On the Social Nature of Planning

In the Interface section of this issue of the journal, where heads of planning schools discuss the challenges they face as planners and managers of planning academia, Mike Teitz provides a fascinating account of the development of the planning department at the University of California, Berkeley, where some of the most famous names in the planning field taught and studied. This interested me as I have been going back over past contributions to planning theory as part of a project to prepare a collection of significant essays in the field (Hillier & Healey, forthcoming). Teitz notes how, in the 1960s, the basis of the Berkeley programme had to be re-cast, to introduce a more social scientific foundation to the planning field, replacing the previous emphasis on physical planning. This linked to my own experience at the then Oxford Polytechnic in the UK, where, following initiatives of Andreas Faludi and others, we articulated a social scientific re-casting of planning programmes in the 1970s. In both cases, an inspiration was the work of Jack Dyckman who went to Berkeley in the 1960s, and encouraged the introduction of masters programmes in “social policies planning”. But Teitz notes that this did not endure. Also in the UK, there are no programmes or specialisations in planning schools which emphasise “social planning”. So what happened?

To explore this question, some attention is needed to what was understood then as “social planning”. Dyckman, in a seminal essay in 1966, locates the emerging practice of social planning in the US as a delayed response to the social consequences of physical and economic planning (Dyckman, 1966), but he argued that such a “remedial” approach needed to set in a broader context. Social planning, he suggested, had three meanings. In one, it meant “societal planning”, establishing social goals and targets for nation states. It is this meaning which he comes round to advocating. The second meaning involved assessing programmes of economic development and physical urban renewal in terms of social values and criteria. Perhaps today this would be called “social impact assessment”. The third meaning referred to the delivery of social welfare programmes, following in the tradition of 19th century Chicago-based social reformers such as Jane Addams. This encouraged a community development tradition in the US, which also evolved in the UK, although here, as in many other European countries, the delivery of social welfare programmes was focused in the domain of “social policy” as an academic and professional community rather than in the planning field. But social policy and community development practices have had a hard time in the UK in the past 25 years, while in the US, Teitz suggests they were drawn into the purview of an economics-dominated approach to public policy.

So what is the situation today? Has the idea of national social goals and social impact analysis been sidelined? Has it been absorbed into “mainstream” practices, or has the very idea of the “social” been transformed by other ways of thinking about the dimensions and dynamics of societies? If Dyckman were writing today, what meanings of the “social” might he identify? There are many possibilities. One, which was stridently asserted in the 1970s and since, is the pursuit of “social justice”. This implies not just a concern with a more even spread of resources and opportunities, but measures to eradicate the systematic ways in which some groups are exploited by other groups. This was expressed in the 1970s in concepts about how capitalist classes exploited working classes, but since then, all kinds of other dynamics of injustice have been emphasised, particularly with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, physical ability and sexual orientation. In the planning field, it implies particular attention to the spatial manifestations of social injustice.

Carolyn Whitzman's article in this issue pursues this agenda in exploring what has happened to attempts to get attention to redressing gender discrimination into the mainstream of local authority activity, and many articles in the journal have provided impetus to sustaining attention to the social justice of planning practices. It informs many practices of community development in all kinds of contexts which seek to engage and empower citizens in poorer localities to mobilise to obtain greater attention and resources for their situation.

However, this concern has struggled with two other movements. One is the intense emphasis on “economic competitiveness” which has informed urban and regional planning practices across the world, in the face of arguments and experiences about the “globalisation” of our economies and cultures. In this argument, economic considerations “trump” all others. In a study of planning strategies in England in the 1990s, we argued that this was the dominant approach, challenged only by the environmental movement. A socially-informed approach to urban and regional development strategies had receded into invisibility (Vigar et al., 2000), but it was recovered in two ways. One was in the continued emphasis on urban regeneration, but by now as much informed by a social welfare emphasis as a physical emphasis. The other was through the concept of “sustainable development”, with its concern to combine social considerations with environmental and economic ones when articulating a development pathway. Thus the social was drawn back in, through an attempt to take a more holistic view of what development involves. Of course, it has been difficult for the practice to live up to the idea, as it involves all kinds of co-ordinations and integrations which are difficult to negotiate, as Sue Kidd in this issue explores in her study of the challenge of making stronger links between health strategies and spatial strategies.

However, others argue that incorporating the social into the sustainable development balancing act is itself insufficient. For some, the nature of economic activity needs to be re-conceptualised, in terms of notions of a “social economy”, or a “social” approach to innovation and development (Amin et al., 2002; Moulaert & Nussbaumer, 2005). This strategy parallels those who have sought to re-conceptualise an economy from an environmental resource conservation perspective. This shift involves looking at society from the perspective of people, their needs and aspirations rather than from that of firms competing in a (sometimes global) marketplace. It parallels those who argue that social relations should be looked at from an everyday life perspective, or from the “lifeworld” rather then the “system world”.1 This re-casts older concepts of communities struggling for justice from the exploitation of capitalists into all kinds of tensions between daily life experiences of getting along and the systemic forces which constrain possibilities. In the mid-20th century, it was thought that, if governments could be elected to represent the world of communities, the classes of ordinary folk, then the system world could reflect lifeworld considerations. But experience in many countries half a century later suggests a breakdown in this possibility, a breakdown in trust with consequences for planning activity generally, as Chris Swain & Malcolm Tait explore in their article in this issue.

There are two other meanings of the “social” which we should add to the above. One is long-standing, which contrasts the social with the physical. The arguments of the 1970s helped us to see that the relation between physical development and social development was a complex and interactive one, involving the interplay of meanings and experiences in relation to physical objects. Planning researchers began to pay much more attention to the social processes of how development was produced, a tradition continued in the article by Marcel van Gils & Erik-Hans Klijn on the decision processes surrounding the expansion of Rotterdam harbour. Urban designers in turn gave more attention to the relation between physical designs, social meanings and attitudes. Marion Roberts explores this issue in her article about the prospects of designing mixed-income communities. But maintaining a social perspective while negotiating and designing physical developments is a demanding challenge, which hopefully these days we foster in training programmes and practices in the urban design and urban regeneration fields.

Finally, the “social” orientation in the planning field can also mean the social scientific emphasis which has come to underpin planning programmes and planning research activity. Such an orientation informs most of the contributions to this journal. But while social science provides a different kind of orientation to planning work than that which comes from training in, for example, engineering or architecture, it is a broad field, informed by many disciplinary traditions and paradigms. It is full of resources for understanding urban and regional dynamics, and the practices of government and public policy. It helps to cultivate strategic thinking and to conduct all kinds of analyses of impacts. But social science is certainly not, as an overall enterprise, the guardian of concerns with values such as social justice, social sustainability, or sensitivity to the diversity of daily life experiences and aspirations.

So perhaps we can make several propositions about what has happened to “social” considerations in the planning field. To some extent, the campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed the subject and its practice, so that attending to social issues is not just part of “normal practice”, but is understood in a much more informed and nuanced way. Yet concerns with social justice and social sustainability are under intense pressure from the claims of economic competitiveness and also from environmental sustainability. Despite all the talk about a “balanced” approach to integrating the three dimensions of sustainable development, the “social” part of the trio tends to be given the least attention. Perhaps then, it is time for more reflection on what has happened to the “social” nature of planning and how it might be re-emphasised.

The Articles in this issue provide interesting material for reflection on the above issues, but also raise many other questions. Marcel van Gils & Erik-Hans Klijn draw on concepts developed in network theory to explore the complex processes of decision making involving different actors and arenas. Their diagrams might help practitioners sketch out what is going on around them in complex development contexts. Sue Kidd explores what it means to integrate two areas of public policy into a common strategy, highlighting the institutional challenge for any kind of “holistic” approach to urban and regional strategy-making. Marion Roberts reviews the reasons for attempting to create “mixed income” communities in designs for new residential areas and possible ways this can be achieved. Carolyn Whitzman examines what has happened to various initiatives in three countries that campaigned for more attention to women's issues in local planning and provides a valuable insight into pathways from campaigns to mainstreaming. Chris Swain & Malcolm Tait explore what the concept of “trust” means in the field of public policy and how trust in planning systems and planners might be revived. The Interface section takes us into the world of heads of planning schools, facing all kinds of external pressures while managing a group of highly individual and often almost autonomous colleagues. Chief Planners and Heads of Consultancies may read these accounts with a wry smile, but will probably acknowledge a key point which emerges from them account. We learn a lot about planning when we work as managers of a group of planners, where we are continually challenged to relate the fine-grain particulars of the daily life of our unit with the broader forces which both create potentialities and constrain the possible. This issue concludes with the usual collection of Book Reviews.

Notes

1. This contrast comes from Habermas (1984).