When Greta Thunberg was nominated as Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, the Washington Post’s regular columnist Jennifer Rubin dissented.Footnote1 It was not, she wrote, that she did not think that climate change was a ‘dire threat’, or that Greta Thunberg had not “provided a public service in calling attention to the threat.” But, she continued “I find it preposterous to assert that Thunberg had a unique, transformative impact on public opinion in a way no other person has.”
Rubin’s preferred candidates were the Hong Kong protestors; the ‘whistleblower’ in the White House; and Nancy Pelosi, on the grounds that “latter three are defending an endangered phenomenon at a critical time – democracy.”
The debate thus provoked continued, inevitably, in the Comments column, even more rancorous than usual, and certainly generating a good deal more heat than light. The one observation that spoke to me, attributed to ‘DeportRupertMurdoch’, which also speaks to me, was “Thunberg has put a human face – a child’s face – on the existential issue of our time.” I think that says it well enough. Greta Thunberg may be just the avatar that we need.
Conversely, the observation that I thought most completely missed the mark (attributed to ‘Flash Bandicoot’, which does not mean anything to me) was “Nobody will remember who Greta Thunberg is 10 years from now. History books will be debating Trump’s impeachment for the next couple centuries.”
Disregarding Mr Trump’s putative place in history, Mr Bandicoot seems to me to be missing the elephants gathering as a herd in our room. Greta Thunberg told the World Economic Forum: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.” She may have been disappointed at their reaction, but in one sense time is on her side: we have now reached the threshold of the Decade of Environmental Panic. Environmental issues that are still only seeping into public awareness, still not making it onto agendas for immediate action of whatever sort, still being disputed or denied, are all about to pervade public consciousness, driven regrettably by events and evidence too horrible to disregard.
Jennifer Rubin sees a particular urgency around the present threat to democracy in the United States. But the threat of the environmental crisis is equally rooted in the present, and its dimensions are so huge and complex – in terms of dilemmas, social justice, envisioning, de-growth, ‘climigration’, resilience, inclusive knowledge, co-production and research practices, and much more – that we have already waited dangerously long to shift the values, priorities, policies and resources sufficiently or even nearly sufficiently to tackle this existential crisis. The Owl of Minerva may not be about to spread its wings, but it is hooting its warning.
Many of those critical themes are covered in this edition of Planning Theory & Practice.
Nina P. David and Adria Buchanan invoke Shelley Arnstein’s famous ladder in 'Planning Our Future: Institutionalizing Youth Participation in Local Government Planning Efforts'. Their research shows “that local governments that anticipate benefits, dedicate staff, and have key stakeholders’ support, institutionalize youth participation”, while “local satisfaction with ad-hoc instances of youth participation has a negative effect on institutionalization.” Where the ladder is climbed successfully, “citizens gain more power and control over policy issues … and communication is not one-way, directed at them but rather two-way and collaborative.”
In 'Limitations of Technical Approaches to Transport Planning Practice in Two Cases: Social Issues as a Critical Component of Urban Projects', Lara K. Mottee, Jos Arts, Frank Vanclay, Richard Howitt and Fiona Miller consider the two cases of Amsterdam’s North-South Metro line and Sydney’s Parramatta Rail Link, and what more might be achieved if practices of Social Impact Assessment (SIA) were brought into, and kept in, the planning process, not least the extent to which ‘Social Licence’ might be maintained or increased.
They conclude that “SIA thinking, if applied in the early shaping stages of projects, provides opportunities for deeper community engagement, to understand how social change processes impact communities, and to develop effective mitigation strategies”, but also that “Our evidence … contributes to the fundamental need for a shift in thinking in transport planning practice, from a reliance on technical approaches to more deliberative and qualitative methods.” The transport-techy-metric approach is not enough.
Raksha Vasuvedan breaks further free in 'The Potentials and Pitfalls of "Art in Research" Methodologies: Foregrounding Memory and Emotion in Planning Research'. She goes beyond how arts can contribute to planning process to look at what they might do for planning research. “In this article, I ask, “How do we utilize ‘art in research’ methodologies to radicalize planning research?” I suggest that while ‘art in research’ leaves important openings for discovery through memory and emotion, it also poses several challenges.”
Vasuvedan gives an account of the various ways in which arts-based research can illuminate planning research, but focuses primarily on the art-in-research process, which “enables participants to ask questions about their community that are actually relevant to them”. She demonstrates this through a research project that she carried out with the current students of her former high school in Reston, Virginia. She concludes “that ‘art in research’ has the potential to unsettle some of the deeper problematic histories of planning research and praxis by centering the questions and knowledge that people have about their own communities.” And that this process is potentially “emancipatory for the participant and revelatory for the researcher.”
In 'Transcending Dilemmas in Urban Policy-Making: Envisioning Versus Adapting, Growing Versus Stabilizing', António Ferreira, Joana Ribeiro-Santos and Isabel Breda-Vázquez address some really fundamental issues in planning, as they distinguish between three different levels of dilemma that might be encountered in planning, and consider them through the prism of Porto.
The team focuses on two particular dilemmas: an ‘envisioning versus adapting dilemma’ – whether cities embrace a powerful vision for their future or adapt to emerging opportunities; and a ‘growing versus stabilizing dilemma’ – whether cities should chase economic growth or work towards a steady-state of economic activity, which might even involve ‘de-growth’. They show that future planning practices will need to deal with problems that are even more wicked than those of the past.
As indeed do Ihnji Jon and Magali Reghezza-Zitt in their 'Late Modernity to Postmodern? The Rise of Global Resilience and its Progressive Potentials for Local Disaster Planning (Seattle and Paris)'. They state as their objective that “we aim to demonstrate how the logic of policy legitimation is changing internationally, focusing on the field of disaster planning and management where the use of the resilience concept has become increasingly ‘in fashion’ … What we aim to suggest is how ‘resilience’ can become an attitude and a style of governance that goes beyond neoliberal assumptions by embracing uncertainty, non-linearity, or complexity of governance challenges.”
This leads them beyond the shattered ruins of modernism to a post-modern theorization, which involves “creating a more inclusive knowledge base, using resilience in a more politically progressive discourse context, and opening up new venues for ‘other powers’ to intervene more systematically in planning processes.”
Intriguingly, in their two chosen research cases, Seattle reflects how relatively weak local government institutions habitually look for collaboration, but it is in Paris, identified with a very centrist philosophy of governance, where those inside government seem most keen, relieved even, to embrace the opportunities of an emerging paradigm. The authors conclude that “We see the potential for resilience, as an overarching governance logic and attitude, to become a source of openings for new agencies, new knowledge practices, and new local initiatives.”
There is a strong thematic link here to Interface¸ which has the ever-more relevant topic of 'Climate Disruption and Planning: Resistance or Retreat?'. The Interface on Resilience, produced by a team led by Simin Davoudi and Libby Porter, which we published in volume 13(2), as far back as 2012, is still one of the most cited pieces from Planning Theory & Practice. I suspect that this latest collection, from a team led by Mark Scott and Mick Lennon, is on track to achieve similar prominence.
Scott and Lennon explain in their introduction that their focus is on adaptation, and specifically one aspect of adaptation: whether it is better to ‘resist or retreat’ in areas that are at extreme risk from climate change. They cite the 2016 report of the European Environment Agency which makes the point that “climate change is not isolated; it is strongly intertwined with socio-economic factors that make it a systemic challenge”. Accordingly, a consistent theme in the contributions to this Interface is around “equity and justice as central to any planning strategies for communities vulnerable to the climate emergency.”
In these contributions Daniel Tubridy joins Lennon and Scott to consider 'Resist or Retreat? Planning for Place Disruption, Displacement and Vulnerabilities in the Face of Climate Change'. Patrick Marchman, A.R. Siders, Kelly Leilani Main, Victoria Herrmann and Debra Butler examine 'Planning Relocation in Response to Climate Change: Multi-Faceted Adaptations'. They, along with Kathryn Frank in 'Accepting Climate Denial and Loss: Florida’s Lessons for Pragmatic Adaptation', make use of the term ‘climigration’: I suspect that this will become part of common usage during the Decade of Environmental Panic.
Karyn Bosomworth and Raphaele Blanchi bring an Australian perspective to 'As Safe as Houses: Do People Consider Climate Change Impacts in "Choosing" Where to Live?', and Cassidy Johnson then looks at 'The Implications of Climate Related Resettlement Policies in Cities of the Global South'.
There are three articles for the Debates and Reflections section in this edition. Andrea Cook examines the possibilities of ‘story-as-encounter’ as a means to overcome the problem of ‘unspeakable encounter’, in 'Telling Tales: Using Story as a Mode of Encounter', drawing on a case-study from inner city Melbourne, asking “What would deliberative, reclaimant storytelling look like and require?”.
Miloš N. Mladenović and Susa Eräranta explore the relationship between planning academics and planning practitioners in 'Hear the Rime of the Fellow Mariner? A Letter to the Next Generation of Emphatic Co-Creators in Planning', seeing this in the category of wicked problems, concluding that both factions need to develop trust and respect in each other if progress is to be made.
Abdul Khakee draws together many of the themes and issues raised throughout this edition in his essay titled simply 'Planning Dilemmas', arguing that “the choices planners are asked to make are becoming harder because planning faces new key challenges … These issues existed before, but they have not only quantitatively intensified, but also qualitatively changed.” Khakee explores this in relation to the climate emergency, the digitalisation of urban space and the rise of xenophobic populism. It is not comfortable reading; nor is his conclusion that the dilemmas that planning practice faces amount to “challenges that seem at present almost insurmountable.”
Notes
1. Washington Post, 11 December 2019.