This edition of Planning Theory and Practice explores alternatives – specifically, political calls and demands for social justice and inclusion, and the role of planning in recognising or in effect repressing these calls.
The absence – lack of recognition – of the existence of different groups in planning and politics more broadly may appear to be a matter of ignorance on behalf of elites. But as a number of pieces in this edition suggest, there is often intentionality and ideology behind this exclusion. Given this, the challenging question running through many of the contributions – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit and direct – is whether the state can be genuinely progressive, including through planning.
Oren Yiftachel starts in the protests for social justice which engulfed all of the major cities in Israel in the summer of 2011 and into 2012, including the city of Beersheba in southern Israel. The ‘occupy’ encampment here included students from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The university subsequently took on the task of translating the demands of the protest into policy proposals. At the same time, consultants and city officials were developing a major new outline plan centring on a massive urban development and densification titled ‘Beersheba 2030’. One of the ‘demands’ which came out of the protest was for a Social Impact Analysis (SIA) of this city plan. Yiftachel reports on the SIA independently prepared by a team of graduate planning students from the university.
As Yiftachel notes, many of the demands raised by the protests had to do with spatial justice issues, hence the call for a SIA. A lack of affordable housing triggered the protests, which also encompassed public transport, services, employment, and social equity more broadly. Building on and extending Susan Fainstein’s conceptual approach to the ‘just city’, the SIA team collected comprehensive data on the physical state of the city alongside residents’ opinions, and met with activists, citizens, and city officials including planners.
The fact that, according to the team’s analysis of patterns of investment in the city budget, less than 10 per cent of municipal spending is allocated directly to the social and spatial needs of neighbourhood residents, reveals the lack of spatial management for social justice in the city. This is conspicuously unjust.
At the same time, Yiftachel appears to believe that a better planning, informed by the use of tools such as SIA, could promote the fairer and more equal spatial distribution of resources – despite the role of past (and indeed current) planning policies in creating and defending inequalities.
Yiftachel also notes how the Beersheba plan, while investing in poorer neighbourhoods, ignores the city’s communities and identity groups. ‘Planning democracy’ is sorely lacking. But would greater public participation in planning help?
Dominic Aitken focuses on a case study of participation – a regeneration project including the demolition of several hundred houses – to identify some important implications for how we understand participation and so increase it.
Aitken challenges the view that the desire to influence any particular decision is the key motivation for participation, in part because this fails to recognise and engage with the local and historical contexts in which opportunities for participation arise. It is because of these contextual factors that people can continue to participate whilst believing that their participation will make little actual difference. Consequently, planners and others need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the people and places that regeneration projects are meant to help, in order to maximise their engagement in these projects.
In doing so, Aitken reminds us of an important distinction between the consumerist (instrumentalist) or citizenship (non-instrumentalist) model of participation.
In a similar vein, in her article Amelia Thorpe critiques how, if ‘participation’ is bolted on to state- and professional-led processes, then the apparent emphasis on inclusion can in fact have an exclusionary effect.
To Thorpe, the “celebratory narratives” of participation, as a post-1960s phenomenon in mainstream planning narratives, represent a rewriting of history. Participation has been attached to an underlying depiction of planning as an inherently utopian, progressive, expert-led project, improving the efficiency and enhancing the justice of cities.
This story of contemporary planning serves to not only retain but to entrench the “dominance” of professionals and formal planning processes. In turn, and in practice, this manages ‘participation’ in planning. But this is to ignore that “Like its precursors, contemporary planning practice is much more a matter of politics than science, reliant more on opportunities than expertise, often directed (and frequently redirected) by private interests” (p.574).
In other words, popular sentiment has always played a role in planning, alongside other actors. If, as Thorpe suggests, planning should be understood as negotiated efforts to determine how best to shape and reshape the city, to develop and implement a vision for the future of the urban environment, then “instead of efforts to bring the public into the planning process, there is a need to think about ways to bring planners out into the world” (p.566).
The stories that we tell about planning – specifically, the genres in which we tell them – are also the focus of Andrew Zitcer’s article.
Zitcer focuses on researchers writing academic and policy papers, in fact, he critiques his own work. By ‘genres’, Zitcer means types of papers – research reports, land use plans and laws etc – and how these proscribe certain forms and acts of communication between author and audience. He also briefly reviews and praises the work of selected writers who he feels break out of genres to tell more direct – and possibly more truthful – stories, and provides a simple but challenging ‘checklist’ for all authors to question themselves.
As Zitcer notes, “…planning stories are ‘supposed’ to be persuasive, and constitutive of some sort of future; this is the default genre of planning” (p.587). But what about stories which have been severely repressed?
The Interface section in this issue provides (sadly) apt examples of ‘alternative’ marginalised stories – those belonging to indigenous First Nation communities.
Histories we are rarely taught, and of which few are conscious, tell how the settler (white, elite) state, and yes planning, were tools used to colonise indigenous peoples – to “spatialise opposition”. It’s not just about stories of course, important though these are; the 350 million indigenous people remain (have been made to be) among the most marginalised and disadvantaged groups in the world.
In their various contributions, based on a session at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference in 2016, Hirini Matunga, Leela Viswanathan, Lyana Patrick, Libby Porter, Ryan Walker, Leonie Sandercock, Dana Moraes, Jonathan Frantz, Michelle Thompson-Fawcett, Callum Riddle and Theodore Jojola suggest how indigenous planning can and must unsettle western planning theory and practice.
Echoing other pieces in this edition, indigenous planning is not about the demand to be ‘included’. It’s about reversing dispossession, and contesting dominant understandings and practices in planning and beyond which constitute the long-standing “structural violence” inflicted on indigenous peoples. As Ted Jojola puts it, “Together, we hope to reclaim our abilities to shape and mould our communities in our way, for the betterment of everyone” (p. 665).
In her article critiquing common understandings of participation, Amelia Thorpe states that:
Rather than focusing on those processes to which citizens are invited to participate, inclusion requires attention to the full range of activities intended to shape the city, from small scale contributions by citizens and community groups to much larger interventions by corporate developers (p.577).
Four comment pieces on anarchism in this edition argue in their various ways that the just city is impossible without citizen and community leadership and autonomy. From the anarchist perspective, the state (and its planning) is not the solution, it’s the problem.
Chris Allen criticises mainstream housing research and policy as underpinned by a “Hobbesian conflict metanarrative” which serves rather than constrains established power, in contrast to the mutual aid based on love and fraternity that non-violent anarchism rests on. Jean Hillier delves into the history of anarchist thought and experiments to discuss the extent to which it can coexist with conventional planning (and vice versa). Hillier concludes that “experimental practices” might begin to demonstrate the potential of new forms of more democratic, inclusive planning that could act as a foundation for a deeper structural transformation. David Crouch reviews the planning work and implications of Colin Ward, including his work on the importance of spaces for children’s play, and the importance as exemplified in Ward’s work of linking theory and practice. Finally, Mark Purcell offers his understanding of anarchism as democracy, and how it offers a radical critique of state-led planning. To Purcell, the latter undermines our ability to “…manage the affairs of the city for ourselves” (p.690) – a power that in reality has always been ours.
At a smaller initial scale, but reflecting an interest in self-sufficiency and with wider implications, Anna Hult and Karin Bradley explore spaces for many more people to be “makers and sharers”.
As Hult and Bradley note, existing planning research and practice for sustainability mainly concerns housing, transport, waste and green spaces, but does not address citizens’ consumption of other material goods. What about how people can make and repair their own goods, and the role of local authorities in creating “sharing infrastructure”, that is, providing access to shared tools and spaces?
Here, the suggestion is that the state can play a positive role. Using Malmö as a case study, Hult and Bradley suggest that the forms of sharing infrastructure developed there can be regarded as “hacking into” traditional public infrastructure and creating spaces for practising citizenship beyond consumerism – crucial in the face of climate change and limited environmental resources. This requires a democratisation in access to tools for conviviality, and so Hult and Bradley also point to the possibilities of a ‘sharing’ (participatory) planning, one which would promote social justice and reduce polarisation, as a possible future for the city.
On a larger scale, Rodrigo Cardoso focuses on ‘struggling’ second-tier cities. Across Europe, these have been losing ground to dominant first-tier/capital cities, in part because smaller cities lack the ability to reap the benefits of agglomeration and are neglected in terms of public investments which can help to increase competitiveness. In countries such as the UK, this growing gap has been a major aspect of inequality and exclusion.
In response, Cardoso examines the extent to which “metropolitan integration” (tighter functional and institutional integration, and sharing of resources) could help second-tier cities. Analysis of existing data suggests that second-tier cities could gain from such integration at higher spatial scales. As Cardoso notes, the challenge for them remains how they can become sufficiently powerful political players to promote decentralisation, while being viewed as “reliable partners” capable of absorbing new responsibilities and powers.
We return then to what can be done to improve places and reduce polarisation, including for the moment at least, what the state can do. Are there definitive answers as to whether, ultimately, state and professional-led planning can produce meaningful advances in social justice?
Inevitably not, and I share the lack of a definitive position. Having worked for the RTPI – an institution of and for professional planners – I certainly believe in the ‘planning project’ and that planners can promote the (more) just city. I’m also currently working on a book on the long-term social and environmental challenges we face and how we need a stronger, better planning (in the widest sense) in order to respond to them. At the same time, in the anarchistic tradition, I’m instinctively sceptical of concentrations of power and of expert-led stories which (not coincidentally) place these same experts and elites at their centre. Given that the challenges we face are so big and broad, the answer must be that we need both state leadership and direction, but also widespread citizen and community action. Then the question really becomes how we might combine the two – a different type of planning perhaps – since our collective survival depends on it.
former Deputy Head of Policy and Research, Royal Town Planning Institute (RPTI), London, UK
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