Editorial

‘Only connect’ has sometimes been proposed as a motto for planners. Planners are encouraged not just to focus on particular issues but on the way issues interconnect. But what kinds of connections do we and should we as planners emphasize? In what ways do we and should we go about our work of ‘making connections’?

The overarching answer, in the past and today, is that the core of a planning focus is the interconnection of people and place, of activities and territories. This was articulated clearly a century ago, around ‘place, folk and work’ relations. It is reiterated now in the RTPI's call for a new vision for planning (Royal Town Planning Institute, 2001), and in the British government's search for a ‘spatial planning’ approach (ODPM, 2004). But this focus provides a very broad scope and has nothing to say about how connections are to be made. Over the years, different dimensions of these relationships and different ways of establishing them have been emphasized. In the mid-20th century, as private transport began to displace public transport, the relations between land use and transport became a major preoccupation. In the 1960s, a great deal of effort was devoted to establishing technologies through which to understand and manage these connections (Chapin, 1965). Earlier, in the UK at least, the critical issue was the relation between housing and health, upon which was built a concern with the connection between design, amenity and well-being, what we may perhaps refer to today as ‘liveability’. Making these connections brought with it another relationship, that between private property rights and the public interest. Often neglected by planners in the mid-20th century, when it was assumed that the state could command resources of land and finance for public programmes, this complex legal, political and cultural relationship has a fundamental impact on another key connectivity for planning work, that between a policy idea or a plan and the capacity for ‘implementation’. By the end of the 20th century, increasing emphasis was put on the interconnections between state and market in shaping both demand for activities and their supply, and in linking these processes to sites, place qualities and spatial organization.

As if the challenge of making connections had not expanded enough, planners are now encouraged to see the relations between people and place in a much more open, fluid and socially-constructed way than in the past. In mid-20th century, it was possible to imagine the relation between people and place through the image of the city region, with the city as the hub of a settlement hierarchy and rural hinterland. Well-being was to be established by maintaining a ‘balanced’ integration between the various activities, revolving around the hub in such a way as to maximize universal accessibility while protecting resources and promoting amenity. Skilled planners and elected representatives governed benignly, it was assumed, to promote these qualities, combining science and art, technical knowledge and design synthesis. We tell ourselves this formative narrative of our discipline partly to remind ourselves that once, as a profession, we knew ‘how to do it’. Now academics tell us that we live in a world of ‘complexity’, a ‘network’ society of dynamic relations, in which connections between people and place have exploded to encompass a global reach, while still anchoring in the local (Castells, 1996; Hajer & Wagenaar, 2003; Innes & Booher, 2000). ‘People’ no longer have merely universal needs, but are to be recognized as highly diverse, with multiple needs, values, hopes and identities. ‘Places’ are as much social nodes as physical sites, evident in the meanings given to them as much as in the interactions which take place within them. The connectivities between people and the natural world are valued by many as an important dimension of place quality and well-being, with natural world relations cutting across at all kinds of scales from the micro-environment to that of global weather patterns. It is impossible to avoid the intense and deep conflicts that routinely surface when planning interventions aimed to improve particular place qualities are initiated.

In such a world, where do planners start in considering our core focus of ‘people and place’ relations? Much of the planning literature of recent years could perhaps be re-interpreted as a search for answers to this question. In a big over-simplification, we might identify four, often overlapping, strands to the suggestions on offer. Those who focus on the organization of governance capacity tend to search for an appropriate scale for planning work. This argument is linked to the idea that the key contribution of spatial planning in the face of dynamic complexity is to provide strategic frames of reference, within which a balance can be struck between what can be fixed (for example, transport routes, sites for development, landscape qualities, indicators of air and water quality, etc) and what can be left to emerge. The key issue is to do this at a scale that is broad enough to encompass as many of the critical connectivities as possible, while still keeping a focus on the spatial dimensions and interlinkages of these connectivities. This produces a search for an appropriate arena—city, city region, sub-region, region, etc. However, as Gualini (2004) persuasively argues, the likelihood of a territorial jurisdiction lining up neatly with the contemporary multiple connectivities of people and place has to be abandoned except as a way in which a particular polity chooses to construct a place ‘for itself’ in a fluid and dynamic world. Following this strand, the important impetus for planning work is provided by the existence, or generation, of a coalition of ‘interdependent stakeholders’ concerned in some way or other about place qualities. This underpins the enormous current interest in the formation of multi-actor arenas, partnerships, ‘collaboratives’, roundtables and working groups of all kinds, which attempt to address particular connectivities. The third strand seeks to underpin planning work with an ‘evidence-base’, grounded in scientific knowledge, which can help to identify critical connectivities linking one place, group and relational system to another, and the nature, reach and scale of their ‘impacts’, which requires an identification of critical cause-effect relations. This strand is pushed along by requirements that strategies and projects are evaluated according to their environmental impacts, their contribution to ‘sustainability’, their health impacts, their territorial impacts, their social equity impacts—the list seems steadily to expand. However, the ‘science’ to support establishing the key relations underpinning impact assessments is often ill-developed and uncertain. As Sawicki (2002) observed in relation to the search for community indicators, much of this kind of work is more a ‘folk art’ than a robust scientific practice. The fourth strand uses the designer's skill of synthesizing from a collage of impressions key concepts through which to attach disparate elements into a strategic idea, to provide a ‘design concept’ to act as a strategic frame or lens with which to view the relations in a place.

In practice, planning teams are evolving all kinds of responses to the challenge of making connections in our dynamic, fluid context. We welcome more accounts of such experiences in this journal. Meanwhile, what can readers learn from the contributions to this number of Planning Theory and Practice?

David Shaw & Olivier Sykes take us straight into the challenge, focusing on how regional planning exercises in the UK are addressing issues which cross jurisdictional boundaries. They examine both how a particular region has considered its geo-political positioning in European space and how it relates to what stakeholder groups are keen to identify as particular functional sub-regions that lie across regional borders. They show how the effort of regional planning, at the jurisdictional scale of a large English region, has helped to develop both the intellectual capacity to imagine and analyse connectivities and the governance capacity to address critical relations. August Røsnes explores how the practices of the Norwegian planning system are having to change, with new ways of making relations between the public interest and market power as a result of greater reliance on private capital for investment in development infrastructure. He notes the emergence of new practices of negotiation at the level of the project and area development plan, but laments the lack of any attention to establishing some kind of strategic frame within which the ‘public interest’ can find expression and thereby contain the negotiative flexibility inherent in area/site based negotiations. The public interest is otherwise left to the skill and ethical commitment to the public interest of the planners and local politicians.

How far do the ethical codes for planners help to keep the public interest dimensions of connectivities in mind? Sue Hendler shows that this question raises challenges of its own, as the content of such codes is contested. She worked with feminist groups to try to identify what, from such a perspective, should be in a code of ethics. As with the issue of connectivities, the ideas that came forward in this process emphasized both substantive and process issues. Finally, Russ Haywood focuses on the long-standing critical relationship for planners between land use and transport. Despite decades of planning ideas about the importance of transport interchanges as nodes in urban development contexts, and some good experiences, in the UK it has been very difficult to realize this potential. The problem is the lack of governance capacity, in a country where not only has the issue of transport and urban development been addressed through separate national ministries, but, at least until recently, integration between modes of transport has been made more difficult by the institutional differences in the way that governance intervention in each mode of transport is organized, echoing a problem identified in a paper in an earlier number of the journal (Sager & Ravlum, 2004).

The Interface section of the journal provides a rich encounter with practitioners exploring ways of reaching out to often marginalized and invisible social groups in discussing what matters to them about places. Introduced by Leonie Sandercock, Wendy Sarkissian gives an account of her experiences of using artistic modes of expression and communication to involve such groups, to listen to them and learn from their experiences. Moving beyond simple notions of participation and collaboration, she draws on her work as a community facilitator to show how making connections with and between people in discussions about where place figures in their daily life worlds requires a broad palette of ways of relating to others. If they work well, such processes release creative energy and mobilize considerable power. Steven Dang & Charles Landry add to this account from their own experiences of using artistic activity as a means to cross boundaries and to release creative power.

The Book Review section of the journal offers a rich fare of ‘tasters’ of recent planning literature on cities, with studies also of planning systems and practices as they have been evolving in the UK, and in Sweden.

All along, planners have been right to stress that how people connect to places is a critical issue for human and environmental well-being. In the 20th century this understanding tended to get lost in the organizational structure of nation states which focused on service delivery and only secondarily on how services connected together in particular places. A complex interplay of issue politics and place politics is now constructing political agendas in a different way. Planners need to sophisticate their understanding of people-place connectivities to be prepared for the challenges that these agendas are bringing.