Reflecting the ominous advance of climate change, and the increasing evidence of ever-widening inequalities in our societies, many in the planning field are striving to imagine, develop and practically realise ways to bring a much more environmentally sustainable and socially just world into being. The planning literature abounds in ideas about how to achieve an energy transition, move towards more sustainable cities, design more supportive and greener neighborhoods, and provide better conditions for those experiencing poverty or other forms of deprivation and oppression. Whether our ideas are big or small, the great barrier to achieving such ideas has been the hegemony of globalised, corporate capitalism and its companion – governments dominated by neo-liberal philosophy and its practices. These together form the particular political economy in which many of us have been living in recent decades. The contradictions generated by this nexus were already becoming obvious before the pandemic in the neglect of public services and infrastructures, the failure of market-based provision, the slow responses to environmental challenges, and increasing inequalities. The pandemic experience has made these contradictions and neglects much more visible. But does it also provide some hope that a new political economy can emerge through the cracks and fissures in this ageing hegemony?
Hendrik Wagenaar and Barbara Prainsack’s short, clearly-written book seeks to fill out a policy agenda to break through these cracks. The authors challenge current political and policy discourse wedded to supporting corporate capital and obsessed with promoting “growth” and a consumerist culture. In their view, the pandemic is not just about Covid19, but about a whole series of ills associated with the policy discourses and institutional practices which have become dominant since the 1980s. The way the economy is currently organised is “killing people and the planet” (p. 9). Because of the complexity of the relations through which our societies and our relations with nature are intertwined, it is no way forward to patch up failing public administration with piecemeal reforms. Nor is it sufficient to rely on changing individual behaviour. Instead, what is needed is a “systematic and integrative approach to transcend our hegemonic present and to harness its intrinsic interconnectedness.” Such an approach, the authors argue, needs to be held together by a strong alternative narrative, which can challenge and break open the taken-for-granted assumptions propagated by supporters of the neo-liberal order. With backgrounds in policy analysis, Wagenaar and Prainsack aim to develop such an approach, focusing especially on the values, policy instruments and institutional practices which would drive forward their alternative.
They first address the need for a “well-functioning public infrastructure” (p. 23). They note that societies with such an infrastructure have generally fared better through the pandemic than those with over-stretched, poorly-integrated public services. They understand this infrastructure as encompassing collectively-generated activities that are essential to meet people’s needs. Such infrastructure can be provided in several ways and should function well and be securely available and accessible to all. A well-functioning approach to managing how land is used and developed, of promoting living environments which are sustainable and convenient, and of coordinating the spatial dimensions of investment, in other words, what has come to be called a planning system, is surely a key part of such public infrastructure. The authors argue that it is not enough to treat each element of such infrastructure as a separate set of relations, as happens so often in the silos of administrative bureaucracies and their associated networks. All parts need to be driven by an integrative vision, “a compelling story (that provides) the beating heart, the condition of possibility of successful social reform” (p. 29). This leads them to argue for a comprehensive programme of reform, held together “in a continuous process of evolutionary learning by a strong and continuously evolving vision of a better society” (p. 31).
Subsequent chapters then discuss other elements of this reform programme, focusing on housing, work and income, “good government,” the social responsibility of businesses, reconstituting money as a public good, and how to reduce the damage we have created for our planetary futures without affecting the poorest. The authors seek to drive financialised objectives out of housing provision systems – a return to housing understood as a home and a service, rather than as a commodity, and in particular, an investment commodity. In relation to work, they review how the evolution of capitalist practices since the mid-twentieth century into the globalised corporate economies we see today, has produced a situation where workers receive a small share of national income and experience ever more precarious working conditions, exacerbated by digitalisation. This leads them to argue for an expansion of the concept of work to include domestic work and voluntary activities. They suggest that “social status, and arguably also income, will increasingly come from work outside employment” (p. 57). So, in addition to improving the conditions for paid labour through regulating labour markets, they present the many arguments for a Universal Basic Income, available to everyone to enable us all to lead a dignified life.
In discussing “good government,” Wagenaar and Prainsack start with the paradox that we expect the state to deliver substantial public services but doubt its competence or disbelieve government can be a “force for good” (p. 65). They tell the story of how the welfare state settlement of the mid-twentieth century, with its model of skilled experts and officials realising politically-defined programmes, fell into disrepute. They show how the concepts which supported that settlement were replaced by public choice economics and the practices of new public management, both supporting the neo-liberal ideology of market provision and a minimal state, supplemented by ways of drawing citizens into shaping and delivering public services. But this model too has fallen into disrepute as, despite continual reform efforts, people have experienced many failings in service delivery and frustrations in engaging with government agencies. Planners will be all too familiar with such failings and reform initiatives. The authors argue that it is time to stop piecemeal reforms, and to re-think in more fundamental ways about what kind of government the state should provide. Such a comprehensive reform needs, they argue, a strong public ethos and well-trained administrative staff, combined with a recognition of the role of grassroots movements and civil society activism. This should lead to a re-constitution of modes of operation, not only in the way citizens and state interact, but in how capitalism is tamed and climate change addressed.
Their target in re-shaping capitalist enterprise is to reduce the might of the giant global corporations which have become so dominant that they have squeezed out the opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises, “engaging in a simultaneous takeover of the market and of national governments” (p. 91). Governments get caught up in pursuing international competitiveness, at the cost of “domestic interests and national democracy” (p. 91). Such corporations publicise to customers that they are engaging in socially and environmentally responsible practices, but often this emerges as more rhetoric than reality. It is then left to civil society initiatives to challenge this dominance and shame corporate business and governments to act in less environmentally damaging and unjust ways. The authors’ particular target is the international finance system. “Our collective responsibility is clear: the struggle for a reimagination of a sustainable society, organised for human flourishing, must start with reform (of this system)” (p. 123). In a long chapter on the growth of a form of financialization which penetrates deep into the other relations of our lives, they show how financial abstractions have become detached from any connection to actual production and consumption activities, a kind of hot-air balloon without moorings (p. 110). They advocate four ways to break out of the present system: educating people out of their incomprehension of how the system currently works; creating money as a public good, with public banks being prepared to take on more innovative and risky ventures; creating a micro-credit system, subject to democratic control; and imposing capital controls to insulate national experiments from capital flight.
The final two chapters weave together their various ideas about how to move towards a different future, one that not only addresses the looming climate catastrophe but does so in ways imbued with a concern for social justice. The fundamental shift they argue for is partly about changing the “grand narrative’ of our political economy. “We need to change how we do things, what purposes we do them for, and how we measure success” (p. 127). But more modest adaptions also have a role. Rather than being taken from recipe books of good practices, these need to develop in concrete situations that reflect specific interconnected complexities. Modes of practice infused with a sense of nurturing and shaping rather than control and mastery should be encouraged. They express this idea in a metaphor of gardening – digging foundations, planting seeds and nurturing how they grow. Key elements in their vision for what they call an “ecological society” are: a steady state economy and the “abandonment of the growth delusion”; a needs-based instead of a wants-based economy; a return to more localised production and exchange; the abandonment of unregulated trade; the promotion of a labour-intensive economy; and better monetary and fiscal co-ordination (pp. 136–137). Key actions which follow from this include the transition to clean energy; reducing pollution in other ways; job creation in activities which care for the environment, for communities and for people; well-funded public services and infrastructures, Universal Basic Income, and controls on cross-border flows of capital.
In their final chapter, Wagenaar and Prainsack re-iterate their argument that “taking complexity seriously forces us to think of solutions holistically and in an integrative manner” (p. 142). Their idea of an integrating vision is not about how the future should look, as this is always in a process of complex becoming, but one rooted in values – of “inclusiveness, solidarity, cooperation, connectedness, participation and mutual respect” (p. 143). If this vision can shift our mindsets, then maybe an “ecological society” can emerge with a rich associational life, a political practice of problem-driven practical deliberation, and the development of intermediary structures that mediate between associational life and state agencies. In such a society, democratic legitimacy, expert administration and the creative power of associational life could work in combination to nurture the seeds of a more caring and sustainable future.
This book is in effect a manifesto for an alternative political economy, focusing especially on changing political and policy discourses and on the “how” questions of both the reform of public institutions and the creation of new ones. It promotes a general direction for moving forward, underpinned by key policy supports. Many of the ideas the authors advocate are being energetically discussed elsewhere. Their contribution is to bring them together in an integrative way. Readers may well wish to delve into the arguments for specific ideas as well as reflect critically on their analysis of our current situation and the nature of their holistic vision. To conclude this review, I draw out five ways in which the discussion in this book helps in thinking about the ideas and practices of planning, understood as place-making and shaping, and managing spatial interrelations.
Firstly, their discussion should remind us to recognise how many of the failings we discern in planning systems and practices are entangled with the wider political economy in which they are embedded. Our analyses should always be attentive to the multi-layered and multi-relational complexities of particular situations and elements of a governance situation. Secondly, if we share any of the values which Wagenaar and Prainsack emphasise, we should expect planning practitioners and researchers to be always attentive to the values infusing what we do and how we act, and be prepared to call out those which damage the chances for future generations to flourish. Thirdly, their approach emphasizes that “planning” the future is always an uncertain voyage of becoming, which cannot be precisely mastered or controlled. It is better understood as a process of nurturing future evolutions towards more socially just and environmentally considerate ways of flourishing. Fourthly, planning system reform should not be conducted in isolation, but as part of a reconstitution of the other supportive public infrastructures needed as evolving conditions of possibility for such futures. Finally, the designers of planning systems, planning professionals as well as academics and researchers need to move beyond ideas of “public participation” and “co-production” with civil society to re-think more fundamentally how the associational dynamics of civil society could and should relate to formal government systems and practices, and how both sectors can work to tame capitalist practices within democratically-set bounds. The pandemic experience has taught us that our taken-for-granted practices can be suddenly changed in fundamental ways, and that the little social supports of everyday life matter far more than we often think. This book challenges us to use our wide-angle and sharp focus lenses interactively in our attempts to nurture a better world.
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK
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