Twists and Turns: The Dance of Explanation

The bold assertion by a number of respected planning scholars that a paradigm shift took place in the mid-1990s — in which communicative action planning replaced/or proved itself superior to all other planning approaches — has been hotly contested in recent years. What can now be said with more confidence, I think, is that the past decade of scholarship and practice has been characterized by at least three emerging ‘turns’ or intellectual trends.

The first of these has become known as the difference turn, which starts with a critique of the concept of ‘the public interest’, develops an alternative concept of multiple publics in multi-ethnic and multicultural cities, and argues that planning needs to address the concerns of these multiple publics. Political philosopher Iris Young's work on social justice and the politics of difference has been influential here.

The second might be called the design turn. Ann Forsyth made this argument at an ACSP conference a few years ago, and Sandercock & Dovey (2002) documented the design turn in an Australian case study of changing approaches to waterfront revitalization over a 20-year period. That piece also noted that the turn (back) towards design was accompanied by a turning away from the democratization of planning.

The third, inspired initially by Patsy Healey's work, is now recognized as the institutional turn. Influenced by intellectual trends in economics and sociology, this turn reminds us that (state-directed) planning takes place in institutional settings with specific rules, norms and cultures that must be understood. Especially if we believe that planning can be a socially transformative project, we must first be able to imagine the institutions through which such a transformation might be wrought. This also recalls for me the work of a great American scholar of planning, Lisa Peattie, who reminded us, back in the heady days of protests, sit-ins, squats and so on, about the necessity to face up to the ‘long march through the institutions’.

The four articles in this issue certainly reflect each of these turns, and deliciously complicate and challenge some of the stronger ideological positions of the past decade: for example, the argument about the demise of public space and its absorption by the corporate domain of a globalised capitalism; or the claim that the hegemony of global forces and neo-liberal agendas will always trump the local. Even more unsettling, these articles question the promise of deliberative approaches (the latest turn within the communicative turn), and alert us to ways in which territorial rescalings of planning functions (at the regional level in the UK, and via Europeanisation in the EU) may undermine more local emphases on and mechanisms for redistributive social justice. (Please note that the order in which I discuss each article is not the order in which they appear in this issue).

In a fascinating study of planning policies and political and cultural context in Nazareth, Israel, Yosef Jabareen shows how planning has the potential to trigger and create risks in cities, to unsettle and even destroy well-established forms of peaceful co-existence in deeply divided societies. His article offers a new concept, ‘space of risk’, defined as a lived space in which low levels of trust among different urban groups make people feel vulnerable and defenseless. His story is rich in historical irony.

Muslims and Christians had lived peacefully in this city since the Arab Muslims conquered Palestine in 638. After the war of 1948 between Arabs and Jews, 780 000 Palestinians were dispossessed and displaced in the establishing of the Israeli state. Since then, Nazareth has become the largest Arab city in Israel, with 70 000 residents, 67 per cent of whom are Muslim, and 33 per cent Christian Arabs. Between 1948 and 1992 the Israeli government deprived Nazareth (and other Arab towns and villages) of funding for planning and development, and for provision of basic services. So the local population did things for themselves, with the help of foreign volunteers and donations from local investors.

In 1992 things appeared to change for the better with the election of Yitzhak Rabin and the Labour Party, who were committed to peace and equality between Jews and Palestinians. The Arab Mayor of Nazareth seized the opportunity and proposed a new plan, ‘Nazareth 2000’, to revitalize the dilapidated city. And that is when things started to fall apart. The government approved a Master Plan that envisioned Nazareth as a key city for Israel's Millennium Celebrations, based on the religious theme of the Annunciation, which occurred in the Old City. Nazareth was thus to be marketed as a unique cultural/religious tourist destination, necessitating the upgrading of all sorts of urban infrastructure.

The contested piece of this was a plan (drawn up by a Jewish architect) for a new plaza on the south side of the Church of the Annunciation, which would be inaugurated by an anticipated visit of the Pope in 2000. When the development of the plaza began, the Muslim community argued that this land historically belonged to the Muslim Waaf (an endowment of land for religious purposes), and requested that the municipality build a mosque on the site. Some Muslims occupied the site, and erected a tent that was initially used as a mosque for prayers. Ugly clashes erupted at Easter 1999 between thousands of Muslim and Christian residents. Hundreds of years of peaceful co-existence were destroyed.

The Israeli Labour government yielded and supported construction of a mosque on part of the site. At which point, first the Vatican and then the White House began to throw their weight into this, intimidating the Israeli government into destroying the foundations that had been put in place for a mosque. The plaza was built. Since then, not only has that whole space around the Church become unsafe, but the way of life of the whole city has become destabilized. It is now a city of fear and avoidance, a city of deteriorated relationships.

Jabareen concludes that there are many reasons for the emergence of this new space of risk, among them the hegemony of global forces. But he places most emphasis on the absence of communicative planning procedures and skills and the contradiction between the planners' conception of the space and the way inhabitants have experienced this place in their daily life practices. He argues that better collaborative and communicative practices in the future may be able to avoid the creation of spaces of risk, by acquiring knowledge of urban groups and their interrelations, and understanding the micro-structure of the city in terms of identity and people's perceptions of place. Here is an article that has clearly been influenced by both the difference and communicative turns.

Geoff Vigar's article is very much preoccupied with communicative debates, specifically those emphasizing deliberation as an essential component of participatory planning. This article tells the story of a regional transportation strategic planning effort in the North East of England, within a broader analytical context: that of the reterritorialisation of the state, and its institutional manifestations. The result is a very even-handed evaluation of what he describes as “a well-intentioned but rather confused consultative process” within the context of a still highly centralized governance polity.

There were two key problems, one institutional, and the other concerned the process. His research casts doubt on the current capacity of regional institutions to manage policy development and strategic planning in a democratic fashion. In the absence of a mandated political institution such as an elected regional government, the regional policy agencies are devolving strategy making to either consultants or groups of local authority experts. The attempt by the regional agency to run a consultative process for the Regional Transport Strategy turned out to be what Vigar calls “participation without deliberation”. The failure to design a more deliberative process meant that stakeholders came to the table with their fixed positions, and never changed those positions. As Vigar says, “there is a long way to go both in the creation and empowerment of regional institutions and in the construction of the arenas and practices that can make such a system work”.

The third article in this issue, by De Magalhaes and Carmona, locates itself in recent literature explaining the nature and governance of public spaces. It examines ongoing changes in the management of public spaces in England (based on an extensive survey), analysing how local governments are responding to national government policies and initiatives that explicitly link the quality of public spaces to a broader urban policy and regeneration agenda.

Refreshingly, this article turns its attention to ordinary streets and squares, as opposed to the traditional focus on iconic parks and gardens, and suggests that this focus is creating a new field of public policy with its own stakeholders, power relations and governance mechanisms. Although the substantive focus of this study is on renewed concern with the local physical environment and its impact on the social and economic well-being of inhabitants, reflecting the related rise of the urban design agenda (the design turn), the article actually makes the case for an understanding of changes in the nature of public space and its governance that is firmly anchored in the institutional contexts in which those changes take place.

In-depth case studies of 20 local authorities, chosen to reflect different routes to, contexts for, and types of innovative management practices, reveal a diversity of contributors to the final quality of such spaces as well as the nature of their contribution. Again refreshingly, the article goes beyond the retarded ‘good/best practices’ focus and probes the governance implications of the findings.

What I found most powerful about this empirically-grounded work is that it reveals a complexity of actors involved in the shift in the control and management of public spaces away from local government structures: not only the private sector, but other public sector agencies, community organizations and interest groups. Privatising of public spaces is certainly part of the picture: for example, the private sponsorship of street furniture, landscaping, street wardens, town centre managers, and CCTV systems. But so too is the involvement of community organizations and the voluntary sector, spurred on by national neighbourhood regeneration policies.

The picture that emerges is a complex one. It is not so much about the retreat of the state and the privatization of public space (as the more ideologically driven literature would have it), but rather a limited transfer of power and responsibilities for management to a range of stakeholders (varying from place to place and from one type of public space to another).

An interesting hypothesis emerges from these research findings: namely that these collaborative arrangements of multiple stakeholders seem to be emerging particularly strongly here because management of public space is in many ways a new area of policy. The absence of an established policy culture with clear expectations in terms of responsibilities and power, and of clearly defined and widely accepted routines, is likely to have made it easier for local stakeholders to be more receptive to collaborative forms of policy making and delivery. (There is also evidence of similar processes in the fields of environmental policy and new areas of social policy in the UK and elsewhere). The contrast with the transportation planning sector, as shown in Vigar's article, could not be greater.

The final article in this issue, by Willem Korthals Altes, explores the extent to which ‘Europeanisation’ may have a deep impact on nationally established practices of land development. Europeanisation refers to ‘the process of influence deriving from European decisions and impacting Member State's policies and political administrative structures’. The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), which sets out European spatial planning policy, calls for a Europeanisation of state, regional, and urban planning. However, the focus of Altes's article is not the influence of European spatial planning policy itself, but the emergence of a single market, the core of the European Union. The article suggests that policies in place to safeguard this market, specifically the rules around state aid and public procurement, could have a deep impact on everyday planning practices in the member states.

For example, new rules on state aid relating to land development practices have ended the system of gap funding (in other words, subsidy) for the regeneration of brownfields in the UK, and public procurement rules may end land development contracts in which owners provide the local government with infrastructure in kind. More broadly, Europeanisation may impact the institutional structure of the development process and change different national development cultures by opening up markets. Altes uses a transaction cost analysis to demonstrate these potential changes, as well as reviewing the Scala case (the restoration and conversion of the famous Teatro alla Scala and adjacent related projects), which was taken to the European Court of Justice for a ruling, to demonstrate what is already happening and how this might impact various countries' land development regimes.

This article is a must-read, and not only for those directly involved in the land development industry. It is an eye-opener regarding the potential impacts of Europeanisation in the planning domain, including impacts on redistributive social justice agendas. The Market rules, OK!

Altes's article provides a neat segue into the Interface theme in this issue, concerning Third Party Rights of Appeal (TPRA). For those concerned that the development industry historically has had too much power, TPRA are a necessary step towards the democratization of planning. Given the interest of many in the planning field in the processes of democratisation, it is surprising, as Peter Clinch notes in his Introduction, that there has not been more discussion of TPRA in the academic literature. This provocative group of contributors, which includes a construction industry guru as well as a former Member of Parliament and Minister of State for the Environment and Local Government in Ireland, in addition to academic scholars, sets out clearly, without claiming to resolve, this ever controversial issue. Leonie Sandercock