the nature of political community and democratic life. It is not enough to leave the governance of places to elites and their advisers, nor to leave it merely to the mechanisms of formal representative democracy. Citizens and other stakeholders have knowledge to contribute and values to assert.
This increases the conflict and argument over what place qualities to privilege and what the priorities for place management and development in any urban area should be. Yet conflict and argument reflect the real diversity of experiences, imaginations and aspirations. This diversity is not only about conflicts between the interests of different groups. Political communities may value, at a general level, the promotion of better living conditions for all, greater efficiency in relating development to infrastructure, better-quality design of the physical fabric of urban areas and more attention to the longer-term environmental consequences of the way we live today. But how do these values get prioritised and translated when specific place management and development actions are taken up? How can one value be balanced against another?
This became a particularly important issue by the end of the twentieth century. By this time, concern for the condition of the natural environment and the relation between humans and
nature had become a major concern, as evidence of the damage that human action has caused to our planetary life was difficult to avoid. At the same time, economic activity had become more crisis prone and more globally inter-related, with some places being hubs of dynamic growth and others faced with economic collapse. Reviving business to make ‘places’ more
competitive became a major preoccupation of many countries and cities in the 1980s and 1990s. These economic and environmental concerns co-existed with concerns about social justice, often transformed into an emphasis on how to make political communities more
‘cohesive’ and less prone to major inequalities and the resentment this generates. In this
context, the search for a way of moving into the future in sustainable ways became an orienting goal for many governments, both national and local. Figure 7.2 presents an influential
expression of this idea developed within a European context.
Figure 7.2 Balanced and sustainable development: A European perspective.8
Source: Committee for Spatial Development 1999:10. European Spatial Development Perspective, 1999.
Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a number of concepts have become central to the planning project. The concept of sustainability gives an important slant to thinking about future possibilities. The concept of balancing and integrating diverse values recognises the reality of conflict, but also the necessity of moving beyond disagreement to enable action to be
taken where this is considered necessary or appropriate for the political community as a whole. The concept of participation recognises that elites and experts cannot be trusted alone to deliver ‘what is best’ for communities. The planning project has thus become associated with promoting conceptions of urban life that recognise human diversity, acknowledging that humans need to give respect to the environmental conditions that sustain them and
understanding that human flourishing depends on giving attention to multiple dimensions of human existence, as realised in particular places. Within this conception, the planning project partly centres on providing understanding and expertise and making a contribution to public debate about place management and development possibilities. But it also has a practical focus on what is required to realise programmes, policies and projects in specific conditions. It gives attention to practical action, to doing place-governance work. This book provides a journey through examples of such work inspired by a planning orientation.