ABSTRACT
This piece provides a reflection on the changing political context for planning ideas and practices over the past thirty years. This period has seen the rise and now serious questioning of a neo-liberal pre-occupation with economic growth which gave little space for shaping futures through a focus on place qualities and co-ordinating the spatial dimensions of action, the core of the spatial planning project. Current concerns with promoting inclusive social well-being, reducing adverse impacts on global climate and the environment, and reviving democratic practices create new opportunities for planning understood as strategic guidance for shaping collective futures. Such a project involves not just expertise as developed in the planning field, but needs to draw on many other knowledge fields. And since many futures may evolve from present instabilities and uncertainties, it needs to adopt an active voice in promoting collective attention to spatial co-ordination and place qualities in ways which advance the values of environmental sustainability, inclusive social well-being and richly democratic modes of policy-making.
Then and now
The 1990s now seem a long time ago. For the planning community – those of us who studied, developed, practiced and taught about the planning idea, planning systems and planning practices, it was a time of optimism. Few questioned Europe’s place in the world. There was increasing political recognition that development strategies had to pursue environmentally sustainable directions, caring for our local and planetary environments rather than carelessly exploiting natural resources. Within the urban sphere, programmes for neighbourhood regeneration were not only inspired by an ambition to improve life conditions for residents, often experiencing deprivation and exclusion in one way or another. They were infused with the idea that those affected should be actively drawn into the design and delivery of such programmes. A fairer, more sustainable and more richly democratic social order seemed possible, and many involved in planning academia and practice were developing concepts and techniques to fill out such an agenda.
The planning field then was fragmented across our various national cultures, but many shared an enthusiasm for building trans-European linkages. As we created and became involved in forums such as AESOP, European Planning Studies (a journal that has long been affiliated with AESOP) and in research programmes promoted by the EU, we became deeply aware of the plurality of local histories which shaped institutional contexts, values and practices across the continent. We also shared an understanding of a common European experience – a past of wars and revolutions which reverberated across our different countries, and of struggles over time to emancipate ordinary peoples’ lives from systematic exploitation and oppression. Could our efforts help to sustain such progress and avoid the terrible traumas of the past through building a Europe-wide knowledge base to infuse our work?
Through journals such as European Planning Studies, and through other arenas where practitioners and scholars from different European countries have worked together, such a knowledge base has now grown substantially. As people have become accustomed to using a form of English as a language for international exchange, scholars from most parts of Europe, including from former Soviet countries, have been drawn into these discussions, to be joined by others from across the world. The scholarly part of the planning community has become not just Europeanised but globalized. But what was not sufficiently noticed at the time was that a political movement was gathering impetus across Europe which worked against many of the ideas being developed within the planning field. This movement, widely labelled as ‘neo-liberalism’, washed across from the US and was adopted in an early and vigorous way in the UK in the 1980s. It expressed a political philosophy which argued for less state intervention and bureaucracy, relying on individual initiative and competitive markets. Economic actors were expected to innovate and promote economic growth, while encouraging consumers to exercise their individual choices in this liberated market context, and, as citizens, take on more responsibility for their own futures. Such a philosophy had little space for spatial co-ordination of public sector programmes, and sought to limit the state’s regulatory powers. It encouraged a project-led approach to the transformation of urban areas, often privileging the interests of developers who promised economic benefits to what became cash-strapped governments. It celebrated innovation, particularly of the technological kind, and, in theory at least, tolerated the ‘creative destruction’ through which unfettered capitalism was expected to promote future growth and prosperity. And it sought to mobilize civil society energy to address many social and environmental problems. This was not a political moment conducive to the planning idea, with its emphasis on interrelations and more co-ordinated pathways towards the future, though policy-makers did make use of imaginative design and participatory techniques for involving citizens in place-shaping.
Neo-liberalism in question
As many academic journal papers attest, we are now living with the costs and crises of this philosophy. The promotion of a narrow economic agenda with little attention to adverse externalities has exacerbated social inequalities and failed to reduce the harms to local environments and the planetary climate. Economic growth has been uneven in Europe, while the balance of global economic power has slowly tipped towards Asia. Economic values have seeped into many corners of social life, especially through the financialisation of public infrastructures. This has led to significant, though still limited, adjustments to Europe’s environmental footprint. In countries such as the UK, the political preoccupation with economic growth has neglected public services, with little productivity gain, while social inequality has increased. This situation was made very evident during the Covid19 pandemic, which revealed that the life of the individualized consumer is not one which most people want to live. Humans are social beings, we have reminded ourselves, and flourish best where many social interaction opportunities are available. The social and environmental dimensions of life have come back into focus, along with attention to interrelationships and recognition of the importance of collective endeavours through which to address challenges and evolve future pathways.
Some now argue that the crises of the neo-liberal project, so evident in countries like the UK and brought into enhanced focus by the pandemic, have created a more propitious political moment for the ideas that planners advocate. Is it possible once again to generate distinctive and politically popular strategic ideas for regions, cities, neighbourhoods and villages which embody spatially integrated ways of creating opportunities for all to flourish? Is it possible to ground such ideas in a focus on people’s everyday experiences, where social, economic and environmental dimensions are interwoven in the flow of life and at the same time ensure that everywhere makes a contribution to environmental adaptation and mitigation in the face of now inevitable climate change? Examples can be found in Europe where such hopes seem to be on their way to being realized, but these are isolated and sometimes oversold.
The political difficulties of generating such strategies are immense. They have become more pronounced in Europe as, over the past thirty years, many diverse forms of social injustice have challenged the formation of a collective voice. Meanwhile, the proliferation of social media platforms has fragmented public discussion into multiple, often isolated, arenas, which sometimes break out into the wider public sphere with points of view that others find difficult to understand and with modes of expression which others find alien. This fragmentation and aggression, partly fostered by neo-liberal practices, both reflects and embeds widespread distrust and distaste for the ‘political classes’ of different countries and the so-called techno-bureaucracy which serves them. Planners, as trained officials and experts, often find themselves at the front line of media attack – the ‘planners’ of much everyday critical public comment.
Re-thinking pathways to the future
Despite these political challenges, there are signs of a move away from the prevailing neo-liberalism in the thinking of policy elites. Rather than economic growth produced by the supposedly exuberant creativity of lightly regulated competitive markets, the role of state investment in promoting the conditions for economic prosperity is being re-asserted. Such investment these days is seen to include not just workforce training and physical infrastructures, needed though they are. It also includes attention to the public infrastructures which support human flourishing both while working and at other times of life. These range from education and health to opportunities for social interaction, access to ‘nature’, and to supportive place qualities. This wide definition reflects a broader view of human life than merely as an economic input to production and consumption. It implies a rejection of imagined rationally-calculating homo economicus in favour of a more rounded human, embedded in social relations and relations with the natural environment, full of feelings and attachments as well as practical concerns. Overarching such re-thinking, the need for much more energetic action at all levels to address the challenges of climate change is ever more pressing. And now suddenly in Europe, we have been forced back into the terrible traumas of the past, with war breaking out in Ukraine, reminding us that the spatial location of key resources and infrastructures matters for reasons of national and international security. Meanwhile, Europe’s global position is shifting as other parts of the world assert their political and economic presence. These evolutions generate a widespread sense of instability in what had once been taken for granted as the political, economic and environmental context for European development, along with anxiety about future directions. Such a context may continue to generate critiques of the organizations and practices of long-established planning systems, but at the same time encourages calls for the kind of planning which focuses on searching for future pathways out of these confused times.
The foci of the planning field
As people look to ways forward, they find a ‘planning field’ which is a diffuse mix of academic discussion, institutionalized practices of education and professionalization, and advocacy movements. Journals such as European Planning Studies are but a small part of this mix. The existence of professional and disciplinary fields is itself experiencing destabilization. These became ever more elaborated from the mid-twentieth century, as university knowledge production expanded and diversified and as new fields of expertise proliferated. Each ‘community of knowledge and practice’ provides a valuable store and tradition of knowledge and technique which builds on what went before but can also bound itself within its own traditions. The focus and boundaries of these disciplinary and professional traditions are themselves formed from earlier contexts and, especially in these contextually destabilizing times, need continual critical review. The pressure for interdisciplinarity in the work of experts reflects increasing questioning of the ways knowledge and expertise has been divided up over the past century. Any field of expertise which evolves into an academic discipline and profession needs to define clearly what its particular contribution to present and future challenges and problems could be, while remaining open to other fields. This definitional challenge has been peculiarly difficult within our field because the term ‘planning’ is such a vague signifier.
In my view, the field has two layers. One relates to a way of shaping collective futures through the application of systematic and experiential knowledge to ordering public investment and regulation policies so that they achieve the gains of strategic direction and co-ordination. This implies taming the market, as well as creating arenas for such co-ordination, linking up what in many countries have become the separate silos of the techno-bureaucratic practices which neo-liberal philosophy aimed to destroy. Knowledge development in this focus overlaps with that in fields which call themselves policy sciences, policy analysis, public administration, and, to an extent, business management. The values embodied in the idea of planning as a general form of societal guidance or ordering are firstly that it is worth aiming towards a better future, even if these days the idea that the future can be precisely imagined and achieved through carefully designed steps has long been abandoned. One contribution that the planning field has made is to emphasize that future imagining is not a scientific process which can be precisely managed but a way of arriving at a vaguely-perceived possibility which can be hoped for, and a set of threats to be guarded against through thoughtful and considerate actions now. Some describe this as a form of ‘strategic navigation’, searching for a possible harbour in rough seas when all navigation aids have been lost. Secondly, this general idea of planning as societal guidance emphasizes that it is worth drawing on available knowledge and technologies to shape strategies and programmes, rather than relying merely on ideological imaginations and rhetorical flourishes. Such ideas have much to offer public agencies seeking to re-focus their work in new ways for new contexts, particularly where the stakeholders include not just the members of a particular organization or the consumers of a product or service, but an array of other interested parties, from citizens to lobby groups and politicians of various hues. Rather than call this kind of work ‘planning’ or ‘strategic planning’, maybe its time to call it something like ‘strategic guidance for shaping collective futures’.
The second layer centres this general focus on spatial relations and co-ordination, especially in terms of the generation and cultivation of place qualities. This is the heartland of the planning tradition as it has professionalized. Papers in European Planning Studies have tended to centre on urban and regional development dynamics within this tradition. The tradition overlaps with many in the social sciences concerned with urban and regional areas, along with urban design, engineering and architecture. Perhaps this tradition too needs a different name. This broad field has been through its own epistemological transformation in recent decades to recognize the complexity and indeterminacy of the relations through which spatial dynamics and place qualities are realized. A deliberate intervention to shape how these dynamics and qualities evolve is but one force among many, with outcomes which cannot easily be predicted. One consequence is that interventions need to be understood less as steps on a clear pathway to a future destination and more as hopeful experiments. Academic work can make two key contributions. One is to research and evaluate the impacts of interventions. The other is to expand the systematised knowledge base and promote new potentialities. Researchers and skilled practitioners working in the planning field are also by now very aware of the unique situatedness of the way spatial dynamics play out from one locale to another and of the need to hone concepts and tools to particular situations.
This emphasis in the planning tradition expresses the value of considering the impacts of one intervention on its surroundings, of spatial co-ordination and ‘integration’ in reducing adverse impacts and improving investment efficiency. It often carries with it an appreciation that place qualities also matter for people’s health and well-being and for cultural reasons. It inherently values connectedness and an appreciation of collectivities as more than merely an aggregation of individual parts of an economic nexus. Those trained in the planning field are accustomed to consider social and environmental dimensions of spatial dynamics, along with the economic. It is this breadth which also encourages calls for greater attention to the social injustices arising from the inherent inequalities and potential environmental damage of unfettered capitalist practices. Such calls challenge neo-liberal philosophy with its celebration of the individualist homo economicus, which is one reason that planning ideas and practices have been belittled by neo-liberal advocates. However, this individualist understanding is itself being challenged. As many social scientists now recognize, the world is formed through multiple, multi-scalar networks, linking not merely humans with each other and with the material world, but with other beings as well. Rather than an individualist ontology, such an understanding brings social and environmental relations into focus, and demands a more social attention to the ways in which particular nodes in networks come to develop cohesive form and power, for example, as ‘places’.
Values and politics
A more conducive context for planning ideas may now be emerging, in which the social and environmental dimensions of human existence in a globally-interconnected world where we humans are a part only of what shapes the environment around us are given much more attention. The planning field, with its focus on future shaping, its broad understanding of spatial dynamics, and its experience of translating general ideas into practical actions, has potentially much to offer as the wheels of politics turn away from neo-liberal strategies. But we should remember that, while a concern for social and environmental impacts is inherent in the planning idea, spatially understood, a concern for social justice and planetary and local environmental health is not. Nor is there anything in the planning idea itself that values the kind of collaborative, participative practices so strongly advocated in the planning field in recent decades, except as providing useful knowledge to help in developing projects and plans. Our literature provides cases where planning as strategic spatial guidance has been used to privilege some and oppress others, and to help the powerful steer their projects and ambitions through potential challenges. Many collaborative techniques have been used and misused to strengthen the position of those already with power. To embed values centred on social justice, environmental sustainability and democratic policy formation into government politics and practices requires a deep commitment to a social formation which values all its members in all the dimensions of life which contribute to human flourishing in the natural world going forward into the future. And it requires a deep commitment to recognizing the value of everyone’s knowledge and expertise as a foundation of democratic practice to support moves away from introverted techno-bureaucratic practices. There is no guarantee that the present de-stabilizing of neo-liberal hegemony will generate a political moment within which these values will flourish. Even if it does, it takes time for the institutional norms and practices of one period to adjust to the ambitions of a new one.
While the problems we humans face pile up, and the world becomes less secure than we in Europe had imagined, political responses could go in several directions. As the quest for social justice and environmental sustainability confronts the bastions of elite privilege and wealth, what this could mean in terms of a trajectory going forward is not easy to articulate. Working out strategies and specific interventions which combine social, economic and environmental dimensions in a fair, holistic and spatially integrated way is a complex political task which will evolve differently in different situations. There may be general directions to public policy, but no generalizations in how these could play out.
Nor is there any inevitability that political futures across Europe will take such a direction. One trajectory which many fear, is authoritarian populism, responding to the views of the dominant group in a nation, region or city in a defensive and often exclusionary way. In such a scenario, spatial integration of social, economic and environmental investments would be pursued at the cost of inclusive social justice. A second direction, a continuation of neo-liberal philosophy, would ignore such efforts, and continue to rely on business morals and customer values to meet the challenges faced, supported by a small state defining minimalist ground rules and individual responsibilities. A third implies a return to Keynesian mixed economy principles, with the state investing in the conditions for economic flourishing while sustaining popular support through adequate welfare programmes and through regulating the economy to avoid the worst failures of unrestrained capitalist exuberance. It is this scenario which seems to be coming back into fashion, in response to the challenges of pandemic disruption and the war-induced energy crisis. A fourth looks to civil society and community initiative, especially at the grassroots, to re-shape how the state works and how to regulate the economy. Such initiatives tend to focus on enhancing the conditions for everyday human flourishing in particular places at particular times. There has been a substantial increase in such activities in recent years across Europe. European Planning Studies could make a useful contribution by encouraging exploration of the relation between evolving governance regimes and planning ideas and practices.
Towards more sustainable, just and democratic futures
How far the skills, techniques and values developed through the planning field will come into play depends in large part on which political future comes about. From my position within the UK, which was not just the first European country to introduce a neo-liberal strategy but is now experiencing the collapsing public infrastructures and deepening social inequalities which have resulted, signs of some mixture of economic Keynesianism and all kinds of community-based initiatives are emerging. There are several networks and experiments emerging which promote new ways of providing support services which recognize the importance of building mutually respectful relationships between those who need and those who provide. These all emphasize the importance of recognizing the shared, social dimension of human life, while sustaining the health of the natural world. There is increasing recognition of the affective as well as material needs we all have as humans, fostering a focus on everyday worlds, rather than that of elite agencies and companies. Combined with an appreciation of our differences as well as what we share in any context, this way of thinking about the worlds we live in leads to an emphasis on enriching rather than hollowing out the democracies which govern our collective affairs. These emerging networks chime with much that is being written about how planning systems and practices across Europe could develop. It is as if a new form of social democratic settlement is being articulated, to provide a trajectory into the future as an alternative to the deepening inequalities and environmental neglects which populist and neo-liberal strategies tend towards. Could we in Europe be living through a transformative moment and if so what part do the academic and professional traditions associated with the planning field have to play?
Such an environmentally-conscious social democratic future will not come about by itself. It needs to be struggled for, and in such struggles people and organizations need to take clear positions. This includes the many voices of the planning field. In European planning academia and practice, a clear focus on promoting and evaluating strategies and interventions which combine social, economic and environmental dimensions in a fair, holistic and spatially integrated way is already strongly developed. This needs to be enhanced with an acute sensitivity to how evaluations, techniques and practices can be subverted to support alternative political futures. Academic ‘voices’, such as European Planning Studies, have a significant part to play in this endeavour through conceptual development, careful evaluation, and advocacy for new insights and ideas. We should remember that our field came into being from the advocacy of many in the early twentieth century, who proposed that more orderly and better designed urban development practices could provide widely-shared benefits. Our research and practice efforts have much to contribute to understanding what precisely inhibits and what encourages the opening up to such a future, as we deal with the very controversial issues of land and property development in which a great deal of what is understood as economic value is tied up. We are accustomed to linking hard materialities with the social dimensions of life, and we are learning how to accommodate the affective as well as the calculative dimensions of people’s responses to proposed interventions in local environments. Our work also highlights the way specific problems and projects express interactions between very particular conditions and broader forces. And there has also been an expansion of research into what it means to recognize not just the diversity of ways we live our lives these days, but the continuing legacy of oppressions, both past and present.
To make this contribution, however, requires broadening out from our ‘planning’ community of knowledge and practice. This means moving beyond existing traditions and out of our own comfortable bubbles, to work with others – other professions, other disciplinary fields, networks and groupings. Any anchor we need as we broaden out may be better provided by a focus on the core of our expertise, giving to the bundle of skills, techniques and modes of operating whatever name makes sense in a context, rather than using the ‘planning’ word with all the complex baggage it carries. Such a broadening should encourage those of us ‘raised’ in the planning field to move from the ‘we’ who write papers and who act as consultants and technical officers in public and private agencies towards the everyday ‘we’ of the political communities within which we exist and which our shared efforts have the chance to re-shape. Put another way, in situations of instability and uncertainty, when bastions of power seem to be crumbling, the power of agency spread across multiple nodes within a society can make a difference. In such a context, crying in despair in the wilderness is not enough. Advocacy is needed as well, showing through doing as well as speaking truth to power, that another way forward is possible.
Caring for the future
My perception is that societies across Europe are living through a period of significant transition with many possible outcomes. In such a context, academics have an important role in mapping the pathways that are emerging, highlighting and evaluating hopeful experiments and providing well-grounded, careful critique of the neglect of fair, sustainable and democratic practices. At the heart of the planning tradition, as it evolved from the nineteenth century, and even more so as we asserted it over thirty years ago when AESOP and then this journal were founded, is a moral care for the future. This tradition encourages attention to the spatial dimensions of urban and regional dynamics, to the qualities of places, and to the articulation of hopeful pathways into the future. The planning community in Europe now needs to ensure that such attention is grounded in understanding and caring for the lived experience of the diverse many across the continent, in all our different situations, as well as an appreciation of how we can contribute to improving life possibilities across the world. Such an orientation can be realized at any scale at which we find ourselves involved. To make a real difference in the future, academics and professionals across all our disciplines and professions, need to reach out beyond established boundaries and seek common cause with others doing the same, with the attitude of advocates and servants of the societies in which we live.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.