Patsy Healey: In Theory and in Practice
How Lucky We Are: A Glimpse at Patsy Healey's Contributions
From Oxford onwards
Theoretical Debates, Planning Practice and Spatial Processes
From Strategic Spatial Plans to Spatial Strategies
Some Presidential Reflections on Patsy Healey
Learning about Scholarship…on a Red London Omnibus

Patsy Healey bade an official farewell to Planning Theory & Practice in her editorial in the last edition, stepping down after ten years as the journal's first Senior Editor. Official farewells in this business should be understood as a somewhat fuzzy concept: we would be disappointed if we were not to receive a paper, or two, from Patsy for publication, and I have no doubt that we shall be asking for her help in reviewing articles submitted by others. And to keep her hand in, so to speak, Patsy has agreed to become Associate Editor for the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Library Series, for which I am immensely grateful.

So it is more than just a memory that lingers on, or a legacy to be drawn down. We hope to have the benefit of her enthusiasm, insight and judgement in diverse and subtle ways for years to come. But for all that, this is the end of an epoch so far as this journal is concerned, and we thought it right to mark that with some reflection on Patsy's contribution to planning theory and practice—and to Planning Theory & Practice.

Although generally the least qualified of the team that puts this journal together, I do perhaps have one unique qualification in terms of being able to explain how Patsy came to be Senior Editor. When I joined the RTPI too long ago, one of the objectives which the Institute set me was to have a learned journal once again. That was the limit of the specification, and since anyone and everyone that I spoke to had a different idea about what it should be, how it should be run and who should run it, I was left with a pretty free hand as to how to get it going.

What was clearly critical from the very outset was to determine the focus of the journal. If the RTPI was to be involved as a partner or sponsor, how could the role of the journal be defined so that it was relevant to all the interests that the RTPI sought to represent—practitioners in all sectors, academics and other researchers, and not just in the United Kingdom—and made a real contribution to the RTPI's sense of itself as a learned society? But this led remorselessly to a second question: what would it mean to try to bridge the gap between the thought-worlds of planning practitioners and planning academics?—which in Britain perhaps more than most places was less of a gap than a thorough-going chasm. And from this emerged the third question: if that chasm was in some degree or even at some extreme reflected by a form of “broken middle”1 between theory (theories, theorizing etc) and practice (practices, praxis, etc.), then how might a journal seek to address that?

An over-neat summary. At the time all thought on the subject was provisional and tentative. But something roughly along those lines was the basis on which discussions started with prospective publishers, and then the basis on which the editorial team drew together.

It would not be, I think, an exaggeration to say that Patsy recruited herself as the leader of the team. By that I mean that given the breadth of her interests, the depth of her researches, the quality of her own writing and above all her sympathy with the underlying cause that she became not so much the obvious choice as the personification of the journal's purpose and its realization.

Working with Heather Campbell, Genie Birch and me, Patsy led the work of developing the concept into a practical proposition, and still a unique one. We were all agreed on the need to require at all times that the theory/practice relationship be addressed in all work in the journal; and on developing Interface, then Heather's very specific and very onerous responsibility, as proof that there could be a dialogue in and between the voices of academics and practitioners.

And so it is in this edition of Interface. The reflections on Patsy's contribution (up to the end of 2008) are provided by John Forester, Maarten Hajer, Margo Huxley, Louis Albrechts, Janet O'Neill as the current President of the RTPI and long-time fan of Patsy, and Heather Campbell. I am not going to try to summarize any of their contributions; they do, in every sense, speak for themselves.

The energy and commitment which Patsy has given to the realization of the journal's purpose has been something awesome to behold. Her ability to match intellectual rigour with concern that authors, and particularly those new to the trade, should be helped to develop has been humbling. For me, as for so many others, working with Patsy has been a very great privilege.

How Lucky We Are: A Glimpse at Patsy Healey's Contributions

Patsy Healey has taught us all by example as much as by argument, by her ways of paying critical attention as much as by anything she's written. I was fortunate to have met Patsy in the early eighties at a time when I was just trying to find my way—and little did I know what kind of presence Patsy would have in Anglo-American planning circles.

I thought at first that here was someone willing to read against the grain, willing to keep one ear on practitioners' experiences and observations and another on the theorists' varied claims. The first had their traditions as did the second; both were expert posturers and posers and Patsy knew it. Practitioners wanted to look good so they could keep their jobs, and so did the theorists. Looking good to the powers that be meant to practitioners not talking French or German when plain English would do; looking good to the journal editors and academic elites meant to the theorists sometimes not using plain English when “flaneur” or “hermeneutics” (“Herman who?”) would do.

Patsy seemed less taken with faddishness or academic fashion than some others, and to me as a young academic, all I knew was that here was a quite special planning academic who seemed to want to rethink what appeared as the mess of planning theory (as Martin Krieger put it long ago). More importantly, she wanted to do that with some real consideration of what a wide range of planners, in several fields and in several countries, seemed to be “up against”, seemed to face in networks, bureaucracies, ambiguous responsibilities, shifting legal and other institutional frameworks, diverse ethnic and class and gendered constituencies all the time, every day.

I had not the faintest idea that this split, or better, “double” commitment, would show up later in the name of this journal, Planning Theory and Practice, that Patsy would launch and direct for its first ten years. I had too little sense myself of the possibilities of the field, even as I struggled to find ways to appropriate and translate (as John Friedmann has recently put it) striking theoretical work in several disciplines for consideration by planning students and planners. Did I expect that the mainline journals of the 1980s would welcome this work and take the necessary risks? Hardly. I'd had an editor respond to an article I'd submitted by saying that the reviewers had found that my text was written in one language for the general reader while my footnotes to that same text were written in a theoretical language that would baffle a planning audience. I wondered: couldn't we publish work that would be read by more than just a handful of academic theorists—but that might still not launder the theories being used so that they were just white-washed, having lost both colour, nuance and critical edge?

Patsy Healey took up this challenge not just as editor-in-chief for Planning Theory and Practice, but in all her work. This has meant more than the personal matter of her having good intentions, for younger and older colleagues alike have spoken of Patsy's actions beyond her words: “She listens to you as if you're the only one in the room,” “She always pays attention to you very carefully, always encouraging and still critically constructive, especially helping along younger scholars and writers.” These quotes are composites, but I'm confident they'd be echoed by planning doctoral students and faculty across the AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) and ACSP (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning) member schools.

So now Patsy has worked for a decade to create a journal open to new ideas and willing to challenge more academic theorists no less than more traditional planning practitioners. She can leave the journal to the capable and creative leadership of Heather Campbell, and she can push ahead with her reading of history, archaeology, geography, political science, sociology, philosophy and more.

Patsy's own work, of course, has been quite diverse, and this might have been confusing to some who demand one real, essential identity. There's the Patsy who's written about spatial transformations. There's the Patsy who's worried about national planning. There's the Patsy who's always after the historical roots of institutions. There's the Patsy who envisions collaborative possibilities where others see only power plays. There's the Patsy who worries about the state and the economy. And so on—there need not be one essential intellectual commitment, and we can be grateful instead for decades of Patsy's writing, grappling with problems, searching for new angles, offering up new perspectives and ways of seeing.

Not least of all, to anyone who's come to know her, there's her energy and drive. She's chaired departments, run research institutes and programmes, created international professional associations (with colleagues to be sure), written, written, and written some more, received the honour of being awarded the Order of the British Empire, and more. What now and next?!

In the USA, retirement often means that the next stage of life becomes even more packed with labours of love, with passionate callings, with new challenges. In Patsy's case this raises challenges in itself, for few of us can see how she might accomplish more, be any more “productive” or “influential” or “busy.”

It's good news that Patsy's going to do new things. The journal will continue to grow and shape the field. With all her commitments to the shaping of space and the human possibilities still unexplored in the planned and unplanned spaces around us, we can be sure that Patsy will be thinking and no doubt writing about these issues that have so long preoccupied her. Some people get their best ideas on long walks, in elevators, stepping on or off the bus. Perhaps Patsy will have more of hers in her Northumberland garden. I'm grateful for all she's planted for these many years, for all the steady critically helpful support she's given so many of us trying to do new things in our field, and I look forward to what Patsy will have to tell us as she moves forward now, gardening, travelling, encouraging younger and older researchers, writing when the spirit moves her as well. What a spirit she's shared with us!

JOHN FORESTER

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

From Oxford onwards

It must have been April 1985. I was on a reconnaissance mission to Oxford to meet the editors of the volume Planning Theory – Prospects for the 1980s (Healey, McDougall and Thomas, 1982). Andreas Faludi, my professor of planning at the University of Amsterdam, had told me to go abroad to get new inspiration. And, after reading a pile of recent books and articles on planning theory, including the work of Friedmann, Burchell and Sternlieb, etc., my choice had been—I think somewhat to the surprise of Faludi—to prioritize the Oxford Polytechnic. He double-checked: I did realize it was the Oxford Polytechnic, not the University of Oxford? I did, although I recall a vague sense that, surely, it would be possible to feel the radiation of the university once you got so close to the dreaming spires.

In an effort to make sure I made the right choice, I had written a position paper on what I wanted to do, and, after Patsy signalled she was interested to explore possibilities for me to come over for the year, I also planned a short trip to check out the place—and the people.

So I first met Patsy on an early afternoon in her house at Shirelake Close, just off the Folly Bridge in down-town Oxford. She was on sabbatical at the time but as I arrived Patsy was just wrapping up what definitely appeared to be a staff meeting. “You must be Martin. Well, why don't you grab a seat while we wrap up this meeting?” Over the next twenty minutes Patsy led a round in which the academics present in the room reported on progress. It was a little awkward I recall, as most members of staff—some of whom were considerably older than Patsy—seemed not to have finished the articles they had apparently promised to submit. There were no penalties or red cards. Yet inquiries were made as to what made it so difficult. There were very brief suggestions as to how to go about finishing. There was also a differentiated expectation: some had to do more than others. New deadlines were agreed, which were conspicuously taken down in the notebook that Patsy kept on her lap. In the midst of this exchange two punk students with impressive spiky hair walked diagonally through the room, cheerfully greeting Patsy and the others before making their way up the stairs.

With hindsight the first meeting represented the various qualities that Patsy became famous for. Patsy was the Great Inspirator: she was ahead of the rest, understated but clearly in charge, good humoured and seemingly liberal, but with clear judgements on performance for whoever would read the signs. While on sabbatical Patsy was also extremely helpful and creative for a young scholar like me.1 I ended up being an “international mixed mode student”, a title Patsy had found in a brochure: “Just say that is what you are, nobody will know what it means.” That turned out to be true, although I can still recall the frowns when I handed over the cheque for a few hundred pounds to study at the Oxpoly for the year.

In actual fact the Healey, McDougall and Thomas (1982) volume is a telling illustration itself. Obviously Patsy took the lead in putting it together but here she had to steer a course in between the “it-is-never-good-enough” theoretical sophistication of the late Mike Thomas, and the “all-too-pragmatic-but-terribly-popular pseudo-Marxian” radicalism of Glen McDougall. But the dominance was clearly shifting towards issues of power, inequality and political economic explanations for the dynamics of planning. Patsy here was somewhat at unease with what was in vogue:

I find the materialist approach to understanding the “ambiguous” and often contradictory nature of government practices, and the changing relationship embodied in the development process and government intervention in it, full of insights which suggest it has the potential to produce an understanding of land use planning which I will find believable…It is when I get to broad conceptualizations of class relations and the capitalist accumulation process (i.e. conceptualizations of societal forces) that I get stuck…[they] fall all too frequently into the traps of mechanistic theorizing which can only be connected to actual experience in crude and often naïve ways. Thus fell procedural planning theory. Perhaps because of this and because of the object of my concern—understanding land use planning—I shall remain, along with Pahl, Saunders, Dunleavy and Co., something of a Weberian fellow traveller. (1982, p. 193).

Hardly the sort of statement that would arouse great cheers in the lecture halls of that time. On the one hand it was the days of the advance of neoliberal values among students and staff (as the Poly expressed in the development of the new “estate management” programme) while on the other hand a contingent of students and staff got its drive from turning against the Thatcherite tendencies. Ironically, some—very close to Patsy—crossed from one camp to the other, which was just part of the experience of being in between.

Interestingly, this statement “I shall remain a Weberian fellow traveller” and the positioning in a particular group of allegedly like-minded spirits has proved to be a self-denying prophecy. I am not aware that there ever was a concrete “Patsy Healey school of thought.” Yet if measured in terms of intellectual influence, Patsy's fan club was and is remarkably large. This is not only rooted in the solid scholarship of the workings of plans, it is also based in her persistent attempt to develop planning theory by bringing in thinking from social theory. Most obvious is Patsy's work on communicative planning which drew on Habermas. Later Patsy studied and introduced Bruno Latour to the field of planning and adopted the broader STS tradition (Science and Technology Studies) in thinking about the status of knowledge in planning processes. Most recently Patsy inspires generations of younger scholars with her thinking about the relevance of Dewey for the understanding of contemporary planning processes.

Her influence goes substantially beyond the confines of planning and planning theorists. Her work is well read in the circles of public policy analysts and she is an active participant in the prospering “Interpretive Policy Analysis” conferences. Her talk on Dewey and collaborative planning at the second IPA conference held in Amsterdam in 2007 was much discussed. Here is yet another sphere where Patsy is regarded as the Great Inspirator: there is a buzz among graduate students that she is the one to give the sort of comments that really help you move forward. What is more, I suppose it is a particular quality of her books and articles that they are written in such a way that they show very clearly the relevance of a body of knowledge that early career scholars would not immediately get from reading Habermas, Dewey or Latour. It is a recombining of this literature, that through Patsy gets a new meaning in explaining the dynamics of processes of policy making and planning, and showing how one can use this conceptual vocabulary in solid case-study work, which is arguably what makes Patsy's work stand out.

Planning has this wonderful advantage over many other social science disciplines that it has this tight relationship with an institutional field, and with the practitioners working in that field. Patsy has always felt committed to that special relationship. But it should be noted that she did this in a particular way. In her 1983 monograph with the not too exiting title of Local Plans in British Land Use Planning, she opens her introduction with a Clifford Geertz type of anecdote.

In 1965 I joined the planning department of one of the newly-created London Boroughs to work in the Development Plan team. I had then no formal training in planning, and until this time, I had thought in a vague unformulated way that planning was something to do with public intervention to distribute resources more fairly than the market could achieve. It was difficult to discern any connection between this general political idea and the tasks of the Development Plan team of which I became a member. These included collecting large amounts of information—about numbers of dwellings and their condition, about how many people worked in what jobs in what locations, about how many health centres were needed and where these should go. Somehow this information was supposed to produce a Development Plan, but what the nature and purpose of this document might be was never made clear (1983, p. xi).

I think it aptly illustrates the anthropological eye that Patsy always brought to a planning situation. Her books are always full of detail, and for some this may be taking this too far. Yet it is always based on this curiosity about what planners do, how they do it and why. In this Patsy is never going for a cheap critique, although she can be very critical at times. But it is this capacity to distance herself from an object and feel committed to its improvement, that is the background of her very stimulating and inspiring scholarship.

MAARTEN HAJER

Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Theoretical Debates, Planning Practice and Spatial Processes

Patsy Healey began what was to become her prolific publishing career as a planning academic at a time when the discipline, like the social sciences more generally, was entering a period of fundamental and creative change.

Beginning in the early 1970s and into the 1980s, an enormous surge of social research and an increasing interest in urban and regional processes took place across the English-speaking world. In Britain, a proliferating array of research centres—from the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES), which proved to be a catalyst for the careers of so many, and disbursed research funds for so much innovative work; to the myriad of working paper series that almost every university department seemed able to produce—and encounters like the Urban and Change and Conflict conferences, provided avenues for debate about fundamental differences of epistemological, political and ethical approaches to the processes of urbanization and the role of government or the state in them. This explosion of interest, particularly in the political economy of urban and regional processes, saw the founding of many new journals, including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the Environment and Planning series, and Progress in Planning.

But in the early 1970s, research into the actual implementation of planning, its effects on land markets, or the experience of planners in local government offices across the country, was far from common, and in studying these issues, Patsy was at the forefront of social science research in planning.

It has been an instructive exercise to trawl back through 1970s and 1980s editions of journals like Town Planning Review, the Environment and Planning series, Progress in Planning and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as CES publications and annual reports and a small selection of working papers from Kingston Polytechnic and Oxford Polytechnic (now University of Kingston and Oxford Brookes University).

The debates, and at times acrimonious disputes, come alive again: they are not just the stuff of “histories and typologies of planning thought” or “theoretical approaches in the social sciences.” Nuances of positions are revealed that have become smoothed over in the re-telling; unexpected connections between different approaches are seen with hindsight; and the continuities and discontinuities with present concerns can be re-examined.

At this time, the prevailing approaches to planning and to understanding its place in urban and regional processes were mainly procedural theories of decision-making, systems approaches—which overlapped with the mathematical modelling of urban and regional processes in Geography, and conventional planning education that was largely focused on teaching of the legal, administrative, regulatory structures and physical design procedures of the British planning system. Very little, if any, attention was paid to what planners were actually doing or the effects this might have.

The main source of critique of these forms of theory and education in planning came, as has been well documented, from what are broadly known as political economy approaches, stimulated by the “re-discovery” of Marx and of Weber and their relevance to urban and regional issues. Harvey's (1973) ground-breaking Social Justice and the City heralded this shift.

Similar critiques, often heavily influenced by the work of Althusser, saw planning as reproducing the relations of capitalism, and prevailing planning theories as mystifying planning's place in the state apparatus. For many espousing neo-Marxist positions, studying or trying to improve the actual practice of planning or taking policy making seriously as an object of research, was akin to supporting the capitalist status quo, since what was required was the complete transformation of society.

Harvey's (1985) paper on “planning the ideology of planning” is a paradigmatic example of such analyses of the role of the planner.

the planner's commitment to the ideology of social harmony…always puts the planner in the role of “righter of wrongs”, “corrector of imbalances”, and “defender of the public interest”…The limits of this progressive stance are clearly set…according to the requirements for the reproduction of the social order, which is…a distinctively capitalist social order. (p. 177).

However, not all political economy approaches were so pessimistic about the potential for planning to make a positive difference. There were lively debates about the possibilities of the state as an arena of class struggle, and—from Weberian “urban managerialist” perspectives—the role of state bureaucrats in influencing the distribution of resources to ameliorate the inequalities of the capitalist system.

Some of Patsy's early publications (e.g. 1973, 1975) reported on her research into urban planning in Venezuela and reflected her interest in planning as a basis for action in relation to the wider society of which it is a part (Healey, 1973, p. 147). These interests are reflected in the many jointly researched and authored books, articles and working papers that bear her name over the ensuing decades.

When Patsy (and her colleagues) explore the operations of the planning system and the planners working in it, their research is positioned in relation to contemporaneous debates. They can be seen to steer a course that accepts neither the abstract theorizing of procedural and systems theories, nor the uncritical reproduction of planning educational agendas, nor the wholesale rejection of planning by the neo-Marxist critique, but are nonetheless influenced by, and contribute to, the changing landscape of social science theorizing and research.

As already noted, very little research of this kind had been done till that time, and it is salutary to be reminded just how full the journals were of papers written in systems, procedural or modelling modes, and how, within a very short time, they then came to be dominated by debates in political economy, and how very little of either paid attention to questions of practice.

Healey and Underwood's (1978) research into “Professional ideals and planning practice” explicitly critiques the way in which systems and procedural theories

neglect the structural dimensions of power and influence within which individuals and organisations operate…It was felt that more empirical evidence was needed about what planners actually did and what ideas they called upon when operating within public sector organisations understood as political entities in the sense of both their internal composition and their location within a wider context of power and influence. (p. 80).

The authors aim to relate planners' actions and influence to the societal conditions of which they are a part, including unequal relations of economic power and interests. At the same time, they note the fact (often obscured by planning theory and education) that planners' employment by the state produces tensions in the claims to independent professional status (Healey & Underwood, 1978, pp. 120–121):

They conclude their study with a call for planners to have knowledge of the substantive fields their actual practice deals with.

…[I]t is time that thinking among planners was focused more directly on land use policy, its implementation and the interests and ends this can serve. This might provide planning practitioners with a more stable and substantial grounding in “planning knowledge” than the planners studied here had available to them (Healey & Underwood, 1978, p. 124).

Many of the themes of this research—interest in what planners do and what effects planning has, working through the problems of relating wider social structures to individual actions, and relating theory or knowledge to action or outcomes—have continued to inform Patsy's work.

It is interesting to note that Patsy—who at one point called herself a “Weberian fellow-traveller” in the political economy field (Healey, 1982, p. 193) —had been wrestling with the problem of the relation between social and economic structures and individual action well before the publication of Giddens's (1984) book, The Constitution of Society. In this, Giddens attempted to overcome the constraints of structuralist Marxist theorizing by proposing a different way of looking at the relations between structure, agency and the “constitution of society.”

Patsy's work in structuration approaches, and later, institutionalist frameworks and relational conceptions of space can be seen as seeking resolutions of theoretical and methodological conundrums that have been raised in her research since the beginning. Whether the tension between “structure” and “agency” can be satisfactorily elucidated, or whether alternative ways of posing the problem or bypassing it altogether are required, remains open to debate—debates that have continued in various forms since the 1970s.

Thus, in the spirit of these debates to which Patsy has contributed so much, it is still important to question, for instance, whether better planning (however defined) is necessarily a significant starting point in a quest for better cities.

This is one of a number of—perhaps irresolvable—questions originally raised by political economy critiques of planning that is of continued salience from post-structuralist perspectives. Another is the tension between critical analysis and normative prescription, in which planning's claim to know how to foster change for the better is challenged by social and cultural diversity in practice, and by the interrogation of liberal norms in theory.

In her engagement with such deliberations, Patsy's work has been, and continues to be, dedicated to the aim of creating better cities and democratic environments through improving planning theory, research and practice. Her latest books (Healey, 2006, 2007) are further evidence of her deep and affirmative commitment to the role of planning in fostering local and regional collaborative spatial governance capable of addressing the inequalities and predicaments of cities, regions and environments.

MARGO HUXLEY

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

From Strategic Spatial Plans to Spatial Strategies

Patsy Healey's broad intellectual scope helps us to understand and to provide conceptual resources for the planning field. With others (see John Forester, Judy Innes) she has documented what has been termed the “communicative turn” in planning theory. However, in this very short paper I focus on some of her contributions to the field of strategic planning that travel in planning theory as well as in planning practice.

Revival of Strategic Planning

In a number of western European countries strategic spatial planning evolved in the 1960s and 1970s towards a system of comprehensive planning—the integration of nearly everything—at different administrative levels. In the eighties when the neo-liberal paradigm replaced the Keynesian-Fordist one, and when public intervention retrenched in all domains (Martinelli, 2005), Europe witnessed a retreat from strategic spatial planning fuelled not only by the neo-conservative disdain for planning, but also by postmodern scepticism, both of which tend to view progress as something which, if it happens, cannot be planned (Healey, 1997). Instead, the focus of urban and regional planning practices shifted to projects (Secchi, 1986; Motte, 1994; Rodriguez & Martinez, 2003), especially for the revival of rundown parts of cities and regions, and on land use regulations.

However, the growing complexity, an increasing concern about the rapid and apparently random development, the problems of fragmentation, the dramatic increase in interest (at all scales, from local to global) in environmental issues, the growing strength of the environmental movement, the need for governments to adopt a more entrepreneurial style of planning in order to enhance city competitiveness, a longstanding quest for better coordination (horizontal and vertical), a re-emphasis on the need for long-term thinking and the aim to return to a more realistic and effective method, have all served to expand the agenda (see Albrechts, 2004). Moreover, in addition to traditional land use regulation, urban maintenance and the production and management of services, governments have had to respond to new demands. This in turn has implied the abandonment of bureaucratic approaches and the development of different skills and resources than hitherto has been part of the traditional administrative apparatus (Martufi, 2005). In response, by the late 1980s and 1990s, more strategic approaches, frameworks and perspectives for cities, city-regions, and regions became once again fashionable in Europe. Often these efforts involved the construction of new institutional arenas within structures of government that are themselves changing. The motivations for these new efforts are varied, but the objective has typically been to articulate a more coherent spatial logic for land use regulation, resource protection and investment in regeneration and infrastructure. Hence, strategic frameworks and visions for territorial development, which emphasize place qualities, integration and the spatial impacts and of investment, now complement and provide a context for specific development projects (Albrechts, Healey & Kunzmann, 2003).

With two books, besides numerous articles, Patsy Healey is central to the revival of interest in strategic planning. Her 1997 book (with Abdul Khakee, Alain Motte and Barrie Needham) provides a pan-European survey of strategic planning issues as they respond to the spatial consequences of technological innovations. A second book (Healey, 2007) provides three in-depth, longitudinal case studies of spatial strategy-making for urban areas based on Amsterdam, Milan and the Cambridge sub-region.

Healey's view is that spatial planning is inherently a governance activity. The way she opens up her relational institutional perspective to spatial planning is highly relevant both for planning theory and practice, even if the latter is sometimes unaware of (and struggles with) the former.

Strategy Making in a Relational Institutional Perspective

Patsy Healey develops an acute eye for observing spatial planning in practice with an extraordinary ability to explore and document its theoretical implications. When reading and analyzing her case studies it becomes clear that she listens to planning practice and practitioners rather than simply looking at it (or them). This is again very well illustrated by her plea for more story-telling in the planning field. She favours particular stories about planning efforts in specific contexts. Her case studies are firmly located in the histories, geographies, potentialities and possibilities in which they are embedded. For Healey we need this not just to help participants in planning processes co-learn about and co-design strategies, policies, projects and actions to address the issues that concern them, but to learn about why planning as an activity gets mobilized, how it gets institutionalized and how far that liberates potentialities rather than builds in restrictive resistances (see Healey, 2005a). For her, the experience of planning practices is one of an unstable landscape, of constant challenge and uncertainty of continually having to adjust and invent, to be “on the move.” In situations perceived in this way a key capacity for those seeking to operate pro-actively, rather than being responsively swayed by the latest governance wind that blows in, is the ability to read the dynamics of the context in which they are situated in a strategic way, to see the different directions the winds are blowing from and their different forces, to identify and imagine new potentialities which their actions could help to open up.

Patsy Healey (2005b) sees spatial planning as the provider of strategic frames of reference, within which a balance can be struck between what can be fixed…and what is left to emerge. She defines strategic spatial planning as

a social process through which a range of people in diverse institutional relations and positions come together to design plan-making processes and develop contents and strategies for the management of spatial change. This process generates not merely formal outputs in terms of policy and project proposals, but a decision framework that may influence relevant parties in their future investment and regulation activities. It may also generate ways of understanding, ways of building agreement, of organizing and of mobilizing to influence in political arenas. (Healey, 1997, p. 5).

She understands strategies in a very similar way as I do (Albrechts, 2004):

strategies are emergent social products in complex governance contexts, with the power to “frame” discourses and shape action through the persuasive power of their core concepts. If the strategic frames accumulate sufficient power to enroll others, to travel across significant institutional sites of urban governance and to endure through time, then they are likely to have significant effects in shaping the future. They have transformative potential. (Healey, 2007, p. 185).

In line with Balducci's (2008) experience in Milan, the strategic plan could be part of a process of recognition, bringing bottom-up experiences into the realm of governance practices (Healey, 2004, 2007). In this sense the strategic planning process is intended to provide the “soft” infrastructure (Balducci, 2008, p. 87) which facilitates a mutually beneficial dialectic between top-down structural development and bottom-up local uniqueness (Albrechts, 2004).

Healey defines institutions as the norms of behaviour and routines of practice embedded in particular histories and geographies. Such norms and routines inherently link actants through relational networks. Her relational institutional theory is clearly based on what she perceives as taking place in the practice world around her. Institutional capacity is thus “the overall quality of the collection of relational networks in a place” (Healey, 1997, p. 61). Her relational conception of space has become highly influential in developing understanding of multiple meanings and values of place and the ways in which people and firms use and experience place. Healey (1997) argues that greater attention to stakes, arenas, routines and styles, discourses and the nature of agreement could help shape such practices into more fully collaborative and inclusionary forms of collective reasoning and argumentation. In my own work (Albrechts, 1995) I have been concerned about developing innovative instruments such as social contracts and/or collective spatial agreements. With Healey's institutional relational perspective an easy link can be made to governance. For Healey, the planning activity, with its focus on “improving conditions whether in the built environment, or the delivery of services, or the promotion of environmental sustainability or social well-being, is inherently a governance activity, situated in a complex landscape of formal government organization and all kinds of other public, semi-public, voluntary and private agencies providing some kind of collective goods” (2005a, p. 304). Her definition of spatial governance recognizes that both the qualities of space and spatial organization are important.

Healey also recognizes, as I do, the co-evolving relations between any kind of deliberate governance activity and the wider context in which it is situated. She attends carefully to the particular histories and geographies, potentialities and resistances within which the ideas and practices associated with planning are being mobilized.

Conclusion

Spatial strategies are not merely long-term in their substantive orientation. Shifting governance is itself a long-term process. But the hope is that where localities are able to achieve such shifts around more creative and flexible spatial strategies and more open, innovative, and collaborative governance practices, this will translate into sustainable and widely shared improvements in the quality of life and of environments. Looking at some recent planning literature (Balducci, Hütter & Wiechmann, Motte, Salet, Sartorio) there is ample evidence that the concepts developed, theorized and opened up to spatial planning by Healey do travel. They travel not only in academia but also in the world of practice.

In a recent paper, Healey (2008) touches upon situated strategic judgement in spatial strategy making. Besides the “opportunity structure” for undertaking spatial strategy making it opens up a more substantive agenda for reflection on what constitutes spatial quality, the good society (Friedmann, 1982), the quality of life (see the capabilities in Nussbaum & Sen, 1993) and good governance structures.

LOUIS ALBRECHTS

Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, University of Leuven, Belgium

Some Presidential Reflections on Patsy Healey

As President of the Royal Town Planning Institute for 2008, I was delighted when I was approached to add to this review on Patsy Healey's contribution to planning. I have been a fan of hers for decades.

The theme of my presidential year is education and lifelong learning. As a practitioner, I have long been struck by the need for all planners to keep abreast of the changing demands placed upon us, in terms of skills and knowledge. The massive culture change required in the progression to spatial planning is a case in point. As an external examiner, I have been particularly aware of the significant and robust body of work undertaken in planning schools and wondered how well this disseminates to practitioners. Increased links between academics and practitioners are welcome and necessary. Patsy has made a major contribution here.

My own contact with Patsy has been fairly remote but I have always been aware of where she has been based and the prolific outputs from her work. I first became aware of her at the UK Planning Summer School in Lancaster in 1977. She gave a talk on the preparation of development plans, as I recall. I was struck by her personable and engaging style of presentation, not to mention the authoritative content of her paper.

As an external examiner, I have attended a number of AESOP, AESOP/ACSP and World Planning Schools Congresses. One instance I particularly recall was the AESOP/ACSP Congress in Toronto in 1996. Patsy and two others were asked to outline the planning paradigms that had influenced their thinking over their careers. Someone had the bright idea of cutting out yellow papers to look like speech bubbles. Each contributor added a paradigm to a paper and stuck it on the wall to illustrate a sequence of thought. Patsy's contribution was not a tree shape but an immense spider's web of interconnected thoughts and influences. She became animated as she acknowledged the work of others in how her own journey had progressed. Although I did not follow the entire sequence, due to only scant knowledge of some of the works, I could appreciate the self-effacing Patsy style of praise to others and none to herself. But her own work, written and spoken, has over the years testified for her. When examining post-graduate courses, I would glance through the bibliographies of dissertations and can recall how often she would be cited.

In 1998, I was on the organizing committee for the Planning Summer School. Patsy was a speaker and also a dinner guest of the President. I had recently had a piece published in a planning journal about how Patsy and another planner were my role models as hard working, prolific and affable planners. I joined her at the dinner table with some trepidation, but without cause. Patsy had been flattered and characteristically quickly changed the subject.

Two or three years back, maybe more, Patsy asked me to come to Newcastle University and speak with her final year undergraduate students about what it means to be a professional planner. She chatted afterwards about her plans to reduce her commitments at the department, but the word “retire” was not spoken, just refocusing. But now, in 2008, Patsy is refocusing again. She will be standing down as “senior editor” of Planning Theory & Practice, after ten years' hard work and incalculable contribution to making the journal the example of excellence it has become.

Last year, Patsy was awarded the RTPI Gold Medal for her contribution to planning. She is one of a very small group to gain the honour and the first woman to do so. The oration on her career by the then President of the Institute was lengthy and abundant with examples of her work which has advanced the art and science of town planning.

I have no doubt that Patsy's future years will be as full and fruitful as ever in new challenges. She will continue in her dedication to planning and will continue to make her mark. Thank you Patsy for all your hard work, commitment and advice to the rest of the Editorial Panel. You will be greatly missed, but you have earned a change but I can't see a rest ahead!

JANET O'NEILL

Learning about Scholarship…on a Red London Omnibus

It is the mark of Patsy Healey's standing within the planning community that you only have to mention the name “Patsy” and there is immediate recognition. The word “prolific” might have been created with Patsy's body of work in mind. There are very few British planning academics whose intellectual contributions have had the capacity to travel, with such impact, across geographical, disciplinary and professional boundaries. However, her ideas would not travel with the ease they achieve without the sense of both a profound underlying commitment to planning, as a societal endeavour which can better people's lives, and also the hard graft of rigorous intellectual inquiry. It is these qualities which have shaped Patsy's stewardship of this journal and from which individually and collectively there is much to learn.

The preceding contributions by academics and practitioners alike are marked by a deep respect not just for Patsy's intellectual contributions—formidable though these have been (and continue to be)—but also for Patsy the person. Everyone seems to have their own anecdote about Patsy, expressed with a warmth which reaches beyond the corrosive cynicism which is (sadly) so frequent a feature of the academic world. People remember meeting Patsy Healey. Whether or not one agrees with every twist and turn in her arguments, is not the point. There is respect for the sincerity of her motivation, accompanied by the quality of her scholarship. She is not concerned with posturing or positioning as self-aggrandizement. Rather, there is a genuine sense that ideas can make the world a better place, or should that be, that ideas can help “to shape (better) places in fragmented societies”, (to misappropriate slightly the sub-title of her 2007 book). These are the very qualities which equipped her perfectly for the role as the first Senior Editor of Planning Theory and Practice.

A theme which runs through all the contributions to this Interface is Patsy's ability to interweave a sensitivity for the world of practice with the critical eye of the theorist. Her engagement with theory is not for the sake of indulging some intellectual puzzle, but rather for the edge this brings to our understanding of practice and the contexts in which such practices are located. Her work bristles with the creative tension between these two pulses of inspiration. The stimulus and the challenge of detailed empirical investigations are accompanied by the insight and critiques of intellectual ideas (read from the authors' original texts, not through the often over-simplifying short cut of intermediaries). Maarten Hajer in his contribution suggests the opening paragraph of her 1983 book Local Plans in British Land Use Planning, indicates that an “anthropological eye” is ever present within her work. However, it is also worth recounting the final paragraph of that same book:

To conclude, I present this book not only as a contribution to the evaluation of British land policy and practice and to discussion about its future, but as a model of the sort of historically specific investigation that is needed in the land policy field generally, and as a contribution to the development of theoretically-based explanation and prescription within this area of public policy (Healey, 1983, p. 286).

This paragraph captures her sense of the importance of the interplay between theoretically informed debate and practice, and, I would argue, is a sentiment which twenty-five years later, remains a “model” for the sort of work which continues to be much needed within the field. Such analyses are the foundation for intellectual advance as well as evidence-based policy, in the true sense, and not in the diminished form reflected in the rhetoric of British governments.

A further striking feature of the preceding contributions is the extent to which Patsy's work travels geographically, across disciplines and in many ways across time. Taking the latter point first: Margo Huxley's contribution helps to place the initial development of Patsy's ideas in context. She also reminds us that it is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to ignore the deeply felt and at times “acrimonious” debates of past periods in the development of planning ideas. At the level of the individual, Patsy's metamorphosis to being seen as part of the intellectual establishment, and hence fair game for attack by up-coming generations, must make for a strange personal journey…and all the more for the generation of (progressive) social scientists who took over planning in the 1960s. It is also noticeable how Patsy's ideas are read and find relevance outside the UK. Too much British academic output is bedevilled by the blinkers of parochialism and inwardness, which diminishes the potential contribution both locally and internationally. Not Patsy's work. It is through a sensitivity to context, and most importantly a concern for what is being taken for granted, that perceptive insight can be achieved. Insights, moreover, which have resonance beyond the shores of the UK as well as crossing disciplinary divides into policy analysis and hence into politics and sociology.

I suspect like many of my generation, who completed master's degrees in planning in the mid 1980s, my first encounter with “Patsy Healey” was as an omnipresence on virtually every reading list with which we were presented. My appointment to the staff in Sheffield coincided with her appointment as the external examiner for our master's programme and it was on one of her annual visits that we first met. To my surprise, she made a point of coming to talk to me and saying that she was, “pleased I'd been appointed.” Unbeknown to me, Patsy had already been introduced to me, so to speak, by the external examiner of my doctoral thesis and Patsy's good friend, Sue Barrett. However, I suspect her observation was less a comment on my research than the continuing make up of the British academic community, as I was, by some margin, the youngest and the only female academic in the department at that time. It is telling how many recall stories of their surprise at being engaged in conversation by Patsy and the resulting encouragement such acts have given new academics.

But Patsy can be challenging and tough, particularly with regard to intellectual laziness, and is uncompromising on the need for rigour in argumentation. And so to the top deck of a red London double-decker bus…It must have been the late 1990s and Patsy and I were on our way to a journal meeting. I had recently received reviewers' comments on an article I had submitted (to another journal) and suspected Patsy to be one of the (rather more critical) “anonymous” referees. My hunch was right, and a frenetic debate ensued about the whys and wherefores of the writings of Habermas and Foucault as the bus made its erratic progress along Oxford Street towards High Holborn. Then, all of a sudden, there was a heart felt plea from the back of bus, “….will you two ****ing shut up!”

That bus travellers do not wish to be assailed by the ins and outs of philosophical debates is, perhaps, not surprising. However, although never stated explicitly during our lively exchange, the lesson I was being taught was that scholarship requires careful and well-informed argumentation. It may be that when Patsy and I look out at the world we see different things, but if my argument was to be taken seriously, then there were (and are) no short cuts to constructing a properly founded argument.

In the current mad rush to publish at all costs, there is a danger that too little attention is paid to the craft of academic writing, and more specifically of rigorous argument construction. Pick up virtually any “Healey” paper and it provides a lesson in the art of framing and positioning an argument. Meet the person, and you realize that such scholarship stems to a large extent from a humility that there are always new things to be learnt. Patsy is always reading, always thinking and always aware that there is more to be learnt.

I mentioned in my introductory comments that the word “prolific” could have been designed with Patsy in mind. However, this does not do justice to her contribution. The (on-going) significance of her contributions is marked by her deep understanding of intellectual quality, combined with her commitment to the practice of planning. She also possesses, as some of the preceding contributors have already noted, unrivalled reserves of energy. Such qualities equipped her perfectly for the role as the first Senior Editor of Planning Theory and Practice. As one of the co-founding editors, with Robert Upton, I can testify that it has been quite a journey. I have, however, been fortunate, that working alongside Patsy on the journal has given me a privileged vantage point, from which to watch and listen to the way she thinks and the values she up-holds. As the new Senior Editor, I do not underestimate the responsibility of taking forward this agenda.

HEATHER CAMPBELL

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

Notes

1. And even for students with even less experience she always found time. I once walked into her office when she was trying to comfort a young sobbing student. As Patsy later explained the student had exclaimed: “Everybody was talking about “radicalism” and I did not even know what it means!”

1. Rose, G. (1992) The Broken Middle (Oxford, Blackwell).