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Abstract

Planning in Theory and in Practice: Perspectives from Planning the Planning School?

Planning a Planning School: Reflections from MIT

Planning at the University of California, Berkeley

Planning the Planning School: Reflections and Lessons from Brazil

Learning about Planning? Some Stories from a British Planning School

The intellectual origin of this special section on the planning of planning schools dates back to 1978, when I first read David Harvey's article “Planning the Ideology of Planning” as a doctoral student at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). The planning program required that all doctoral students take a qualifying examination in planning theory, and Harvey's article was among the required reading for that exam. Ironically, the main point of his article was to deny the intellectual autonomy and, hence, legitimacy of planning theory as a body of research that could guide planning action.

Harvey argued, quite persuasively, that what is called “planning theory” reflects nothing more than planning academics' periodic attempts to re-legitimize their role in capitalist societies when structural crises in those societies undermine previous attempts to plan capitalist economies. This argument made me question the relevance of my education as a planner; it stayed with me long after I had passed the planning theory exam, and even as I began my academic career at MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Harvey's question resurfaced as I watched the ideological impact of the Reagan-Thatcher years on what Robert Fishman has called “planning conversations” within US planning schools. When I became the chair of MIT's planning department, I began to listen to those conversations more closely as I sought to calibrate MIT's intellectual mission to fit the particular needs of the time. Harvey's argument remained as a consistent low murmur of doubt about the intellectual autonomy of planning, which I consider to be the basis for the education of a professional planner. After all, the notion of a profession rests on the assumption that its body of knowledge is produced relatively autonomously, free of control by either the state or market (Olgiati et al., 1998). As an increasingly active participant in the management of MIT's planning program, I was curious to test this assumption.

However, my eight years as department head passed quickly without much time for reflection on this topic. It was only after I had stepped down from those responsibilities and was attending the World Congress of Planning Schools in Mexico City that the question emerged again. During lunch after an editorial board meeting of Planning Theory and Practice, Heather Campbell, who had become head of department and leader of the Planning Theory and Practice Research Cluster at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and I were sharing experiences as planning administrators, when it occurred to us that our stories could be of some use to others who also may be challenged one day to apply planning theory to the administration of planning schools. Compared with Harvey's grand theoretical question about the intellectual autonomy of planning, the issues we discussed that afternoon were relatively mundane: How was a department's mission articulated? What resources were available? How were limited resources to be allocated? What was the department's relationship with central administration? As we discussed these practical questions, it became clear to me that we had each been engaged in planning exercises that could be culled to ultimately respond to Harvey's question, and I proposed that we think about a special issue on “planning planning schools”. As we agreed to proceed, we pondered how to assemble an interesting set of stories from a representative sample of large and small planning programs in public and private universities, in the US, Europe and newly-industrializing nations.

The following set of commentaries by Michael Tietz, Carlos Vainer, Heather Campbell and myself is our first attempt to explore how planning academics can learn about the art of planning practice by drawing on their own experience of administering planning programs. We do not claim to represent all planning programs. This special section is only a way to begin a process of reflection of the kind James March and colleagues (2003) have called a learning experience with “a sample of one or fewer”. These are also the experiences of individual contributors and may not represent a shared sense of learning by all members of the planning departments they headed. Even then, the stories provide some material to construct a response, however tentative, to the challenge Harvey had posed at the moment when the literature on planning theory was just beginning to flourish.

Without repeating the arguments of each contributor, let me highlight one question I find particularly illuminating, that is: who shapes the educational agenda of planning schools? Is it, as Harvey argued, shaped mainly from outside by the dictates of a capitalist society facing one crisis after another? Tietz describes how the planning curriculum evolved at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley since its inception in 1948. He acknowledges the external pressures posed by changing times but credits the faculty (academic staff) for ultimately arriving at an intellectual consensus after many battles between those who considered land-use planning a central element of planning practice and others who saw the need to educate students in the social, economic and political issues that emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s upheaval in the US. Tietz proposes that all such intellectual battles can be traced back ultimately to the historical moment and the cast of characters at the time of the school's founding, but the particular evolutionary trajectory of UC Berkeley's planning school is more a result of individuals like Mel Webber—and, I would add, Tietz himself—working astutely within the UC Berkeley administrative system, than of the dictates of an economic system which necessitates periodic ideological reformulations.

Vainer's story of how the planning program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFRJ) evolved under his leadership confirms the relative autonomy of planning schools to shape the ideological discourse regarding the role of planning in capitalist societies. He describes how the army-controlled Brazilian government attempted to expunge all dissenting voices from within the planning school. Ultimately, however, the intellectual trajectory of the school was influenced from within, under the leadership of scholars, like Vainer, who brought to the teaching and practice of planning a strong distaste for the powerful state apparatus which they knew, from personal experience, could be used for repression and social control. Vainer also voices concern about the threat of intellectual hegemony from Northern planning schools that periodically construct ideologies of modernization and then export them to Southern planning schools on the global periphery. In this regard, his viewpoint is sympathetic to Harvey's concerns, but the evidence Vainer provides of his leadership and that of others with a critical view of planning suggests that the Southern planning schools do have some intellectual autonomy to shape the planning discourse, at least at home if not abroad.

Campbell draws together the threads from the preceding articles but in her own reflection on the University of Sheffield's planning programme also suggests the relative autonomy of planning schools in shaping the ideological agenda of planning. She points out that although the neo-liberal tendencies of both the British government and the university administration influenced the resource base of the planning programme, the faculty has stated unambiguously that the mission of the department is to further “understanding and action which is socially just in relation to spatial processes and place based outcomes”. However, this collective emphasis on social equity issues was not automatic. Campbell describes the important role of the department head in creating a forum for the articulation of the faculty's intellectual concerns and conveying them persuasively to upper-level administrators.

How each department head navigates through the university's administrative maze could provide good material for planning theory of a different kind than Harvey had advocated. As one attempt in the direction of theory building, the essay on what I learned from chairing MIT's planning department acknowledges Harvey's insights but focuses inside the educational institution to understand how planners navigate through institutional constraints. This question can be traced back to the first generation of planning theorists who, writing even earlier than Harvey, were also somewhat pessimistic about the power of planning but for a different reason. For example, Lindblom's (1959) portrayal of planning as a set of disjointed incremental efforts was not only a critique of rational comprehensive planning, but also a verdict on the limits of planning as a force for social guidance in the contentious institutional environment of constitutional democracies. Yet, we are more aware now than ever before that within the same political-economic setting, institutional performances vary, and that such variations result not only from differences in leadership qualities, but also from complex institutional processes shaped partly by chance or forces of circumstance, but also partly by planning. How such planning processes unfold, particularly within institutions of higher learning, is an intriguing question, one that deserves more attention from planning theorists searching for ways to link knowledge to action in the public domain. After all, universities, where planning theorists usually plan the ideologies of planning, are part and parcel of the public domain.

Planning a Planning School: Reflections from MIT

In the fall of 1994, I cut short my first sabbatical by a half-semester and returned to my position as associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because we were expecting our first child in December. My wife, also an academic, was teaching in New York, and we were planning to commute between Boston and New York even after the child was born. Then in November, suddenly and without any time to prepare, I was asked to replace the chair of the department, Philip Clay, who had been appointed associate provost of the university. This was not an opportunity I anticipated at this point in my career, and it came under difficult circumstances. The fact that I was not fully aware of what lay ahead may be one explanation for why I agreed to take on the responsibilities of being department chair. Another is that these responsibilities presented an important planning task, which I was being asked to lead. Having been educated as a planner, I assumed that I would have the opportunity to test planning theories in practice, albeit in the relative microcosm of a private research university.

To understand my challenge, it is necessary to understand something of the institutional setting. The Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT is one of the oldest and among the leading planning schools in the world. DUSP is a large department comprising 30 full-time and three to five part-time faculty (academic staff) members. It admits between 60 and 65 students for the master's program, 10 to 12 doctoral students, and only a handful of undergraduates each year. Strong in both domestic and international planning, the program has a long tradition of physical design as well as public policy orientation, with both scholars and practitioners among its faculty. The broad range of faculty expertise, apparent in the large number of course offerings per semester, is certainly a strength; yet it can also present problems in crafting an intellectual consensus and achieving a sense of a coherent intellectual community.

MIT is first and foremost a university for science and engineering, and it is appropriate for DUSP's intellectual agenda to complement the university's dominant intellectual attitude of exploration and problem solving. Problem solving is also a central element of planning, and there is a natural affinity between engineers and planners. Yet engineers, somewhat less trained in social sciences than planners, are often less appreciative of the “soft side” of planning, which differentiates it from engineering and provides the rationale for its intellectual autonomy. For the average engineer, it is not difficult to identify with the goals and methods of an architect—indeed, Architecture was among the four founding departments at MIT, along with Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering—while a planner without an engineering or architecture background is still an unknown entity to some degree. I distinctly remember being asked repeatedly, by both senior administrators and other department heads, what exactly we did in the Planning Department. In response, I sought to convey both the similarities and differences between planning and engineering: we are not rocket scientists, yet we can be of use in making decisions about how rocket science should be pursued in environmentally and socially responsible ways.

Aware of the institutional characteristics unique to DUSP at MIT, I have conceptually filtered my experience as department head into three lessons that may be of use to others even in different institutional settings. Although not necessarily the most important lessons I learned, they highlight insights about planning which surprised me at first, and influenced my planning style to a degree I could not have predicted when I accepted the responsibilities of department head without much time to think about the challenges I would face.

Lack of Vision as Strength

After serving for eight years as the department head, I stepped down voluntarily.1 Many of my colleagues and some of MIT's top academic administrators applauded my leadership in strengthening DUSP's position as a leading planning school. Needless to say, I was pleased, but also intrigued by the result given that I had started without any preconceived “vision” of what I wanted to accomplish.

I never really wished to be a department head. In 1994, I was glad to be a tenured faculty member in DUSP, a department I did not even apply to as a student because of MIT's formidable reputation for competitive admissions. My doctoral education in planning at UCLA had cultivated in me some distaste for “people in power”. The art of administering from the top, which is the essence of education in, say, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was not encouraged at UCLA. On the contrary, when I was a student there, the dominant theme was “critical planning”, which encouraged criticism of formal authority as representative of hegemonic ideas.

However, my education at UCLA did provide familiarity with a broad set of issues—domestic and international—related to physical design and public policy, professional practice and academic discourse. Lacking a vision for the department, I had to converse with a wide range of individuals to construct one, and that process was aided by this breadth of knowledge. My intellectual enthusiasm for planning was also helpful. This was cultivated first at the University of Kansas, where Tom Galloway had just started the planning program the year I joined as a master's student. Later, under the guidance of John Friedmann in the doctoral program at UCLA, deep intellectual engagement with planning also inspired me to think about the distinctive qualities of “planning imagination”.

This enthusiasm for planning, and the supporting knowledge of a broad range of planning issues, was the key to my ability to create an environment in which students, faculty and staff considered their daily efforts meaningful. The individualized nature of their research often isolates academics intellectually, and the level of isolation is even higher in top ranking research universities with intense competition for research dollars and prestige. This problem is heightened further in departments with faculty and students from varied academic backgrounds, which must be subsumed in the central mission of the department. Under such circumstances, the challenge is to cultivate a shared sense of meaning among smart people who are constantly questioning the relevance of their work and therefore are appreciative when the department head expresses curiosity about their teaching style and research results. Conversations that begin with such recognition can provide understanding of the faculty's, intellectual preferences, and concerns of the department members, out of which a vision may eventually emerge, if the department head is able to connect the individual dots of scholarship into a coherent story that draws on the history of the department and is fair in its assessment of past efforts.

Even more important in crafting a vision is that the department head not claim personal credit for positive outcomes, or ownership of ideas, even though he/she may have sown the seeds of an idea and, more importantly, will have to nurture it to its full bloom. I learned on the job that property rights of good ideas do not have to be enforced: most colleagues are observant enough to note how ideas were generated, and are happy to be acknowledged as one who played a role, however small and even as contrarians, in the shaping of ideas that ultimately affected the quality of life of the department. Hence the art of leadership is to detach oneself from one's own initiatives and let others take credit, particularly in public, because this broadens the legitimacy of the ideas and increases the chances of their implementation.

Crafting a vision on the job is a labor-intensive process involving many one-on-one meetings. Because there is no one “game plan” it requires the organization of many exploratory initiatives. Some of these exploratory initiatives have to be abandoned eventually, or combined, so as not to overburden the faculty with too many activities and meetings that deter them from their primary responsibilities of teaching and writing. Starting numerous initiatives, although financially expensive, can be justified to some extent by the learning opportunities they provide for the department to determine its real priorities. However, abandoned initiatives can begin to build up resentment unless they are assessed impartially and their lessons are incorporated in the next round of activities.

In other words, a department head needs to acknowledge mistakes openly; as long as they have attempted to be unbiased, fair, and open to constructive criticism, the faculty and students are usually forgiving. The issue of fairness is paramount because the vision of a department head who is viewed as unfair will not be trusted as representing “the public interest”. Gradually, he/she will lose legitimacy, lowering the department's morale, and damaging the positive sense of meaning that faculty and students need to engage actively in departmental activities.

Bish Sanyal

AddressBishSanyalRoom 9-435A, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA, [email protected]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Old Resources, New Uses

In 1994, MIT was in the midst of serious financial problems, which had required the reduction of the department's general budget by $60 000 per year for three years, starting in 1992. So, one of my first challenges as a department head was to reduce DUSP's budget by yet another $60 000 without seriously hurting its academic mission. The tenured faculty proposed that DUSP give up one faculty slot that would become available when a senior faculty member retired. Reducing the relatively large faculty by one member was not viewed as threatening to the department. This decision, although the least painful choice at the time, sent a signal to MIT's higher level administration that the department could absorb a cut in faculty size without much opposition. It came to haunt DUSP a few years later when I asked the provost to increase student fellowships. To meet that request, the provost suggested that the department reallocate funding available for unfilled faculty slots to student financial aid! Underlying this advice was the notion that the faculty size was too large.

To challenge the notion that DUSP had too many faculty, we compared ourselves to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and University of California (UC), Berkeley, both of which had separate planning and public policy programs, whereas at MIT, public policy-related courses were offered by faculty in the planning programs. To demonstrate the importance of public policy course offerings to MIT as a whole, we joined with the Department of Political Science to offer a new sub-specialization on public policy at the undergraduate level. We also provided an institutional home for MIT's Teacher Education Program, which trains undergraduates to teach mathematics and science in high schools. We demonstrated to the administration that the relatively large faculty was necessary for the mission of the department, and the administration backed away from seeking cuts in faculty size until I returned in 1998 with a new request for student fellowships.

The administration continued to frame the debate in either/or terms: keep the large faculty size or reallocate resources to student fellowships. To get out of the trade-off, we sought the help of the chairman of the visiting committee, Hank Spaulding, who had donated generously to start MIT's Center for Real Estate. We provided evidence that DUSP's master's students had to borrow, on average, $42 000, close to their starting salary in 1998. We proposed a loan forgiveness program for graduates who sought employment either in the public sector or with non-governmental organizations. If the Institute really cared to encourage public service, we argued, it should support the creation of such a program (as Harvard Law School had done to encourage graduates to opt for careers in public service). Hank generously contributed the first $1 million of the $7 million needed to create the fund.

Although the Institute did not openly discourage DUSP's effort, it pointed out that administratively it is more difficult to manage a loan forgiveness program than to offer fellowships at the very outset. In the process of requesting that DUSP's loan forgiveness program should be included in its capital campaign, I gained two insights about planning. First, I learned that private donors do not like to donate funds to solve old problems or pay old debts: they prefer to ally themselves with exciting new initiatives. Second, I learned that it is very difficult to generate new resources. What from the outside may look like “new” resources are often old resources used for new purposes.

However, from efforts to use old resources in new ways institutional innovations may emerge; such shifts also signal that the institution is flexible and adaptive to change. One way to put old resources to new use is to connect previously unconnected activities and publicize the connection as the new twist to the old story. Such initiatives are not only easier to implement because they are built on existing practices, but also convey a sense of institutional coherence that senior administrators appreciate. When one is able to achieve such a result, it may be the appropriate time to remind the senior administrators of old nagging problems, which is what we did with the problem of inadequate fellowships. Fortunately, in 2000, MIT was beginning to enjoy a significant increase in returns to endowment, the pressure for budget cuts and restructuring had subsided, and the provost offered to match $3 to every $1 the department was willing to set aside for fellowships. Ultimately, DUSP did agree to reallocate the funds from yet another faculty slot, but the funding for student fellowships increased dramatically, sharply enhancing DUSP's competitive advantage in attracting the best students.

Bish Sanyal

AddressBishSanyalRoom 9-435A, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA, [email protected]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Respect as Resource

When I was appointed rather hurriedly to be the chair, my first decision was to meet with not only the faculty and students, but also with the (non-academic) staff. I was warned that they were a rather difficult group of individuals, mostly women, who were generally unresponsive to any effort to enhance their efficiency. In the first meeting with the staff, I mentioned that the department was continuing to face annual budget cuts, and that I was seeking their support to enhance its operational efficiency. The staff responded gradually, one by one, in ways that shaped my thinking beyond what I had expected; and as I write this article, I remain deeply grateful to them for giving me an institutional insight that I now consider almost an axiom of good planning.

The staff's response began when one member congratulated me for becoming the department head. She mentioned that I had not changed much since I arrived at MIT in 1984, except for steady balding, commenting that I had kept my friendly and accessible demeanor, even after being promoted. I mentioned that although I had no time to envision specific goals, I had heard that the staff were not happy and wondered what kind of mistakes I should avoid in order to gain their trust.

A second staff member responded spontaneously: “Bish, we know that you cannot increase our salaries, which are quite low, but what you can do is to at least treat us respectfully”. “How so?” I asked. This evoked an immediate response from almost all the staff members in the room. “By simply acknowledging that we exist”, said one staff member, who went on to describe how the faculty member she worked for barely looked at her as he hurriedly dumped work on her table, on his way to a meeting or a class. As these types of comments followed one after the other, I came to realize that the staff were deeply aware of the contrast between themselves and the faculty, particularly successful women faculty, who seemed to avoid socializing with women staff members in order to emphasize their own academic and professional status within a male-dominated environment. Many staff members complained that though the faculty got upset if the staff members were not at their desks when the faculty needed their assistance, the faculty themselves rarely mentioned their daily schedule. In other words, the flexibility of time that the faculty enjoyed (although usually put to good use) was in sharp contrast to the working schedule of staff members who were expected to be at their desks from 9 am to 5 pm.

The relatively low salaries of the staff, particularly vis-à-vis those of senior faculty members, strained this relationship further. The staff members were keenly aware of the institutional constraints influencing their low salaries, and none asked for a salary increase in my first meeting with them. Instead, they asked why the Institute was charging the same parking fee for faculty and staff when their salaries varied significantly? And why the Institute had changed its policies with regard to college tuition support for the children of staff members? One commented that she was grateful to the Institute for providing opportunities to learn new skills through specialized courses, but that learning new skills without having access to jobs at higher levels within the Institute made her question the purpose of the courses.

Among the points made that day, the one that stayed with me—and is still with me, even after 12 years—was the need for more respect among apparently unequal members of DUSP. I have come to realize, thanks to my colleague Richard Sennett's (2004) wonderful book, Respect in a World of Inequality, that the notion of social respect deserves more intellectual scrutiny from planners. No one would disagree that a little more social respect for one another would be good for the human condition, but how to cultivate such respect, particularly at a time of deepening social inequalities, is a matter which has not received the kind of intellectual attention it deserves.

Sennett has argued that not all well-intended public policies aimed at improving the quality of life of disadvantaged citizens contribute to a sense of social respect. On the contrary, some well-intended public policies, such as provisions of public housing, may hurt the cultivation of social respect if they do not take into account the emotional groundings on which the personal and social meanings of disadvantaged groups rest. I had been familiar with this particular angle of reasoning, in part because I have had the opportunity to work with Peter Marris (1974), who too had argued, before Sennett, regarding this important role of social meaning, and how planners must help reconstruct such meaning at times of rapid change. But, I had not understood the complexity of the issue until my meeting with the staff, who provided many examples of how they were disrespected even by faculty members who made a career of studying inequalities. The examples were surprising in their simplicity: faculty members coming to and leaving their offices without a schedule around which the staff could organize their time; faculty leaving the office abruptly, in a state of anxiety, without saying a word to the staff member; faculty not acknowledging the significance of Administrative Professionals' Day until they are reminded by the department's administrative officer; faculty travelling around the world to give talks, on trips planned by staff members whose contributions were rarely acknowledged, then returning with a large backlog of work for the staff; and so on.

By the end of the first meeting with the staff members, I had been deeply affected by their comments, particularly as they stressed that they were not asking for more salary because they knew the department had to reduce its annual budget by $60 000. Needless to say, they were anxious about who among them were to lose their jobs; some staff members had lost their jobs in the first round of budget cuts that my predecessor had to implement. By the time I had become head, the faculty had realized that good administrative assistance was crucial for their productivity, and were more willing to reduce the number of faculty than to further reduce the support staff. The staff wanted to know my position on this issue, and all I could tell them was that I was very new to the job, and had yet to develop an overview of the department before making any major decisions. I also sought their assistance and patience as I learned on the job. And that sign of respect was the main thing they wanted.

Bish Sanyal

AddressBishSanyalRoom 9-435A, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA, [email protected]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Anticipating Scepticism

This brief article highlights only three lessons among many others I learned on the job as chair of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. To summarize, I discovered that lack of vision need not be a problem under all circumstances, that institutional innovations require the use of old resources in new ways to address persistent problems, and that social respect is crucial for the cultivation of social harmony even in the microcosm of a planning school. I realize that others may have drawn different conclusions from these experiences; and if this article evokes such disagreements, I would consider that an accomplishment. However, the issue of social respect is too important to be ignored or marginalized. One might ask, to put it bluntly, whether social respect as I describe it in this article is merely a form of window dressing in the absence of social fairness. This is a crucial question because fairness and equity are principles which many planners, myself included, consider central to their professional mission.

Social respect is not a replacement for social equity, and I am not advocating social respect in lieu of social equity. What I describe in this article are instances of asymmetrical power relationships which must first be acknowledged as such; and since such power asymmetries can rarely be equalized without radical changes in the governance structure of institutions, planning administrators may give some thought to how individuals at the bottom of the institutions cope with power asymmetries. The type of social respect I refer to here requires no material resources but can help create a sense of meaning among people at the lower end of organizations, which is essential for coping with the uncertainties and humiliation often inflicted by power asymmetries. This does not mean that social respect by the powerful minimizes the claims of social equity by the relatively powerless. What I learned is that social respect creates a more open organizational environment, one that evokes reasonable claims in a context in which they can be appreciated and addressed.

Bish Sanyal

AddressBishSanyalRoom 9-435A, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA, [email protected]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Planning at the University of California, Berkeley

Planning schools and departments are purposeful organizations, usually focused on training and preparing students for professional life in the diverse fields of city and regional planning through master's degree programs. In many cases, they also prepare doctoral students to teach and carry out research through PhD programs, and they educate undergraduate students through majors in fields such as urban studies. All of these are now part of the program of the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, where they have evolved through a long process of planning and trial and error over the past 56 years. As organizations, planning schools are also embedded within universities and must also respond to the changing imperatives of that larger institutional environment, with serious risks if they make poor choices. At a still larger scale, because of their concern with practice and policy, planning schools must necessarily relate closely to the world outside the university, both in their immediate urban context, and in relation to real changes in the larger world and to new knowledge in the form of theory or as shown by empirical research. Furthermore, planning schools consist of groups of human beings—mostly of the sub-species homo academicus or homo professionalis—with all the variety of temperaments, objectives, personal styles and quirks that we might expect. Not surprisingly, planning schools are neither simple nor easy to plan.

City and regional planning at UC Berkeley has a relatively short (by academic standards) but complex history, so in order to discuss the question of planning it is helpful to review briefly how the department came about. At its founding in 1948, the department was a response to a widely felt need for planning that was part of the legacy of the Great Depression and Second World War. In no small part, its formation was also due to the efforts of a small group of citizens and professionals who had campaigned for better urban and regional planning in the San Francisco Bay Area through organizations such as Telesis, which sought to bring multiple fields together in a comprehensive regional approach to environmental issues. T. J. Kent, who had served as San Francisco's second planning director, was invited to become the chair, a position he held for 12 years.

I would contend that every organization, at each point in its existence, faces and addresses a specific, key planning problem, and that the most critical such problem is addressed at the organization's outset. It is then that the organization's basic mission must be established, together with the means that is chosen to achieve it, and the strategy for implementing those means. Addressing the planning problem successfully may give rise to a period of relative stability, but inevitably challenges will arise, implying a new planning problem to be solved. That process ends only with an organization's dissolution. Nonetheless, it is at the outset that the organization's “DNA” is created, from which its future evolution will spring. Jack Kent saw the Berkeley department's mission quite clearly. It was to produce capable, committed, professional planners, who would work and advocate for improved physical planning for local communities and regions. The means was in his hands, namely, a Master of City Planning degree program with a firm promise of university support. The strategy for implementing it was to bring together an experienced group of professionals and advocates. They would teach according to the current practice in schools of architecture and landscape architecture, employing intensive studios for the greatest part of the students' time, and supplementing them with course work to deepen their understanding of the field and its problems. Such a strategy implied that the program would be small, taking in fewer than 20 students per year. It would be costly in terms of faculty time and commitment, and it would offer relatively little room for deviation from the program on the part of students, who would be engaged in a mandatory, major studio for several hours each day for four days per week.

In the early years, Jack Kent recruited Francis Violich, a landscape architect and member of the architecture faculty at Berkeley, Sidney Williams, a professional planner, Catherine Bauer, a nationally known housing researcher, Mellier Scott, a very able journalist-historian, and Melvin M. Webber, an early graduate of the program who was working on feasibility studies for the soon-to-be-built Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Corwin Mocine, director of city planning for the City of Berkeley, and the department's first PhD, the sociologist Donald L. Foley, joined subsequently. Clearly, this group fitted the planning solution that Kent chose. They were fortunate, too, in the department's institutional locus in the university. During these years, the chair reported directly to President/Chancellor Clark Kerr, with no intervening deans, and only a supervisory faculty committee. The department had been identified in the university's plans as having high priority for new faculty, a status that would last well into the 1960s.

Jack Kent thus successfully solved the initial planning problem for DCRP, but in so doing, he created a successor problem that would dominate the department through the 1960s and into the 1970s. It arose fundamentally out of the fit between the department and the university. By the 1950s, UC Berkeley was well established as one of the nation's leading research universities, not least because of its achievements in nuclear physics. With several Nobel Prize winners on the faculty, the institution was coming to expect high research productivity from its entire faculty. For professional schools and for departments addressing the arts, this posed a problem that still remains unresolved, namely, what should count? Given its professional orientation and the lack of research training or experience of many of its faculty, DCRP did not fit the research model well. Furthermore, the field of planning, itself, was experiencing internal debate about the relevance of social science to its work. Related fields, such as regional science, were coming into existence, and practitioners were beginning to experiment with new forms of analysis, especially the use of computer models in transportation planning. The use of surveys and data to establish the foundations for planning was not new; it had been part of the field since the 19th century. What was problematic was the style and substance of work for those teaching planning in universities. They were historically not part of a culture of research and journal publication. Though many had written important books, for example, T. J. Kent's The Urban General Plan, such works were not in an academic tradition.

The problem of research did not go unnoted within DCRP. Some faculty, especially Catherine Bauer, campaigned for the establishment of a research institute to complement the department. Writing directly to UC President Clark Kerr in 1960, she urged the formation of a research institute, noting that competitor schools, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania had organized research institutes. She saw that without such an institutional base, research by DCRP faculty would not be treated seriously by faculty in other departments.1 In due course, the Institute for Urban and Regional Development (IURD) opened in 1963. Even more important was the growing influence of Melvin Webber, who became the guiding force in the expansion of DCRP after 1960. Mel Webber was actively in touch with new developments in the field and sought out and recruited many new interdisciplinary faculty members, even though he only served briefly for one semester as acting chair.2 Convinced that the department had to go beyond the professional model, Webber became a force through his intellectual conviction, his tireless application, and his mastery of institutional development. From 1960 through to 1968, a series of new appointments were made, many of them PhDs in fields ranging from planning to engineering. They also included leading senior academics in planning, Martin Meyerson and William Alonso from Harvard, and Jack Dyckman, and William Wheaton from Penn (University of Pennsylvania), all of whom might be called modernizers.

By the late-1960s, it might be said that the second planning problem had been addressed and solved. DCRP had more than doubled in size, and substantial research funds were flowing through IURD. A PhD program had been successfully established, and Berkeley graduates were producing innovative research and teaching in programs across the US. But in solving the problem, internal differences within the faculty had not been eliminated. The paradigm of the original conception of the program differed so greatly from that which was now being put into place that significant differences and tensions emerged between proponents of physical planning, as it was then conceived and practiced, and those who sought to broaden and replace the foundations of the field. As a result, in the master's degree program, a series of uneasy compromises were put into place, breaking the old unitary format into three separate tracks. Solving the planning problem once more had its price. Furthermore, the solution itself was soon to face powerful new challenges, in which I participated directly.

I joined the DCRP faculty in January 1962, directly from the Regional Science Program at the University of Pennsylvania. During my first two years, as a junior faculty member, I saw the continuing arrival of new faculty, both senior and junior. By 1966, I was serving as Assistant Chair to Jack Dyckman. Since he travelled incessantly, I found myself managing the department from day-to-day. Although the recruitment process was controlled by senior faculty, especially Mel Webber, I found myself using time-honored means, such as control of meeting agendas, to shape the process. In June 1968, I left Berkeley for a two-year period at the New York City Rand Institute, and after my return, I became chair of the department from 1970 to 1974. In 1985–86 and briefly in 1994, I returned as chair, but that is not germane to this account.

Apart from the tension generated between old and new in DCRP, what were the issues that led again in the early 1970s to redefinition of the department's key planning problem? Two elements, one internal and the other external seem to have been critical. Internally, the process of expansion of the domain of the field of planning continued. In the mid-1960s, Mel Webber, in conjunction with a broad external network of people working on policy issues, developed major funding for a Social Policies Planning Program. A very large grant from the National Institute of Mental Health was a response to the urban crisis that had been wracking American cities during that decade. It sought to train a new cadre of scholars who would address urban issues through social policy, broadly defined, and it enabled DCRP to recruit new faculty, including a practicing psychiatrist, Leonard Duhl, and to support doctoral students handsomely. As a result, a new wave of faculty recruitment occurred, including a much larger intake of doctoral students. However, these students were not conventional social scientists. Influenced by the external ideological movements of the decade, especially Marxism and feminism, together with the vision of war, inter-racial violence and burning cities, they were far more attuned to problems of race, class and gender in American society. Responding to the pressure of the Vietnam War, and the violence in Berkeley during 1969–70, they were impatient with the standard paradigm. Instead, they turned to Marxist and structuralist explanations of social phenomena. The result was a new, intellectual crisis in the department as the methods of social science were denounced and doctoral students sought new ways to define the field and their work. In the strange atmosphere of the university at the time, all manner of curious, often narcissistic, forms of doctoral research seemed acceptable. In retrospect, it is hard to reconstruct that atmosphere. All types of conventions broke down, not least, formality in modes of address, in dress and in relationships between faculty and students. Behaviour that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before became normal, if that is the right word. For some faculty, who had just short years before advocated rigorous empirical research, this seemed intolerable. Managing and planning a department in such a situation requires great flexibility, a good deal of subtlety, and the ability to withstand invective. It is not good for one's mental health, although in retrospect it can be very funny.

Even in tumultuous times, more fundamental planning problems do not disappear; they become expressed in specific decisions. The prospect of Jack Kent's retirement in 1974 raised the question of what would be the future of the master's degree program, with its professional and land use planning orientation. Today, three decades after the emergence of environmental consciousness and the mass of accompanying legislation of the late-1960s and 1970s, it is hard to imagine the field of city planning without issues of land use and development being central. Yet at that time, the whole question of the continuation of land-use planning itself was on the table. Some faculty members were inclined to drop land-use planning completely, taking the program elsewhere. Others saw the professional field as the critical element that justified the program's existence within the university, without which it would be viewed as no more than a weak copy of the social sciences. The issue was successfully resolved with new appointments and redefinition of the program's land use offerings.

Was there a dominant issue in planning for the planning school at UC Berkeley in the 1970s? Unlike the two previous rounds of critical planning problems, this one showed neither a single defining issue, nor a coherent, albeit debated response. It was a time of intense intellectual and professional confusion, exacerbated by the end of expansion for the program, rising student-faculty ratios and budget cuts. Some faculty, offended to the core by boorish student behaviour, retreated into their own concerns. However, for the most part they faced the problems and sought to address them. In retrospect, it seems as though by the end of the decade DCRP had responded to this round of change in three profound ways. First, a serious effort was made to improve the gender balance in the faculty, with the recruitment of the first women since Catherine Bauer, namely Janice Perlman and Judith Innes. This was no easy process, but it broke the barriers and responded to the rising number of women among the master's and doctoral students. Ultimately, it took a chair's initiative that presented the faculty with only women candidates, which was accepted, albeit with some grumbling. A parallel effort to increase the proportion of minorities on the faculty, had some initial success, but in the longer term must be judged a failure. Second, the professional core of the master's program was sustained and boosted by the recruitment of Alan Jacobs, who combined both professional and research skills in equal measure. Third, the department, and to some extent the field as a whole took a look at itself and pulled back. Some of the areas of social policy in which planners had innovated were taken over by other fields, notably economics and public policy, but more to the point, with the end of resource expansion, they were simply not sustainable. Similarly, although multiple modes of research were now acceptable, planning faculty had looked into the abyss of methodological chaos and earlier excesses became history. The 1980s and 1990s would see new problems and challenges, but this specific planning crisis had run its course.

I have described three episodes in the course of which the Berkeley planning department faced planning challenges and responded to them. Planning fundamentally always addresses the future, but conceptions of the future itself may differ greatly. One way of looking at the idea of the future sees it with two metaphors—the future as invention and the future as navigation. Those who see the future as invention take it as possible to reshape it according to their desires, largely through creativity. Those who see it as navigation tend to emphasize the necessity to chart a course through rocks and shifting winds and currents, always with an end in view. I see it both ways, depending on the times. In the 1950s and 1960s, planning the Berkeley planning school required bold invention, which was forthcoming. The 1970s time of crisis, confusion and constraint required strong nerves and careful navigation, always with a vision of what we should be. There will be more crises and changes in the future, but I hope and believe that our field and our schools may always respond to their best ability in the context of the times.

Michael B. Teitz

Correspondence Address:MichaelTeitzDepartment of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA, [email protected]

Department of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Context

I have been the Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFRJ) on three separate occasions: the first two times for two years (1989–91, 1993–95) and the last time for four years (2002–06). Each period has coincided with a very different combination of political and academic circumstances, and a different stage in the institutional development of IPPUR. This changing context has had a very distinct impact on the development of the Institute.

IPPUR is the oldest planning school in Brazil and the first master's program in Urban and Regional Planning started in 1972. The early 1970s coincided with the peak period of the military dictatorship and hence planning was centralist, technocratic and authoritarian in nature. The financial and political support for the foundation of IPPUR came from the Federal Service of Housing and Urbanism, which was part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This reflected the regime's preoccupation with educating “experts” to undertake the “rationalization” of urban and regional development. In practice what resulted was rapid but uneven growth of the metropolitan areas leading to a housing crisis and acute regional disparities. The impacts of this approach to planning were later dramatically exposed by the results of the census.

This context had implications for the Institute, because during the course of the 1970s, students and staff became increasingly uneasy about the implications of the current planning policies, leading them to question current planning conceptions and practices. In 1977 the matter was, in a sense, solved manu militari, as seven professors were expelled from the programme for holding heterodox ideas. From 1979, with the advance of the democratization process in Brazil, a new faculty came together in the Institute. This group, with which I belonged, was able to recover and develop the academic program, which the military government had attempted to destroy through terror and intellectual repression. A key achievement was the establishment of an independent academic institute for planning. Rather than the planning school being simply a subordinate discipline within a department of architecture, economics or geography, as generally occurs in Brazil. This independence allowed us to avoid being beholden to another discipline.

An enduring concern has been the maintenance of good relations, not only with the planning agencies but also with non-governmental organizations and popular movements. The latter are recognized by us as important agents in shaping urban and regional spaces. In countries like Brazil a shortage of resources often forces academic departments to seek financial support from governments and companies. However, for us dialogue with a diversity of agencies is regarded as a sine qua non for the preservation of academic autonomy. In turn, independence has been vital to the development of an educational and research mission, which aims to be critical as well as being committed to developing thinking and actions concerned with transformative change within our cities and regions. It is important to emphasize that these were conscious choices and their realization is therefore a reflection of a successful long-term planning process.

Carlos B. Vainer

AddressProfessorCarlosBVaerInstituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Edifício de Reitoria, sala 543, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, 2164-590, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, [email protected]

Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Institution Building

The material challenges facing the Institute since the 1970s might seem at once immense and also quite straightforward. How to access resources for research? How to secure resources to keep the library up-to-date? However, the main challenges for a young institution, born out of crisis, are in some senses less material and more about the process of institution building. Institutional agreements define the goals of a planning school. Hence they are a priority when everything is open and yet to be built. What should be the form of programmes of study? Which modules should be obligatory and which elective, with what content and which bibliographies? What are the obligations and rights of the faculty? What are the rights and duties of the students? The process of institutional construction involves answering these questions, amongst others, and the role of head of the department, in our case, the Director of the Institute, is responsible for co-ordinating and, if possible, leading this process. This seems to be, above all, the task of a statesman rather than of a planner? But if we take a second look, is this not one of the enduring lessons from planning theories and practices? As Francisco de Oliveira used to say, parodying Clausewitz, planning is the continuation of politics by another means.

If this challenge was not big enough it has been made even bigger by the advance of neo-liberal conceptions and ideologies in politics, in urban and regional planning and, last but not least, in human behaviour. On the one hand governmental scientific and academic policy increasingly attempts to transform universities, encouraging academics to become more entrepreneurial and competitive as they struggle to secure research endowments. This entrepreneurial individualism is incentivised and linked to productivity and competition. This is strange for those familiar with critical thought and directly in conflict with the academic ideal, which inspired many generations of scholars. The policies of government allied to this individualistic ethos present a great challenge, especially for those like me and many of my colleagues, who are committed to participative and democratic planning based on co-operation and solidarity.

Carlos B. Vainer

AddressProfessorCarlosBVaerInstituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Edifício de Reitoria, sala 543, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, 2164-590, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, [email protected]

Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

An Educational and Research Programme in a Peripheral Country

Which planners do we want to train? What form of planning do we wish to encourage in our cities and regions? These are crucial questions in a Brazilian context. The critiques of modernist, technocratic and authoritarian planning with their emphasis on expertise and their belief in rationality and the apolitical nature of planning will always be important. But it is necessary to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water, and the rejection of any form of planning, for this leaves the way open to market friendly planning (or market oriented planning). The market being the hand that, while invisible, is far from disinterested. The challenge is how to build conceptions, methods and practices which transform planning into a democratic process of reinventing cities, while is also committed to universalism and simultaneously is deeply rooted in national and local realities?

It is to be welcomed that the contemporary world seems to offer scholars and universities in the South increasing access to the academic work of the countries of the North. However, there must also be concern that the diffusion of conceptions and ideas engendered in, and spread from, the North threatens to impose a dangerous and impoverishing urban pensée unique. The solutions offered by numerous experiences inspired by the famous “best practices” could not be more disappointing and often inappropriate. Rio de Janeiro is not Paris or London, São Paulo is not Los Angeles or New York. English has become the lingua franca of the global planner and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, UN-HABITAT and UNDP. Hence such agencies, often with links to academics in the North, tell the South what to do in a foreign language and from a point of view that is unaware of the realities and needs of our cities and citizens.

So here is another great challenge. To interact with the research and practical experiences accumulated in the countries of the North, while avoiding superficial translations, which ignore the realities of the South, including the urban privation and everyday lives of millions and millions of Brazilians. Moreover, how many of our planners and scholars in Brazil are more concerned about becoming international consultants or World Bank employees rather than about the housing shortage of more than 15 million households? How many use their commitment to the mainstream as a means to facilitate their own individual project rather than to further the public endeavor, which is (or should be) the foundation of our professional education and practice?

Carlos B. Vainer

AddressProfessorCarlosBVaerInstituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Edifício de Reitoria, sala 543, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, 2164-590, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, [email protected]

Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Planning Helps?

The extent to which planning helps, is an inexorable question. In my case there can be no doubt that a knowledge of planning helped to direct and co-ordinate my work. I would even say that after my last experience as the Director of IPPUR, I am, more than ever, an advocate of planning. As an instrument with which to glimpse the future, but also as an ordinary guide to action, planning is a powerful instrument for institutional construction.

But which planning model is most appropriate and useful: normative or pragmatic, participative or centralized, incremental or strategic? What should be prioritized: intuition or reason, goals or processes, rules or communicative interaction? The lesson I have learned from my experience is that any subordination to a specific model seems to impoverish the possibilities of finding innovative, creative and original solutions to our problems. Perhaps some issues demand a pragmatic and managerial treatment; after all, budget planning and adequate financial management help to ensure scarce resources are used in more intelligent ways. However, a managerial approach is not appropriate when faced with the epistemological and methodological challenges of developing a critical pedagogy in the context of capitalism and a peripheral country. Rather flexibility, commitment and a long-term and clear perspective is needed.

Overall this suggests that methodological orthodoxy should be avoided, although linked to, the non-negotiable principle of participative democracy. Only the participative process recognizes the vitality and richness of conflicts, while also contributing towards the construction of solid institutional pacts that respect diversity and academic liberty. Participation works to cement a collective, critical and democratic project. Consequently, the lessons from my time as Director of the Institute are political rather than technical or methodological. Planning is about building spaces and political projects, with politics being understood as the process of elaboration and implementation of collective projects in public space. Is not that what we try to teach future planners?

Carlos B. Vainer

AddressProfessorCarlosBVaerInstituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Edifício de Reitoria, sala 543, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, 2164-590, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, [email protected]

Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Learning about Planning? Some Stories from a British Planning School

Introduction

The response of most academic colleagues on hearing the news that I had agreed to take up the appointment as head of department was to offer their “commiserations”. In the UK at least, and I sense elsewhere, such responsibilities are equated with ending one's research, and therefore academic, career. The role of head of school or department is something to be actively avoided by any self-respecting planning academic. In the last few months of my four-year term as head of the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield, I now feel in a position to challenge this pervasive assumption. My experience suggests, quite the reverse. In many ways any self-respecting planning academic should see it as part of their development as a researcher to take a stint as the administrative head. Why? Well, as the preceding contributors have already highlighted you are confronted in such a role with the challenge of actually doing planning in the here and now, rather than retrospectively observing or talking about planning. The benefit of hindsight makes us all wise after the event; the art of planning is how to judge between better or worse courses of action in real time. As head of school you are responsible for making things happen, or for that matter, not happen. What “things” they should be, how those choices are arrived at, by whom and with what implications given a complex terrain of often conflicting pressures and structures, lie at the heart of the job. Sounds like planning to me, if not specifically spatial in focus.

Over the last decade or so story-telling, and the closely related skill of listening, have been recognized as an important part of inclusive and progressive planning practices (Sandercock, 2003; Throgmorton, 1996, 2003). Local residents, developers, politicians and planners are continuously engaged in a process of constructing stories (or narratives). Each story helps to give meaning to the places people inhabit, while they are often also designed to persuade others of the veracity of particular interests, needs and wishes. Linked to this is the understanding that the construction of knowledge and insight is not simply a matter of the identification of “objective”, quantifiable facts. In emphasizing the role of story-telling the academic planning community has concentrated its focus on the stories of others, but what of our own stories and the potential reflexive insight to be gained?

The preceding contributions illustrate that there is much that can be learnt about planning from our own academic backyards. My purpose in the following is to draw together some threads from these contributions and to reflect on some stories from my own experiences in a British university. There are two key themes that run through my comments. First, it is striking that all the contributions have sought to provide understanding and explanation by positioning their experiences in relation to particular institutional, societal, governmental and professional contexts. I want to reflect on this a little more by focusing specifically on the interplay of context and outcome, or expressed rather differently structure and agency. Second, there is a concern with differentiating doing from observing, and hence whether the forms of understanding that we have developed to observe planning processes are at all helpful at the point of determining an appropriate course of action. Planning and public policy more generally is, or at least should be, about deciding and acting not spectating. However, first I need to say something briefly about the Department of Town and Regional Planning (TRP) at the University of Sheffield and to recount a few stories of my own.

Heather Campbell

AddressHeatherCampbellDepartment of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]

Department of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Background: Some Initial Stories

TRP's “DNA”, to use Michael Teitz's metaphor, has taken shape over a rather shorter period of time than the planning schools already discussed. It was founded in 1965, along with several others in the UK. This reflects a revival of interest in planning during the 1960s, and was further reinforced by the election of Labour governments from 1964 and the availability of funding for postgraduate planning programmes following the establishment of the Social Science Research Council in 1966. The 1960s represented a period of optimism about the intellectual and practical potential of a social science, rather than design, based planning education and this emphasis was embraced by the first head of Department, J. R. James. Therefore, the department's educational philosophy has long been grounded within a strongly interdisciplinary social science context. This should not be assumed to suggest a history of happy consensus amongst the staff. The 1980s, for example, saw the reorientation of the accredited graduate programme to reflect procedural planning ideas, while simultaneously the non-accredited undergraduate programme in Urban Studies was framed around a far more radical and critical agenda. It is undoubtedly the latter emphasis that has subsequently gained dominance. It will be clear from this that the Department offers both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of study. In the recent past the range of programmes has been diversified considerably including dual degrees with other built environment professions such as Architecture and Landscape Architecture as well as with the social sciences in the form of Geography, and the in-house development of professionally-accredited graduate programmes in property / real estate. To reinforce the point made above about the dominant ethos, there cannot be many real estate programmes that have a compulsory module entitled “Philosophy, Theory and Ethics in Property”.

An important feature of the work of the department has been commitment to the development of doctoral education, leading to the creation of one of the UK's most vibrant research schools. Although a more recent development than at MIT or UC Berkeley, this commitment resulted from recognition that if the discipline was to generate a good calibre of research, significant resources would have to be focused on research training and doctoral education. Tensions between staff orientated towards practice rather than to academic research, mentioned by the previous contributors, and in turn often linked to different generations as Teitz suggests in the context of Berkeley, has not been a hugely divisive issue within TRP. Even in the early years of the department when the majority of staff were appointed directly from practice, intellectual inquiry was valued alongside engagement with practice. However, more generally, this issue has been the source of much fierce debate within the discipline in the UK and more broadly in continental Europe.

The department's relationship to international concerns, particularly in the global South, has paralleled British clumsiness more generally. It is uncomfortable to recall that in the early years of TRP the UK government divided up the so-called “less developed” parts of the world and allocated a chunk to each planning school, Sheffield being allocated the Middle East. Alongside this, through accident or design, the British post-war planning system was “rolled-out” across many parts of the world. Much of the town planning of the now devastated Beirut and Baghdad was undertaken by Sheffield trained planners and/or was linked to the activities of staff. Amongst other issues, unease about the colonial legacy implicit to these activities as well as changing global relationships, led to focus increasingly being placed on collaboration with academics and practitioners in other European countries. However, over the last five years the department has re-embraced its links to global South, this time with a strong emphasis on mutual dialogue and learning. Further, from a Sheffield perspective, I can sympathize with Carlos Vainer's concern about the unthinking influence of examples of international or national “best practice”. Sheffield, as with the majority of the UK, is not London, nor is it New York or Bilbao.

This departmental environment is set against the back-drop of a university, which is a member of the 20-strong Russell Group of leading British research universities. Sheffield is a large, full service university, which like virtually all universities in the UK is state funded. Given its location it will come as little surprise that the university has a strong base in engineering. Very early in my time as head I too learnt, like Bish Sanyal, of the importance of being able to communicate in a language readily understandable to engineers. I also became immediately aware that in the abstract no one in the senior university administration would grieve if they did not have a planning school. Therefore, a crucial aspect of my job was to act as an enthusiastic advocate for my discipline, as its worth and value would be far from self-evident to those outside the department, and worse, the general stereotype was of planners as dull bureaucrats, who were not really “proper” academics. While the development of my advocacy skills has been important, I have been dependent for my evidence-base (or ammunition!) on the talent of my colleagues to demonstrate the intellectual and educational value of the work with which we are engaged and want to develop further, as well as the professionalism of the administrative support team. Sanyal mentions his educational inheritance, which gave him a natural suspicion of authority. Well-honed critical capabilities do not necessarily equip a head of department well for the role as an advocate. An academic life spent uncovering oppressive and exclusionary planning practices can leave you unpractised in the art of selling the planning discipline.

More generally, critique alone as a departmental philosophy provides little positive sense of purpose and is a problematic, and somewhat confusing, basis for the education of future practitioners. I remember able students asking in the late 1990s, “What point is there in becoming a planner?” One of the most important journeys the department has undertaken in the last few years is in developing a confidence in who or what we are as a planning department. This has not involved any kind of “eureka” moment or, perhaps surprisingly, endless tense “away-days”. Rather it has been a very gradual process, but one that has been crucially dependent upon finding the appropriate words to express an unspoken shared understanding. The ability to find the “appropriate words” should be in the job description of every head of department, with what is “appropriate” highly context sensitive.

For TRP the appropriate words have become “excellence in teaching and research undertaken in an interdisciplinary context that is characterized by critical engagement at the interface of social scientific theory and policy, more particularly with the objective of furthering understanding and action which is socially just in relation to spatial processes and place based outcomes”. These words may not be all that catchy, but they have meaning, and within the department that is the most crucial issue. Moreover, during a period of rapid growth in programmes and staff numbers (in the first three years as head I was involved in making 16 appointments, 11 academic) they have developed a life of their own that I had not imagined, and in turn have re-enforced a common sense of purpose. There can be no doubt that in evolving this mission, explicit reference to “social justice” in a context of theory and action represented a crucial moment. It was at this moment that the statement stopped being mere words and became a shared ethos. Whether the words constructed the environment, or the environment the words, is impossible to know, and matters little: as Sanyal again observes there must be no exercise of property rights on good ideas. However, the result has been a greater confidence in our collective mission and in turn a much greater ability to communicate with students, senior management and practitioners. I increasingly shock myself at how enthusiastic I can sound about spatial planning. In the prologue to one of his books David Harvey (1996) reflects on being at a conference, which was sharing its venue with a gathering of evangelical Christians, and his jealousy at their seeming assuredness and enthusiasm. I understand this, for, scepticism, and worse still cynicism, make it difficult to communicate in such a way as to win friends and influence people.

Heather Campbell

AddressHeatherCampbellDepartment of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]

Department of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Context Matters?

The preceding contributions have in one way or another all made reference to four interacting contextual layers in positioning and explaining their stories. These are: the institutional or university environment; broader society including both governmental policies and popular movements; trends in intellectual ideas; and finally, something that differentiates planning from many other academic disciplines, developments within the profession. At an institutional level the context of a state-funded university in Brazil poses a rather different back-drop for planning education to that of a private university in the world's richest economy. At a societal level, while Teitz talks of the influence of the civil unrest in the Berkeley of the late 1960s, Carlos Vainer speaks of his experience in 1977 of seven members of staff being expelled for having “heterodox views” by the then military government. Even in a democratic context within Brazil the importance of maintaining links with civil society and a healthy distance from government remains of considerable significance. Planning departments have to negotiate a path between changing governmental and societal attitudes towards the purpose of higher education as well as towards spatial planning. Further, the flow and flux of intellectual ideas within the academy have been a source of comment by all the contributors, more particularly how these developments have been perceived to influence the form and nature of a progressive and/or effective planning activity. This poses an important question for planning schools: is our role as knowledge generators and educators to mirror the practices of today or attempt to shape a new, hopefully better, practice for tomorrow? Are we here to maintain the existing system or to seek ways to transform that system? It should not be expected that transformative change will be welcomed and may result, at best, in tensions with government and the mainstream profession and, at worst, the profound consequences Vainer highlights.

In relation to the contextual layers within which I find myself, it would be very easy for this article to be dominated by a tirade about the practices of what Vainer refers to as the “neo-liberal” university. The insidious infrastructure of a regime of performance review has required the department to produce the following over the last six months: a draft submission for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which seeks to measure research quality and in turn allocate the greatest levels of state funding to those performing best; the annual Academic Development Plan, providing a full analysis of departmental performance against short term budgetary expectations; the Annual Review of Learning and Teaching and associated action plan; a self-assessment and further documentation to feed into an Independent Evaluation of Teaching, also entailing a two-day visit by a panel of external assessors; a review of the results of the now annually published National Student Satisfaction Survey; and four action plans on various issues from student recruitment to module failure rates. In addition, lengthy reports have to be prepared for the annual meetings of the professional Partnership Boards of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). More generally the last 12 months have seen: the introduction of student tuition fees for undergraduate programmes for the first time in the UK, and with this, further development of the whole paraphernalia of market research, with students now referred to as “customers”; a complete re-structuring of salary scales for all categories of staff with the consequent strains; significant financial stringency across the sector; and, perhaps not surprisingly given the above, the most bitter and protracted industrial dispute between academics and their employers (the combined senior management of UK universities) that anyone can remember. As a result it would be fair to claim that we in the UK have more than a little understanding of the structures, demands and practices of the “neo-liberal” university. I could go on to deconstruct the mechanisms of control exercised within the university. However, a story of the constraining capacity of government- (and perhaps societal-) inspired and university-imposed performance regimes, is not the one I want tell. I am much more concerned about how to find spaces for alternative forms of action. Moreover, for me, this is the very essence of spatial planning.

Heather Campbell

AddressHeatherCampbellDepartment of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]

Department of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Context Matters … But How Much?

Critical academic studies of planning practices tend to focus their attention on seeking to describe what's going on and then asking why is it like that? In addressing the why question, research variously highlights the insidious workings of, and mutually reinforcing interactions between: power; capitalism; colonialism; rationality; patriarchy; racism; homophobia; emotion; angst and so on. We learn about how the actions of planners and the outcomes of planning are constrained by the “oppressive” practices of states, governments, markets and possibly also certain communities as well as our own self-imposed limits. Whether as academic or planner, corporate fat cat or community activist we are all a product of our context and experiences. However, as head of department you are much more clearly identifiable as part of the apparatus of authority and control. More particularly, within the context of the “neo-liberal” university, the assumption by those above you is that you are there to deliver “the university's” (often perverse) interests. You are a “manager”, not the independent head of your discipline. But how determinative are these forces and, without the benefit of hindsight and the swirl of the generalizing impact of history, what do you see as a decision-taker at the moment actions have to be determined?

I will come back to this question, but let me digress for a moment with another story. The fieldwork for my PhD involved spending several months in the late 1980s observing the working practices of two large British local authority planning departments. Although seemingly of only tangential relevance when I started the research, I was soon struck by the approach of one of the planners. Essentially her method can best be summarized by the phrase, “No, is only yes waiting to be discovered”! “Remember,” she would say, “Change is brought about by unreasonable people”. She was not much one for endless reviews and lengthy strategies, and while at times she exasperated her colleagues, she created around her a shared sense of purpose and deep commitment. Her colleagues equated strategy with “Rena's head” and crucially trusted such a strategy far more than detailed management-inspired analyses and plans. In contrast the other local authority I was studying had the most exquisite documentation, which in turn created a powerful evidence-base with which to defend its actions. Yet when it came to it, this environment lacked any real sense of dynamism and creative potential. It was perhaps the epitome of “proper” planning!

It will be clear from the above that an absence of paperwork is not an option in the British university of the 21st century (although how much of this paperwork is in any way “meaningful” is worthy of reflection). However, I am convinced that we have more choices than the system might imply or want us to imagine, it is just a question of going looking, of pushing at the (seeming) boundaries. One of the most depressing aspects of current British society is the extent to which we have been lulled into acceptance of Margaret Thatcher's evocation that “there is no alternative”. I recently heard a new group of graduate planning students reflecting that, they “... wouldn't be able to change anything until they were 50” and hence, in their terms, reached a sufficient level of seniority. This was not a statement I left unchallenged, for our job, whether practitioner or academic, is to find the room for manoeuvre within structures that often fail to appreciate the perversity of their inherent implications. The lesson for me from “doing” planning as the head of an academic department is about the importance of searching out alternatives. Our options are, in many ways, as limited as our imaginations. I would emphasize that this applies regardless of position within the hierarchy. I am currently much more encumbered than I ever was as a new lecturer. What I need, and am entirely dependent upon, are my colleagues (both academic and administrative) to be pushing at the boundaries.

To focus a little more on the issue of searching out the space in which to act. While ““No” may only represent “yes” waiting to be discovered”, it is probably best to avoid those you seek to influence ever having to say “no” outright. Confrontation is generally not a productive course of action unless there really is no other choice and the issue is crucial. The challenge lies in anticipating events and then reshaping or redefining the initial issue or problem, with the objective of getting to the outcome that collectively serves the best interests of the department. This may involve re-working and questioning the knowledge base on which a particular request is based. It may only require altering the tone of a single word. There is always an element of keeping your fingers crossed but the imponderable of chance can be weighed in your direction. Performance systems are there to be out-witted, subverted or beaten. That does not mean ignoring them and erecting the metaphorical barricades but trying to be smarter than them so that the department both performs well in terms of the indicators, while more importantly furthering wider objectives. I am constantly puzzled by the actions of many of my fellow heads, who seem to see their role as being to enact the missives that they receive, while simultaneously berating the system. They undoubtedly have more choices than they allow themselves to imagine. But this should not come as news to planners; in Planning in the Face of Power John Forester (1989) had some pertinent insights about subverting performance regimes.

The preceding concentrates on the “making it happen” aspect of probing beyond the seeming boundaries that have been set. However, there is a crucial phrase in the above paragraph which I have skirted over so far and that is, “… with the objective of getting to the outcome that collectively serves the best interests of the department”. When it comes to determining the collective interests, or put another way, the departmental vision, the focus of activity becomes much more inward looking. That is not to suggest that the external context should be ignored, but neither should it be regarded as determinative. If all that is seen is a world of “no alternatives”, then responsibility has been ceded to outside forces and the vagaries of prevailing fads and dominant forces. This may be what the neo-liberal university seeks to create but above much else the job of the head is to provide a buffer, soaking up, as far as is possible, these forces and thereby creating the space in which colleagues have the freedom to act (while simultaneously keeping your fingers firmly crossed!).

But what of the collective vision? I mentioned at the start of this article that one of the most important journeys we have been on as a department, and continue to be on, has centred on gaining confidence in who or what we collectively are. As an intellectual community deeply aware of the lessons from collaborative planning it might be imagined that our journey has involved much anguished discussion. For this not to be the case, as an outsider looking in would surprise me, particularly if the vision was to be meaningful. However, the mission very much wrote itself and has since developed a life of its own, supported by the expectations of new appointments. That the mission has developed a life of its own is of far greater meaning and significance than any words on the page.

I was struck very early in my term as head that where trust exists lengthy debate is not always deemed necessary. This was brought home to me when I placed before the full staff meeting the first Academic Development Plan I had been responsible for drafting. The Plan is a university requirement, setting out the department's strategies and the resources needed to achieve its goals. Therefore, it is a vitally important bidding document. To my surprise, having slightly nervously presented the main ideas to the meeting and circulated the document, virtually no issues were raised and its content was affirmed. This puzzled me, and I subsequently asked colleagues “why so little debate, given the importance of the document”? Their response was, “We trust you, it's your job to deal with the University”. I have been party to times in the history of TRP when such a plan would have been scrutinized line by line but on reflection it is clear those were moments when little or no trust existed. Certainly in the first few months as head, colleagues probed to see what I stood for, but having established my credentials, detailed questioning seems hardly to have been regarded as necessary.

I see this as an important lesson more generally: individuals seek to make representation when trust in the people or systems having influence over our individual or collective futures is lacking. That is not to suggest opportunities for comment should be abandoned. Rather, that the nature, tone and extent of that comment depends on the establishment of trust. Without trust action becomes very difficult and slow.

This emphasizes that effective plans are about very much more than words: they are about the cultivation of a particular culture and in turn of appropriate behaviours. This is perhaps the greatest challenge, for it is within your own realm, and is about creating the taken-for-granted, about trying to establish your own boundaries rather than destabilizing the boundaries of others. Teitz refers to the peculiar being which is “homo academicus”. By their very nature academics have an individualistic orientation. They relish their autonomy and freedom to pursue their own educational and research interests. The art is to facilitate the individualism without allowing it to descend into selfishness. A culture of individual selfishness inevitably has negative implications for others and creates an ultimately destructive environment. (Are there lessons here about markets and spatial planning?)

What colleagues are usually searching for is fairness. Fairness is an innocent enough sounding word but a concept which is hugely challenging to realize in practice, as it will undoubtedly mean, at some point and generally when one is least prepared, having to say “no”. Associated with this, in an academic context, is competition between the adherents to particular intellectual traditions, each hoping that their preoccupations will be favoured and ready to shout “unfair” if they feel their interests are being overlooked. In this regard the longstanding emphasis within TRP on excellence over intellectual fashion has been crucial in creating respect and trust between colleagues. A culture of mutual respect (which does not imply an absence of serious intellectual debate) is made manifest through processes which embody fairness. However, fairness involves establishing norms of behaviour which are about the interests of the collective rather than the (selfish) individual. It follows from this that all the actions of a head of department (like a local authority planning department) are scrutinized and judged, for good or ill. I was struck just the other day by a senior colleague commenting “… when you see the head of department teaching undergraduates, you know you've just got to get on with it”. I had taken my teaching for granted and it reminded me more generally that actions can and do speak louder than words. Clear and consistent alignment between words and actions will also make colleagues more understanding of the inevitable errors and mistakes that will arise. I am in turn convinced that the substance of a vision or plan is cemented through the cultivation of appropriate behaviours and in what then become cultural norms. The claims made by words must be demonstrated by action, otherwise they are, or become, hollow of meaning and cynicism will follow. Words on the page may be a means to end but they are very definitely not the end in itself.

Heather Campbell

AddressHeatherCampbellDepartment of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]

Department of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Telling Stories

The preceding contributions suggest that perhaps academics should tell a few more stories and through that process, as Sanyal proposed, reflect rather more on what they can learn about planning from their own backyards. As planning academics we need to remember that planning is about acting in real time, not with the benefit of hindsight. An understanding of multiple contextual layers should never become an excuse for failing to search out the room for manoeuvre. Rather, such knowledge is necessary so as to be able to probe at the weaknesses and the vulnerabilities in the structures in which we find ourselves, otherwise we allow ourselves to become mere pawns in some else's game. However, this in turn assumes that we have some shared sense of what we are trying to achieve, of desirable outcomes. In Teitz's terms, we are simultaneously involved in invention and navigation, which Vainer suggests is about institution building. Vision matters, and this is often articulated through plans: but the plan and its words matter far less than the cultivation of the appropriate cultural expectations and norms.

Heather Campbell

AddressHeatherCampbellDepartment of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK, [email protected]

Department of Town and Regional Planning, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Notes

1. Noted in Oberlander, P. & Newbrun, E. (1999) Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).

2. Following T. J. Kent's tenure, the chair became a rotating office among senior faculty, placing the department on a par with other departments in the university.

1. I am the only Department Head in DUSP to have served two consecutive terms of four years each.