Louis Albrechts is Professor of Planning at the Department of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Leuven, Belgium. Moving people, goods and information in the 21st century The pioneering infrastructure of networked cities.
N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS
Innes is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she recently retired as Director of Contributors. Niraj Vermais Associate Professor of Planning and Management, and Director of Doctoral Programs at the University of Southern California.
P REFACE
I NTRODUCTION
A New Context for Planning?
The image of the network society is sometimes brilliant and sometimes a clumsy attempt to connect social and technical relationships. 4 For most participants at the Leuven meeting, the image of the network society was associated with the work of Manuel Castells.
P ART I
The Network Society
A New Paradigm
C HAPTER O NE
Communicative Action and the Network Society
A Pragmatic Marriage?
In the extreme case, this implies total autonomy of the living world from the nation-state. First is the issue of the relatively strong connection between Castells and the Frankfurt School.
C HAPTER T WO
Planning and the Network City
Discursive Correspondences
It is precisely in relation to the disordered totality of the city that the "network city" is most important. It focuses on the dynamics of the city's connective tissue and, in doing so, brings action into view.
C HAPTER T HREE
Escaping the Prison of “the
Present Place”: Can We Plan the Future of Localities in the Context
The core of the problem is that planning practice is trapped in an orientation to 'the current place'. How can planning better take into account changes from outside local boundaries? The artifice of “the current place” is supported by the governmental structure of place-based voting and contemporary decision-making.
C HAPTER F OUR
The Discourse Network
A Way of Understanding Policy Formation, Stability, and Change
Castells' point is that the spatial form of cities and regions today is shaped by the network: “the spatial articulation of dominant functions takes place in our societies in the network of interactions enabled by information technology devices” (Castells 1996: 412 ). . It is possible to identify a political form that we might call, with Ansell, 'the networked polity': 'a distinctive form of modern polity that is functionally and territorially fragmented, but nevertheless linked through a web of interorganizational and intergovernmental relations' ( Ansell 2000: 303). If the networked polity is symptomatic of the network society and 'the space of flows', then Castells' answer to 'who benefits?' would probably be,.
It is not difficult to pick out the usual suspects: the 'road lobby', the oil and car companies, the engineering profession, the weakness of the public transport agencies, the propaganda of the road service agencies (e.g. the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria), all constantly reinforced by the shock jocks of talkback radio, but also by cowardly or blinkered politicians who respond to what they see as public demand (see Mees 2000). Storylines coordinate action through what Hajer calls “discourse coalitions.” These are “the entirety of (1) a series of storylines; (2) the actors who portray these storylines; and (3) the practices on which this discursive activity is based” (Hajer 1995: 65).
C OMMENTARY
Networks and Planning Thought
All three disciplinary traditions speak to important aspects of what we do in planning. Verma and Shin take as their starting point Castells' concept of the network society and of networks, which they describe as a globally interconnected and interdependent 'giant' of companies, groups, territories and populations. They explore the potential theoretical relationship of the 'network society' with Habermas' views on communicative rationality.
Beauregard is interested in the literary and linguistic dimension of the network idea, and explores the metaphor of the "network city." He compares along the way some of the other adjectives and metaphors used with Commentary: Networks and Planning Thought. We need to "go with the flow" as we try to improve that flow to achieve some of the outcomes that can emerge from networks at their best.
P ART II
Organization of Space and Time
C HAPTER F IVE
Cities and Transport: Exploring the Need for New Planning Approaches
The rest of the chapter explores this potential and illustrates it in the Amsterdam case. At the bottom of the center line, a third ideal situation is seen, represented by Cities and Transport. Let us illustrate this through an application of the model to station areas in the Amsterdam city region (Figure 5.3; for details see Bertolini 1999).
The withdrawal in the early 1990s of an ambitious project to redevelop the areas around Amsterdam Central Station (as part of the so-called IJ-banks project) is a concrete signal of this. From a change-centered perspective, it is particularly interesting to link the development patterns in the urban region to the morphology of the transport networks.
C HAPTER S IX
Networking for Trans-national
Missing Links”: Tracing the Political Success of European High-speed Rail
This chapter also provides insight into the effectiveness of the EU as a new form of government. In Germany, the initial approach to high-speed rail was to concentrate on certain parts of the dense network to overcome bottlenecks. However, pressure from industry lobby groups was not the only reason for the success of the 'Missing Links'/TEN concept and the resulting EU-backed high-speed rail initiatives in the early 1990s.
However, more than 60 percent of the EU's special TEN-T budget line up to 1998 went to rail, with two-thirds of that dedicated to high-speed rail. It is clear that, in the case of the TENs, the European Union has an interest in recognizing and securing these supra-national benefits.
C HAPTER SEVEN
Strategies for Networked Cities
It is therefore worth briefly discussing each of these weaknesses in this first part of the chapter. A third of the world's population has yet to make a phone call (let alone go online). "Dot-con": The brilliant ideologies of the "Information Age" as a camouflage for neoliberalism and uneven development.
With the dissolution of the city into the ever-emerging metropolis, our existence slips into a permanent mobility. Instead, the mechanisms for the public that arise in connection with the new mobility infrastructures should be imagined in completely new ways.
C HAPTER E IGHT
The “Network City”: A New Old Way of Thinking Cities in the ICT Age
The real legacy of the Internet is not the birth of thousands of new online businesses, but the transformation of existing businesses (Barabási 2002: 216). It has remained a utopian vision of urban development, in contrast to the work of the European network thinker Cerdà, which had a significant impact on the development of Barcelona. Our final example of rereading the classics is Lynch, perhaps best known for his “image of the city” (Lynch 1960), which inspired Page and Phillips (2003a) in their urban design for Jersey City.
According to Lynch, the image of a city depends on paths, edges, nodes, districts, landmarks and "the sense of the whole." Lynch had also been working at Jersey City at the time. The work of the drawing room and new network-based concepts prove that this is possible.
Challenging the “Old” Urban Planning Paradigm: The Network Approach
What is reflected in the widely implemented network policies is, on the contrary, evidence of power, lobbies and territorialism. Despite the aesthetic qualities of the Italian Renaissance plans, as for example in the case of Palma Nova, the urban planning patterns are essentially geometric. The challenge here is to move away from the essentialist, static, Euclidean and object-oriented representations of space from above – which have been key axioms in the formation of modern urban planning – towards something more.
No one expects every town and village in the outlying suburbs of Paris to have its own metro station. The fractal dimension expresses consistency in the occupation of space, according to any scale of observation.
C HAPTER N INE
Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in the Context of “the Network Society”
Nor can planners assume that their texts will elicit a single desired response if "read correctly." The meaning of the text can be contested and negotiated between the author and its many readers. Both Buell and David Harvey (2000) wrote before 9/11—a moment that made a terrifying joke of the "end of history" thesis—that the contemporary scientific and literary world is full of explorations of "the imaginary" and of utopian possibilities .If we think of each place as being a node in the global web, where each place is connected to all other places through a highly fluid and ever-changing set of relations, then we can connect Buell's conception of place with the urban theorists' research on the global city and the "network society" (see figure 9.2).
When told by urban theorists and other scholars, these common urban narratives often seem to express a point of view (or subject position) that is outside or above the Web, constructing understandings of the Web that privilege class above all other relations and identities, and tend to treat “the global” as the locus of the dynamic flows and driving forces of history. 11 See Rotella (2003) for an analysis of nostalgic stories about 'the old neighborhood' of Chicago's South Side.
C HAPTER T EN
Network Complexity and the Imaginative Power of Strategic
In conclusion, and despite frequent use of the 'network society' as a metaphor, current episodes in strategic spatial planning struggle to translate concepts of relational complexity into a multiplex, relational spatial imagination (Healey 2004c). The latest efforts in strategic spatial planning reflect a challenge to the image of the state as a separate, autonomous sphere within society, operating according to the principles of nested hierarchy. Recent European episodes in strategic spatial planning tend to assume that the power to change forms of governance will come from developing the interactive practices of some form of collaborative partnerships.
This assumes that transformative potential lies in the multiplicity of tensions and tensions of the relational complexity of governance processes, creating tensions of all kinds. The spatial and governance imagination, expressed and mobilized in recent strategic spatial planning efforts in city regions in Europe, shows some signs of appreciating the relational complexity of urban and regional dynamics.
Imagining Urban Transformation
For Healey, the challenge is to develop new kinds of spatial and managerial imaginaries that are more attuned to the realities of the networked society. It is a valuable contribution precisely for this head-to-head engagement with and development of the concept of network complexity. Despite his nuanced discussion of the "planner as author" and his acknowledgment of the need for multiple stories to be told, we are left with questions about presumed receptive listeners, and about the institutional arrangements by which multiple stories manage to be told. to become. .
Throgmorton seems to have missed the real point of the political economy critique of his work. Throgmorton tries to engage with the relational challenges of the network society, but unlike Healey he is not really concerned with the intellectual or political challenges.
P ART III
Policy Networks and Governance
C HAPTER E LEVEN
Why Liberal Planning Cannot Manage the Network Society
Lessons from Community Action
Second, the case provides an example of the "network thinking" that planners must master in order to influence the shape of a networked society, while illustrating challenges in developing this thinking. So was the initiative of the Task Force Chairman to pursue and provide resources. These limitations can be seen as the result of the parents' isolation from social networks.
Part of the explanation is that few people have the training or skills for the job. Leaving the "social" and "political" place to others such as social workers, public administrators, educators, and public health workers, planners paid far more attention to land use than to land users—the people and organizations whose Howell S.