In Search of the “Strategic” in Spatial Strategy Making1

 1. This paper is a development of a version produced for the Liber Amicorum prepared to celebrate the retirement of Professor Louis Albrechts at the Universiteit Leuven (Van den Broeck & Moulaert, 2008). I would like to thank the Editor, Heather Campbell and four anonymous referees for helpful and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Abstract

In recent years, city governments and other entities concerned with urban futures have been exhorted to produce spatial strategies, indicating how their areas might develop in the future. But many of the resultant strategies do little “strategic work” in the sense of shaping future development trajectories. This paper reviews the meaning of “strategic work” in terms of mobilising attention to an urban area as a whole, and influencing the way that multiple actors involved in urban development shape their interventions. It emphasises the key judgements which those involved in promoting such strategic work have to make and discusses how the capacity for making such judgements may be cultivated among individuals, groups, and the wider political community involved in urban governance.

Keywords:

• Spatial planning
• practical judgement
• strategy making
• public realm
• planning theory

Notes

 1. This paper is a development of a version produced for the Liber Amicorum prepared to celebrate the retirement of Professor Louis Albrechts at the Universiteit Leuven (Van den Broeck & Moulaert, 2008). I would like to thank the Editor, Heather Campbell and four anonymous referees for helpful and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

 2. See Albrechts et al. (2001, 2003), Fedeli and Gastaldi (2004), Marshall (2004), Motte (2007), Salet and Faludi (2000), Salet et al. (2003).

 3. Ward (2002) notes that it was common in the interwar years for a strategy to be known by the name of the planner who led the planning team. These days, it is more common for a strategy to be known by its place name.

 4. For the empirical basis of my reflections, see Healey et al. (1997), Vigar et al. (2000), Healey (2007). I have also benefited greatly from discussions with skilled strategic planners over the years, and learned from my own experience as a “strategic manager”.

 5. The term “governance” is used in several ways in planning literature. For some, it implies a shift from undertaking collective action primarily through the institutions of formal government and resort to all kinds of other coalitions, alliances and “partnerships”. My usage is as in the text above.

 6. Note that my use of “strategy” here is not related to the Habermasian distinction between strategic and communicative “rationality” (Habermas, 1984). A strategy in the sense that I use it here could arise through the exercise of both rationalities, or some hybrid between them.

 7. By the term “polity”, I mean a governance “culture” in the sense of the qualities of the political life of some collectivity with a political identity.

 8. These “orientations” are given different terms in the planning literature. The most common term, taken from the work of Schon and Rein (1994), is a “frame”, or framing set of ideas. This gets linked to the idea of a “discourse” as used in work on struggles between alternative orientations and in the capacity to transform them as developed in interpretive policy analysis, drawn from Foucauldian inspiration (see Hajer, 1995). Faludi uses the term “doctrine”, although he developed this to describe a very strongly developed conception of the Dutch landscape (Faludi & van der Valk, 1994).

 9. See Esping Anderson, 1990; Gualini, 2004, 2006; Jessop, 2002; Le Gales, 2002.

10. This has always been a challenge for those promoting a perspective on urban dynamics which pays attention to the interplay of programmes and projects across an urban area. See studies in planning history, notably Ward (2002), Nasr and Volait (2003).

11. I think, therefore, that the difference between my understanding of strategy and that argued recently by Newman (2008) is very small.

12. Cities which have attracted funding from various national and EU programmes are particularly prone to such experiences.

13. There is a long tradition in planning thought which emphasises the importance of creatively responding to specific situations in experimental and exploratory ways, rather than relying on prior models and templates, see Lindblom (1990), Schon (1983), Forester (1989, 1999).

14. See Giddensian structuration theory, actor-network concepts, the varieties of institutionalist understanding. In philosophy also, the rediscovery of the USA pragmatic tradition, and also the lessons from European phenomenology and post-structuralist philosophy, underline the importance of situated practical judgement within social processes.

15. See Flyvbjerg (2001) and Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2006) on case study method.

16. Talk by Larry Beasley, UBC, Vancouver, 9 June 2007.

17. See, for example, the cases of Amsterdam and the Cambridge sub-region in Healey (2007), and Salt Lake City in Briggs (2008). For the role of consultants see Healey (2008).

18. Here I draw on arguments which promote the positive benefits of discordant, conflicting viewpoints in resisting tendencies to univocal, monist policy discourses (see, for example, Connolly, 1987, 2005). The pluralism implied here is about a plurality of values and perspectives, not just a plurality of interests.

19. See Lindblom (1990), Healey (2007), see also Hillier (2007) for a similar conclusion arrived at through engaging with the poststructuralist theorists of complexity.

20. This image of a “compass” derives from the USA pragmatist writers (see Healey, 2009).

21. This draws on central arguments in the pragmatist tradition, see Thayer (1982).

22. See Campbell (2006) for a discussion of how general values, such as a concern for justice, are enacted in the making of practical judgements in the planning field.

23. See, for example, the new urbanism ideas (Grant, 2006), and the various ecologically inspired utopias that have appeared in recent years.

24. See Dewey (1982) for a very interesting discussion of these processes in an essay on the pattern of inquiry.

25. See James's idea of how we “heave” our will towards a new direction, cutting off another as we do so (in Thayer, 1982, pp. 184–185).

26. See Hajer (1995) on the re-framing that happens in the transformation of policy discourses.

27. See Healey (2004b), Briggs (2008).

28. Skilled practitioners have long known the reality of such contingencies. Social scientists are now giving these much more attention (Jessop, 2002; Sørensen & Torfing, 2007; Westbrook, 2005).

29. See Barrett and Fudge (1981) for a discussion of the interactive relation between policy and action, which argues that policies are often made as a consolidation of what is reflected in the flow of action.

30. See, for example, the classic case histories (Altshuler 1965; Meyerson & Banfield, 1955), and more recently also Flyvbjerg (1998). Other accounts by strategic planners include Albrechts (2001), Goodstadt and Buchan (2002), Krumholz and Forester (1990), Wannop (1985), while there are an increasing number of “longitudinal” accounts of urban development and planning experiences in individual cities (for example, Fainstein, 2001; Madanipour, 1998; Abbott, 2001; Punter, 2003; Hooper & Punter, 2006; Healey, 2007; Angotti, 2008; Briggs, 2008).