I think it may have been in the first editorial that I wrote for this journal that I used the word “eclectic” to describe the range of the articles that we had on offer. “Oh dear”, said one of my editorial colleagues, “Does that mean that there is no thematic coherence?”
Our tenth anniversary is not so far off now, which inevitably promotes some reflection about how the journal has developed. Thinking back to the early days, the editors had many discussions about how we could encourage the submission of papers that would address squarely our stated purpose, to relate theory to practice in a critical and comparative context. That is a specification which trips off the tongue quite easily: but at the outset it seemed a pretty daunting task. (I think that I fell back on the gnostic mysticism of the film Field of Dreams—“If you build it, they will come.”) But a nagging concern at the back of my mind, at least, was the question whether increasing interest in publishing in the journal, from a wider range of authors with varying interests and from different backgrounds, would make it difficult to maintain and project that sense of strategic focus.
It must be for others to judge how far we meet our specification. The gratifyingly steady increase in the number of articles submitted suggests some degree of success. But for me at least, required by my role as an editor to read a great many manuscripts that (if I am honest) I would probably not otherwise be reading, the fascinating lesson is that so many approaches, insights, analytical techniques and normative yearnings, based on a vast diversity in the evidence base, can indeed cleave to the same purpose. Eclecticism works—in so many ways.
So it is in this bumper edition, with five articles, an Interface, an extended book review and a Comment.
In “Places that Support Human Flourishing: Lessons from Later Life”, Rose Gilroy provides a review paper that argues that a proper degree of attention to the space and place issues affecting quality of life for older people will tend to produce more liveable places for all. She uses considerations of home, neighbourhood and mobility as the primary means to demonstrate the validity and achievability of this as “a right and proper goal for planners”.
Mee Kam Ng's “From Government to Governance?”, gives us a fascinating study of how civil society is developing in the Hong Kong SAR partly through a desire and a determination to oppose an unpopular plan to take more of Hong Kong's famous harbour for reclamation—this in the context of a political system in which democracy is still very constrained.
Ng's challenge to planning-related professionals in Hong Kong's public and private is whether “they are ready to take up the inter-related challenges of further empowering the lay public through instituting a participatory mode of planning governance?” She puts this in the context of the “economics-first” city, where the capacity for public challenge has formed around the evidence of loss of the harbour through reclamation, symbolised recently through the demolition of the old Star Ferry terminal on Hong Kong side, a structure whose iconic significance was in inverse proportion to its architectural quality. It is sobering to think that in England the new Sub National Review proposes, in effect, to reduce the level of public involvement in regional and sub-regional planning by passing power to the economics-first Regional Development Agencies—with little chance of the public here being mobilised by the prospect of losing icons.
Juliet Carpenter and Sue Brownhill, however, in their “Approaches to Democratic Involvement: Widening Community Engagement in the English Planning System”, do find some evidence of improved community involvement in primarily local planning here. They examine the extent to which the 2004 reforms of the English planning system have actually led to greater or more effective community participation, and in particular the role and contribution of Planning Aid.
They see this through the prism of the idea of hybrid democracy, as developed by Louis Albrechts, in which representative and deliberative democratic approaches come together. As we go to press, we learn that Planning Aid is about to face an even stiffer test, with yet more government funding to allow it to bring about community engagement in the process of developing national policy statements for major infrastructure projects, and subsequent planning applications, to the proposed Independent Planning Commission. In this country, it seems, we like deliberative democracy and government is prepared to pay for it.
Hybrid concepts have a further outing in Oswald Devisch's paper. This takes the journal into new ground, posing the question “Should Planners Start Playing Computer Games? Arguments from SimCity and Second Life”. Devisch's answer is yes, if the two different systems can be evolved into a gaming-simulation hybrid. This editor admits to unbounded ignorance of computer games, a failing which will not be rectified in his first life, at least. But how very interesting that Sim City has a Mayor to look after its Sims, a symbol of representative democracy, although it seems that the application of Devisch's hybrid model would be to advance understanding of the possibilities of deliberative democracy. That apart, this article outlines possibly a major commercial opportunity for a reader of this journal.
James Throgmorton takes us to New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches the city, and in “The Bridge to Gretna: Three Faces of a Case” looks at the story of how Black Americans were denied a chance to reach shelter on the West Bank, having been directed there by police within the city. The question he poses is how we can make sense of such events, when they necessarily become stories, which are part of a larger story, with alternative readings of the City as Nightmare and one about the City of Oppression. Social scientists create rather than interpret such stories, and Throgmorton suggests three models for this construction—that of the Scientist, the Technician and the Phroneticist. These help—but he suggests that this is only a start, and that planners need to become more skilled in identifying and interpreting the stories that are told.
Interface in this issue continues to build on its record of being both ambitious and incisive. Ananya Roy addresses the significance of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which in their “new concern with human development and therefore inevitably with the role of state and civil society actors” she sees as representing nothing less than “a resurrection of planning”.
Roy and her fellow contributors use the Millennium Development Goals as a set of global norms that move us to investigate how planning in its broadest sense can contribute to the defined priorities. The radical question which she herself raises is whether the real objective for the application of global norms should be global inequality more than global poverty.
As part of this inquiry, Francesca Giovannini contributes a challenging piece on whether the United Nations can be a “norm entrepreneur”, setting the targets of responsibility that sovereign states should come collectively to adopt. David Satterthwaite makes the case for why “the poor” must be actively involved in the delivery of aid in the urban areas of the developing world, and why the international aid organisations' common goal of minimising administrative costs through a hands-off approach to delivery may be quite misguided.
Bharati Chaturvedi completes the section with an extraordinarily powerful case study of how the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group has worked with waste-pickers and recyclers in Delhi, not with unqualified success, to promote action plans for the informal sector which the formal sector can adopt. This is a text which should be read by everyone who thinks about the role and possibilities for the informal sector—and that is not limited to the global South.
Our book reviews section makes a departure from normal practice in this edition by being an extended review by Enrico Gualini of the major works of Luigi Mazza during the last two decades. The four texts which Gualini uses are not, to my knowledge, available other than in the original Italian. So Gualaini's review provides a rare opportunity for those without Italian to gain an insight into what he calls “ … the very peculiar position taken by [Mazza] in Italian planning debate as both a theorist and a practitioner”.
And finally, we have a Comment by Andrejs Skaburskis on Horst Rittel and the notion of “wicked problems”. Skaburskis modestly suggests that his primary purpose is to record the origin of the concept, but in doing so he provides a particularly elegant description of the idea and its significance, and its relationship to stories.