Places need better planning not less

ABSTRACT

The authors writing in this special issue pierce the dark clouds of populist cynicism that fuel rightwing discontent. Do not retreat from the practice of hopeful professional analysis. Embrace and strengthen utopian plans. Include relevant details to attract and inspire popular interest and uptake. Show the inescapable impacts of climate change and the dramatic physical changes that need be done. Nurture a plurality of democratic planning experiments bridging institutional and cultural barriers. Learn to find common cause and commonsense planning together without expecting convergence or unanimity. Foster resilient spatial planning communities using multi-disciplinary expertise honed with practical experience to anticipate and prepare for future uncertainty. Make plans that persuade more than compel. Acknowledge the complexity of cities and the interplay among governments responsible for their fate. Use rational expertise sparingly preparing plans with others.

KEYWORDS:

• Craft
• discipline
• movement
• practice
• pragmatist

Introduction

I have always studied planning at the retail level versus the wholesale level. What do people do as they make plans? What do they think and feel as they ponder what to do for the future (Hoch 1994, 2012, 2022)? This poses a challenge for me trying to grasp how all the nations of Europe might learn from each other how to plan! Thirty years ago, I was worried that the postmodern blues would sap the vigour from liberal and progressive confidence in the spatial planning enterprise. Quick to criticize our own moral, conceptual and political shortfalls planning scholars spent too little effort investigating how conservative elites created and mobilized think tanks, institutes and digital media outlets legitimizing neoliberal values while condemning government planning. As my scholarship persuaded me that everyone plans, I realized that binding the power of collective governance with the varieties of spatial planning was a mistake. (Here Patsy Healey and I parted ways). The conceptual, emotional and moral strength of plan making flows from its independence from decision making. What makes professional planning analysis and judgment legitimate is its detachment from a particular political outcome. Professionals should and do engage in political activity, but the plans they make need to offer advice about imagined outcomes based on evidence and argument. This persuasion admits bias, but invites publicity, scrutiny and review by critics, partisans and supporters. We should not try to make plans that compel consent by force of will, law or violent threat. This diminishes the power of planning as a tool for comparing and selecting among the choices at hand. The professional plans made by the enemies of democracy do not recognize or practice the discipline of deliberative exposure to wide ranging options. This temptation haunts every meaningful public planning episode. I am heartened by the expansion of planning scholarship that now explores the intersection of intention and plan, uncovering the legacies of professional exploitation, subjection and domination that distort moral vision and occlude fair judgment. Ferreting out the ugly and the bad needs to be complemented by studying moments of genuine democratic persuasion.

Institutions and organizations do this work, I know. I am still astonished how we learn and comply with rules and norms tacitly and willingly composing layers of social and cultural order. Willem Salet (2018) has pierced the paradox of action and norm showing how they complement each other even as partisans favouring one over the other squabble. idealistic reformers long ago helped launch the astonishing enterprise of city planning. These ambitious professionals sought to use spatial relationships to tame and transform the inefficiencies, inequalities and ugly excess of the industrial empires fuelling the uneven growth of modern urban regions. These reformers wed scientific inquiry with the powers of physical design to compose master plans for city towns. After two world wars and the Great Depression the design professionals expanded their ranks to include recruits schooled in social sciences and public service. Laws and regulations emerged at the national, provincial and local levels carving out distinct political and administrative cultures for government planning. Planning professions within each nation expanded membership to include new administrators and consultants. Within a generation it became evident that systems of geographic interdependence surpassed national boundaries and planners imagined forming institutions that might bind together plans from adjoining nation states. European Planning Studies was created in recognition of this reality.

The authors in this special issue offer a sample of the diversity of views held by the planning intelligentsia. Many acknowledge the growing success of rightwing political movements challenging the ambitious social and environmental goals of government sponsored spatial planning. They also recognize the waning influence of neo-liberal policies that too often intensified spatial inequalities at public expense. Some criticize aspects of current spatial planning practice. All propose ideas for what professional planners and scholars can and should do to improve spatial planning conceptually, institutionally, politically and educationally.

Planning

Each of us makes plans. We imaginatively compose and compare actions before we act. Reflecting on possible or probable outcomes informs our intentions toward the future. This contrasts with impulsive, unconscious, or habitual action that makes up most of what we do. We learn how to make plans living with others. This constitutes a vast field of planning happening every place people inhabit.

Spatial planning denotes the activities of people seeking to anticipate, understand and cope with the consequences of geographic and locational problems posed by human alteration of the physical environment. Professional planners as well as a host of different government, corporate and community actors make plans for places. I lump these efforts together as the planning movement because all share the belief that purposeful preparation for the future will offer useful remedies to current spatial problems. Moral ideals inform political options for collective action.

The planning discipline includes the students and scholars of spatial planning. This relatively small group studies the practice and impact of spatial plans and planning for places across the globe. It includes planning school faculty, allied scholars in geography, architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, design, researchers in specialized institutes, government and corporate research divisions and assorted consultancies. These are the folks who sponsored this journal, write for it, review submissions and help manage its publication.

I presume that each of us reading this special issue are members of the planning field, movement and discipline (Hoch 2011). I use these distinctions to organize my interpretation of the essays. Some essays focus on how the planning movement can and should shape the complex field of human plans. Others question what discipline proposes in relation to what the field offers and allows. Finally, some focus on improving the relationship between the planning movement and its disciplinarians.

Planning movement governs the field

Naess

Naess revives the radical sustainability demands of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report. He argues that more recent reports exaggerate the benefits of spatial concentration and avoid the absolute decrease in urban growth needed to curb global warming. His egalitarian outlook calls not only for economic contraction, but radical redistribution from rich to poor and from global north to global south. Planning professionals are too timid in their conceptions of the future for places. They need to propose sustainable urban alternatives that meet climate action goals even as they dramatically reduce the standard of living of millions of European households.

Naess admits that institutional systems historically created to generate and support the economic prominence of European nations resist radical reform. However, the recent COVID pandemic provides a compelling example of economic contraction that received popular support. Countries adopted policies that restricted work and travel for large portions of the population. Many European nations provided emergency assistance including cash payments to offset the hardship of unemployment. Fossil fuel use plummeted across the board. There was consensus among the population about protecting the lives of the vulnerable, even as vocal minorities resisted these policies.

The impacts of global warming will prove vastly more deadly than the pandemic, but making these consequences appear compelling proves hard to do. The social impacts of COVID lockdown were felt more unevenly in less prosperous nations. The proliferation of false narratives fuelled fears and conspiracy stories contradicting the unpleasant facts detailed by public health officials. The roll out of vaccines followed the uneven institutional contours of privilege laid down over centuries of exploitation of north over south.

Naess envisions professional planners focusing less on the conduct of planning and more about making plans that take full measure of unsustainable development and offer means to implement what will be unpopular policies of contraction and redistribution. Professional government planners may possess knowledge and expertise, but this alone does not give the plans they compose for a place legitimacy among the affected citizens. The popularity of rightwing populism feeds on and foments a mistrust of government administrators issuing commands or enforcing regulations.

Recognizing this legitimacy gap requires that planning officials learn how to persuade people to willingly alter their own plans to fit with the plans of others. This usually takes time and effort. First, learn what people want and need based on the problems they are experiencing. Second, do this by including them in making the plan. This need not include everyone in a jurisdiction, but those most likely to bear the consequences. Learning how to conduct inclusion is not public relations, but a learning strategy that shapes the purpose and content of spatial plans. Resilience flows not from regulatory compliance, but the creative interaction of groups of people familiar enough with local conditions to anticipate and prepare for expected yet unpredictable events.

Olesen

Strategic spatial planning is popular in prosperous times as political regimes use the publicly sponsored plans to justify decisions among future settlement options. Strategic spatial plans prove less attractive during economic contraction as few places willingly accept cutbacks. For instance, in 1990s Denmark the national government offered support for spatial plans that offered options for future places – in effect spatial designs detailing different combinations of infrastructure improvements and associated urban development. These proved popular at first but were not really followed. After the 2008 recession the neoliberal model took hold letting developer driven project demands set the planning agenda. Increasing political support for reduction in fossil fuel consumption has stimulated windmill provision. Olesen argues for a revival of national spatial planning for Denmark that helps balance the rapid expansion of windmills with local environmental impacts.

He envisions plans that will provide a conceptual bridge linking the national technical demands of windmill locations with the environmental and social needs of the environments in each placement locale. This requires that the integrated plans show spatial arrangements in enough visual detail to offer viewers meaningful landscapes that reconcile the trade-offs between global and local impacts. Olesen wants professional planners to make plans so compelling that those who read the plan will be convinced by its arguments and inspired by its aspirations.

I am no fan of neoliberalism, but we need to own up to the historical evidence demonstrating that government plans that rely upon enforced compliance rarely inspire universal uptake. In the United States, the incubator of neoliberalism, the national government lacks the authority to make spatial plans as in Denmark. Spatial planning does happen, but through a complex network of federal, state and local government agencies each with its own plans – some written, mostly not. Lawyers and consultants plus civil servants compose plans for infrastructure improvements and development projects. Anticipating the legal boundaries of jurisdictional turf to avoid project blocking lawsuits requires a different kind of planning skill than negotiating bureaucratic plan requirements travelling through national, regional, provincial and local government levels. I agree with Olesen about making better plans, but I think we need to learn more about what sorts of institutional changes will include enough relevant actors doing these plans to replace compliance with common sense (Kaza 2019).

Healey

Healey insists that the neoliberal policy regime in the UK has not delivered on its promise of economic and social wellbeing. Dependence on fossil fuel remains stubbornly high and social inequality has reached astonishing levels. The increased social fragmentation of neoliberalism and the social isolation imposed by the recent COVID pandemic exposed the limits of a narrow economic outlook. However, populist movements have taken hold in some places where the revival of nativism, racial animus and cultural superiority foments a cynical dismissal of progressive hopes for the future. Nostalgia trumps insight about the sources of exploitation. Healey worries about the tremendous political difficulty of disarming the powerful attraction of these proto fascist ideas at the national scale.

After fair warning she offers qualified hope for the ideas of those who have reframed a progressive role for the national government funding social infrastructure: education and healthcare especially. These reform ideas include climate action interventions that promise to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in every aspect of modern life. Anxiety and uncertainty about the future for Europe in shifting global alignments makes room for spatial planning.

The planning movement has developed two layers of professional institutional practice relevant for meeting this uncertainty. First, the hard won experiential, institutional and disciplinary knowledge learned trying to anticipate and cope with the externalities and inequalities of neoliberal excess has improved planners’ conceptual grip on the future. Second, learning to include many more stakeholders, partners and constituents in the effort to both imagine and undertake change has turned societal guidance into a less abstract and more grounded form of strategic navigation.

Healey locates the work of European Planning Studies as a tool for the multidisciplinary study and analysis of professional planning efforts across Europe. Scholars in complementary disciplines of design, engineering, geography, landscape architecture and architecture now recognize the complexity of places and what it takes to anticipate and alter their futures. Instead of relying on prediction and control research practice has turned to experimental study of situations formed at the nexus of many ill-defined relationships. Careful evaluation of context laden interventions offers practical improvements for a place while helping others learn what aspects of practice might be relevant elsewhere. The attention to interactive effects and their future impacts combines the practical and analytical dimensions of judgment. Growing recognition of the layers of interdependence binding people and place has challenged human primacy and confidence in conceptions of inevitable progress.

Healey reminds us that the planning movement has long included a holistic conception of interaction shaping the future of places. The knowledge that planning scholars have helped create and foster has for 50 years recognized the problems with a narrow rational planning. Conceiving, testing, modifying and practicing alternative place focused inquiry and reform has generated useful results.

But Healey is more critical and ambitious. The planning institutions and practitioners have not adopted a progressive political approach to guide how planning knowledge is used and for what purposes. Healey lays out four political pathways: autocratic, neoliberal, welfarist and communitarian. The kind of political regime that professional planners and scholars need adopt is the communitarian. Link spatial planning with political movements that seek bottom-up civic improvement with practical innovations in joint governance. Show people how practical sharing sensitive to ecological as well as economic and social relationships can outperform elite control or market competition.

Planning in my view cannot lead because it does not decide. It offers advice about options and imagined effects. It persuades but does not compel. Here I disagree with those who want plans to impose compliance like laws enforcement. The coupling of planning and law to institutionalize the goals and policies in a plan for a place creates ambiguity. Planners who administer the regulation receive blame for a law they did not make. As bureaucratic employees they must administer the law – a land cop. As professionals they advise the petitioner about options within the law – land planner. This distinction gets lost in the routine practice of government sponsored land planning.

Grange

Grange openly criticizes the efforts of rightwing populists against democratic planning. She tells the story of how threats, intimidation and violent rhetoric was deployed to oppose the provision of one thousand shelters for foreign migrants in Gothenberg, Sweden. Local officials caved into these demands approving only 57. The violence prone rightwing opponents pose a serious challenge because they cynically exploit the tolerance and trust of democratic institutions. They use public legislative and administrative domains to claim ironically that these very institutions are not democratic but corrupted by elites. Plans composed through such participation are merely a façade for elite power. Replace these illegitimate institutions with a popular plebiscite. The emergence of rightwing populist movements is not spontaneous, but the result of plans sponsored by corporations, parties, non-profit associations and other social groups. The nostalgic reconstruction of white victimization and cultural threat posed by the coloured masses was manufactured to justify new plans for imposing public order. The message proves attractive and compelling to millions of people. The populist narratives may be deceitful, but the grievances and suffering of the people who believe them deserve acknowledgement. Do we accept the polarization of positions hyped by the rightwing activists, or do we use our talent and skill to understand these attachments and what alternatives we might offer that would replace them? Grange argues that professional associations of planners take direct political action criticizing antidemocratic planning by right wing activists.

I share Grange’s assessment, but not her prescription. Recruiting planning associations designed for scholarly discourse to conduct political battle with right wing partisans seems foolhardy. Government planning faces legitimacy challenges from critics within its ranks (conservative, bureaucratic, racist, colonial, elitist) and from those outside who question the competence, fairness, transparency and truthfulness of professional plans or regulatory norms. Responding to these criticisms through reflection and reform strengthens the relationships with the critics who may recognize and acknowledge these improvements even as they find new failings to call out. What can we study and learn about the populist partisans that might de-escalate the rhetorical excess and identify remnants of shared humanity?

We often take for granted the moral infrastructure of our democracies. Civics is boring until our neighbour shows up at the planning meeting with a loaded sidearm and a group of rowdy protestors in tow. Defending the rule of law in a democracy cannot rely solely upon the strong arm of the police but requires confidence and trust in each other as participants. Habermas reminds us of this power as he details what we presume as we conduct democratic speech: comprehensible, truthful, legitimate and sincere. The populists hijack political speech violating these conditions in clever and emotionally satisfying ways. This violence eventually grows both tiresome and troublesome as people yearn for speech that respects these practical norms. Cynicism, conspiracy and lying undermine the solidarity we each rely upon in our intimate relations with partners, family, friends and colleagues. How do we anticipate and mobilize these social bonds?

What discipline proposes and the field offers & allows

Bertolini

Instead of continuing down the path to sprawling urban places tied together by auto friendly roadways, Bertolini explores what it might mean to turn roads into pedestrian paths linking denser mixed-use settlements. He scans the current field of urban transport and settlement with an eye on the growing climate crisis. Abstracting from immediate political and social attachments and the inertia these represent, Bertolini imagines what might be done now and in near future European settlements to create truly sustainable places. What if people integrate the regional biome into the physical fabric of the local built environment.

Bertolini explores what a major shift in everyday behaviour might entail and how professional planning might anticipate and prepare places for these sorts of changes. He offers a radical reimagining of the physical features of urban places that are much less reliant on the automobile. This requires a utopian lift to rise above the inertia of more than a century of infrastructure sunk cost and to imagine all of us changing a host of largely unconscious habits.

Bertolini first projects a successful transition to electric vehicles. This will lead to more auto dependence intensifying urban gridlock and a parking nightmare. This mobility adjustment is more palliative than cure. He warns us all to stop thinking of ways to reduce transport emissions and focus on how to reorient the spatial organization of settlements to foster pedestrian cycling based urban locales with more generous public transit linking these places. Bertolini does not dwell on the transition but drafts some of the basic urban ‘what if’ components for a post mobility urban place: convivial streets, proximate availability of basic sociability, pedestrian & cycling access to work, services & goods. He does list obvious challenges: lifestyles revamped, old identities recast, new inequalities remedied, new jobs created and fiscal systems revised.

Bertolini proposes social experimentation as the primary vehicle delivering folks to the post mobility urban place. These experiments need to be both practically feasible and socially attractive. Bertolini imagines the spread of narratives weaving together the multidimensional features of the proximate neighbourhood nested within a biome friendly metropolitan landscape. Narrowly focused economic growth assessments of future costs and benefits lack the proper focus and form. He offers a table summarizing examples of nascent transformational experiments already underway at different spatial scales from city streets to metro region. The institutional practice of government planning too often lags these emerging initiatives. Bertolini urges professional planners to embrace the radical imaginary of the proximate urban place – the post mobility settlement of the future. He proposes that professional planners learn to contribute to spatial experiments offering feasible practical options that disrupt and replace attachments to unsustainable mobility habits.

Ironic that more than a century after Kropotkin and Howard that our imagined urban places for the future can still draw upon their ideas. We move from our now vividly unsustainable capitalist growth model in any of its national versions to a cyclical ecologically sensitive sharing economy tied to place. Bertolini sidesteps how capitalist real estate investment, land markets, property ownership shape the spatial organization of land in metropolitan areas across Europe and the globe. State socialist efforts to substitute collective ownership for private ownership in the last century did not fare very well. I think about the irony of China’s post Mao adoption of capitalist market relations that turned a system of proximate pedestrian bicycle dependent urban and rural places into booming metropolitan regions within a single generation. This does not discredit Bertolini’s challenge but reminds us to be wary of experiments insensitive to the lessons of everyday attachments. Why did Shanghai adopt and promote a Chicago style urbanization rather than Copenhagen’s?

Hilllier

Once we recognize the legal and cultural appropriation that our institutions generate then it follows that the planning undertaken within or sponsored by these institutions usually does the same. The host of intermediaries binding markets for land, labour and capital promote the normalization of social and environmental differences. Nations, provinces, local governments, intergovernmental authorities, corporations, political parties and social movements compose political institutions that seek to govern how this happens within and among places across the globe. Professional planners and planning take shape within the nexus of these agencies and their norms. Adopting a relational understanding of these comingled norms can inspire and inform resistance and transformation.

Hillier uses the work of a single artist to tell us how people on the margins of conventional norms push past colonial limits introducing new players who enact their planning own moves. Artistic works can shake up familiar unconscious habits and offer imaginative options instead. Hillier offers detailed interpretation of a painting by Lubina Himid, The Operating Table to show three women doing planning that subverts and transforms conventional land planning. Hillier distinguishes three kinds of artistic synthesis: connective, conjunctive and disjunctive. The complementary colour of each women’s garments binds them together while avoiding uniformity. The divergence of chance, compromise and commitment embodied in each woman’s gestures hang together visually as the natural world enfolds them. Most important for Hillier, the women take charge of the table at the centre of the image – the symbolic legacy of colonialism and the government plans indifferent to the indigenous.

The image from the imagined field of local planning offers an inclusive disjunctive synthesis. People on the periphery can learn from their differences without requiring the subjection of one to another. I think of accounts telling how indigenous peoples quickly adopted metal tools obtained through trade, but vigorously resisted Christian conversion, territorial land grabs and varieties of human enslavement. The recognition and acceptance of the current entitlements enjoyed by many European nations and the United States won at the expense of indigenous peoples is now underway. But resistance has also increased with the growing popularity of rightwing populist movements.

I share Hillier’s relational conception of planning with an emphasis on transaction. I take my inspiration from American pragmatists rather than French theorists like Deleuze. I wanted Hillier the critical planning theorist to reconstruct for me a conversation among professional planning practitioners, scholars and students who had just visited the museum viewing The Operating Table. What differences emerge? Learning to view and interpret a painting like learning to draw a picture requires much practice and coaching. I wanted to learn about the familiar north south divide less in theoretical style and more in the back and forth that would ensue among people from north and south holding different levels and types of cultural familiarity, practical experience and professional standing.

The planning movement and its disciplinarians

Moroni

Moroni focuses on spatial planning sponsored and conducted by local governments. He makes an historical argument that local government spatial planning traditionally focused on the location, design and financing of public infrastructure. The professionals prepared alternative project plans offering evaluations of the physical location, placement and construction of different projects. These evaluations assessed the projected use and expected secondary effects. Additionally, local governments hired professionals to regulate the use of land for different purposes based on statutory rules. These rules did not follow plans but enforced rules. The rules enforce certain standards, but not a specific blueprint or vision. Later, Moroni argues, the conception of plans expanded to strive for a comprehensive approach that encompassed current and future spatial areas for urban development. This effort tried to use the relatively focused and predictable blueprint infrastructure plan onto the complex unpredictable urban development activity. This confusion persists leading planners to mistakenly impose too rigid spatial designs onto complex elusive development activity.

This is not the typical conservative critique of planning as another kind of government overreach, but a more fundamental internal historical revision for spatial planning. Regulations do not implement a comprehensive plan, but rather provide contours of order for complex urban development. The formal and informal negotiations people take on as they pursue their plans to create a complex order.

The work by Lew Hopkins and Knapp (2016) offers a complementary recognition of plans. They argue that we should not confuse planning with collective decision making. All the agents involved in urban development make plans and seek to learn about the plans of others interested in the future for a specific place. Like Moroni, he has no confidence that one publicly sponsored comprehensive plan can capture and coordinate all the relevant development plans in play. Professional planners should relax the effort to corral and channel development, and focus instead on learning, informing and coordinating the many plans in the making. Moroni offers useful distinctions for recognizing, organizing and studying these opportunities.

Davoudi

Davoudi reports that European’s optimism about conditions for future generations and trust in government have declined significantly in the last decade. She attributes this shift to growing economic inequality and successful right wing influence dismantling welfare state programmes. Government spatial planning retrenched as well pivoting from public serving to developer focused management. Davoudi takes aim at the cynicism that accompanies this retreat reviving what she calls utopian prefigurative planning.

Davoudi casts prefigurative planning not as design for a perfect place, but cognitive intuition that inspires imaginative visions for everyday living. Professional planners need adopt an egalitarian ethos imagining more ambitious options to replace the conservative bias of regulatory conventions. These concrete utopian projects recognize the complexity of social and environmental change and so offer radical experimental innovations that break with convention but remain tethered to the context of the situation at hand. Such radical practice puts democratic inquiry to good use, seeking out and including diverse actors for whom purposeful change may anticipate and prepare for emerging uncertainties.

The concrete utopias Davoudi hopes to inspire can tap the imagination of people trying to anticipate and cope with the unforgiving climate disasters inflamed by global warming. Prefigurative experimentation extends and adapts familiar existing social and emotional attachments to include unfamiliar innovations. The growing risk of rising floodwaters, drought, heatwaves, wildfires, famine, inflation, mass migration and civil disorder increases uncertainty and insecurity. Individuals reluctantly realize these changes, often adopting self-defeating strategies of escape or exclusion. The proliferation of doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories spread on social media compete for attention and uptake. Political entrepreneurs cynically compose and circulate vivid and compelling narratives of solidarity based on racial identity, civic entitlement, cultural superiority, partisan privilege and religious righteousness. These alternatives share a dystopian conception of human nature fixed by inheritance and fate.

Utopian alternatives tied to practical judgment bind together the causes and consequence of specific kinds of uncertainty to offer imaginative plausible responses people can take. Details about what might happen need to be vivid enough to offer meaningful new attachments for those releasing old ones. Possible pathways to this future place need to include many routes envisioned not just by decision makers, but by those trying to intentionally anticipate and cope with these big changes. Such ambitious social experimentation will be contested by those who currently enjoy the privileges of power and those vested in the dystopian providence of fate. Professional planning should explore ways to loosen its exclusive ties to government authority and seek additional sources of legitimacy in civic associations, social movements, community organizing, religious inspiration and cultural affiliation.

Davy

Davy et al open with an unsettling rhetorical account of recent global events from two contrary ideological perspectives: liberal and populist. Neither allows for collaborative consensus because each rejects a common shared truth. Consensus remains elusive and perhaps futile.

Davy et al propose polyrationality. Why not travel father – beyond rationality? Rationality describes a kind of specialized cognitive accomplishment honed over centuries to justify the primacy of disciplined logical thought. Most people use concepts to make plans that neither fit nor aspire to rationality. The pragmatist corrective reminds us of the elitist focus of rationality even as its scientific insights fuel astonishing engineering feats whose near universal adoption generates most urban problems.

When Davy et al remind us how billions of people adjusted their lives in dramatic fashion to protect themselves and each other during the COVID pandemic, they illustrate the hopeful wisdom of collective adaptation. They detail how emergent crises and responses defy the bounds of forecasting and longstanding commitments to the status quo. Improving the resilience of people in the face of these problems requires an experimental approach sensitive to the diversity and complexity of the relationships linking people and the places they inhabit. This pragmatist approach calls for professionals to learn how to adopt multiple contested theories into their practical planning judgments. This will require that academics conceive and teach planning theories less as a grab bag of conflicting ideas, and more as tools for practical conceptual uptake. It also would require that conference and journal deliberation expect theory to offer practical insight, while also expecting technical analysis to offer theoretical insight. Abandoning the theory-practice and technical-moral dualism opens the gates for the radical proliferation of multiple experimental inquiries. This requires what Davoudi considers utopian thinking with an emphasis on concrete details, a vivid experimentation tied to the consequences for those too often left out of our imagined futures.

Husar

The Young Academics Network affiliated with AESOP has provided a loose collective of students from many nations and disciplines who for more than 20 years has sustained a network sponsoring learning events and social gatherings. These activities have nurtured intellectual and personal ties across academic generations, universities and planning institutions. The active participants embrace contact with a diversity of fellow travellers as they conduct interviews, host seminars, conduct research, write papers and educate one another about the opportunities and expectations of professional planning education in Eu. The eight authors grasp how complexity undermines the usefulness of increasingly specialized disciplinary research knowledge. Coping with complexity requires tacit experiential savvy combined with diverse technical competencies. Professionals need to learn how to tap diverse disciplinary expertise and diverse stakeholder constituents, making plans and rules to help remedy spatial problems. This requires learning to play many different professional roles: advisor, mediator, advocate and analyst depending on the demands of the situation. This also presumes changes to the institutional and organizational location of spatial planning. They call for more attention and remedies linking planning education in the countries of the Global North and South.

Husar et al. believe acquiring knowledge from interdisciplinary study complements using specialized knowledge to inform practical judgments about a specific spatial problem. Disciplines take time to learn rewarding methodological mastery. Practical competence takes time as trial & error field experience resolving problems taps local knowledge relevant for each situation. Planning education has usually included both forms of learning, but their integration remains a work in progress that needs a serious upgrade.

The digital revolution has introduced a whole set of tools expanding and improving the cognitive reach of spatial analysis, inference and communication for professionals and their clients. These may be used to misinform and manipulate, but the authors understand that professional planners need to learn and show how these tools offer prosthetic levers for improved assessments and interventions for complex spatial problems. Husar et. al. worry that planning educators may not be doing enough to integrate these innovative tools into school curricula and pedagogy.

Meeting the demands of complex spatial problems requires that professional planners adopt a learning approach fuelled by curiosity rather than certainty. Respect the usefulness of familiar concepts and methods for routine difficulties. Seek out and test new ideas in discussion with others trying to tame a wicked problem. Use critical self-reflection to balance professional prowess against the efficacy of collegiality.

Discussing planning education, the Husar et al. acknowledge that acquiring knowledge about many things does not mean that you will know how to offer useful advice for a specific situation. They want universities to team up with government and non-profit organizations to create institutional bridges for collaborative learning. This cuts across the historical trend of specialization in higher education and affiliated research organizations and consultancies. Additionally, they call for an inclusive collaborative approach placing greater emphasis on practical learning for actual planning projects. Improve the relevance of professional planning education linking curriculum and pedagogy to timely engagement with current challenges.

The idealism of this sample of next generation European trained scholars converges with that of authors like Healey, Davoudi and Davy. European universities provide a wonderful environment for disciplinary learning. But universities remain stubbornly siloed. Faculty education and recruitment requires disciplinary mastery of theory and method foremost. Research publication and citation earn respect and promotion. The experiments that Husar et al. hope to conduct happen outside the silos in the field of practice. What sort of alternative education can these old and new idealists conjure to support multidisciplinary spatial planning experiments?

Conclusion

Veteran (Davoudi, Davy, Grange, Naess, Hillier, Bertolini) and rookie (Husar et al.) scholars argue in this special issue that professional planners need learn to compose utopian plans that capture and distil inspiring ‘concrete’ possibilities for popular uptake. I share their enthusiasm for the plan making craft but am less sanguine that government should do it. Government should authorize, sponsor and support plan making that includes professional planners, stakeholders (good guys and bad) and people likely to be touched by the consequences (citizens, migrants, foreigners, enemies, …). The more democratic this involvement the better. Legislators and administrators in their respective government positions should use these plans as they draft and pass laws or compose and apply regulations. We now recognize that the complexity of our relationships with the places we inhabit cannot be adequately captured by government plans. Moroni distinguishes government infrastructure plans from land development plans because he knows that planning a roadway, dam or airport complements the power of the state to slice through and tame the complexity of the existing locational network of attachments and entitlements. I consider this a paradox. The plans for infrastructure improvements should be able to envision the kind of post mobility place that Bertolini describes but cannot because already bound up with the government agencies responsible for transport. Ironically, professionals dare not imagine how such plans might work because the institutional inertia of existing government agencies tied to often undemocratic conventions of administration and accountability appear normal and even necessary. If you get utopian you must find the courage to break through this inertia.

The communicative planning folks (Forester 1999; Innes and Booher 2010) sought an antidote to the bond between professional expertise and government decision making. Planners as employees of local governments do make regulatory decisions about specific development proposals. Their judgments can and should be informed by plans, but the act of judging and articulating modifications flows from their authority as an appointed administrator not the plan. Donald Schon (1982) long ago wrote about this encounter using a compelling case account to illustrate how professionals might alter how they conduct regulatory review. Be less masterful and more democratic; less focused on procedural compliance and more on mutual understanding of consequences. Easy to say. Hard to do.

Instead of identifying exclusively with engineers, architects and social scientists, professional planners should also align themselves with journalists, organizers and advertisers. We do analysis about the problems of place, but the plans we compose need to speak intimately to the people who will inhabit the future we envision. We should think of ourselves as public professionals who help articulate popular plans that governing officials will find attractive because their constituents find them attractive. Our job is to work with other professionals to ensure that these popular plans use reliable and valid knowledge attuned to the situation at hand. Arriving at such plans requires collaboration among many kinds of people, agencies, organizations and governments – collaboration that relies on the clever democratic integration of diverse ideas and interests (Lake 2017). Many professionals already do this work (Forester 2021).

The admittedly simple distinctions: field, movement and discipline put familiar plan arguments in a different light. As scholars of planning, we tend to live our intellectual lives travelling pathways linking the professional movement and discipline. Introducing the concept of the field reminds us of the importance of including the plans of all our fellow humans vulnerable to the consequences of global climate change. The pragmatist sensibility infusing my conception of planning embraces a democratic ethos that refuses to accept the expendability not only of any other person, but the integrity of the ecological biomes that make human flourishing possible. Putting such ethos into planning action seems to me to require utopian thinking and social experimentation to jumpstart behavioural, social and institutional change. The good news is that we need not start from scratch. Tens of thousands of planning professionals and millions of individuals are making plans for places that our colleagues are busy studying and working hard to understand. We need to pay more attention to their work and how to leverage that knowledge and experience to turn vivid utopian hopes into multipurpose projects and practices that reduce global warming in Europe and abroad.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).