Editorial

When it comes to writing editorials I suppose all of us on the Planning Theory & Practice editorial team instinctively start from the consideration of “What's on our mind?” For my academic colleagues in the team I suspect that this then becomes an issue of narrowing down a wide range of competing possibilities until the best performing option triumphs and surfaces.

For me the process is rather more constrained. I have usually started instead from the position that my work-mind is entirely fixated on institutional struggles of too little relevance to the pursuit of better theorising and better practice in planning—to the point where I wonder how I can bring any insight worth the name to bear on the material in front of me to inform the readers.

This time, however, my position is somewhat different. Not because I feel for once that this time I really do have insights to offer, but because I am more conscious than usual that I am actively looking for insights to inform me.

The background to this is that since I wrote my last editorial for Planning Theory & Practice I have changed jobs. I am no longer the Secretary-General of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), a position that I was very proud to hold for nearly thirteen years, and not the least of whose attractions was that it required me to maintain, perhaps more accurately develop, a position between the academy and the world of practice.

No regrets. But now I have been appointed to the new Infrastructure Planning Commission for England and Wales, a body created by new legislation (the Planning Act 2008, HMSO London) to handle applications for what are defined as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects—that is, projects over certain specified thresholds in the fields of energy, transport, water, waste, and waste water. Some of the legislation has been welcomed generally—for example, the requirement for the government to produce National Policy Statements establishing the case for infrastructure provision in each category. Other aspects are more controversial—for example, the provision in the law that requires the Commission rather than an elected minister to take final decisions on applications where such a National Policy Statement has been “designated”, that is, approved.

So my appointment takes me back into the sharp end of planning practice, and at a rather high level of complexity and potential controversy. And I must be conscious of the responsibilities of the reflective practitioner when faced with this responsibility, both individually and collectively.

At the larger scale, colleagues within the Commission and I are thinking about the collective aspect. There are some useful managerial concepts such as quality assurance which help provide a framework for this. We want to think about how, as part of that agenda, we might bring in a broader, more challenging academic perspective on how we are tackling our responsibilities, and how well we are doing that. This means thinking about how we might work with academic partners to establish jointly some useful research questions, and then (hopefully, for obviously this involves funding) make them into a research project.

But then, at a smaller scale, there is me, and my individual responsibility. Having spent so many years thinking about the orientation and the attributes of Donald Schön's legendary Reflective Practitioner (1983)—and this journal, with its explicit aim of linking theory and practice, which means if nothing else theorising the practice that an unrelenting society needs, has that notion at its core—at the very least I find that I am now a highly self-conscious practitioner. So I do want to frame some research questions for myself to inform and challenge my thinking about the context and constraints in which I am working, and the opportunities, the responsibilities and the imperatives that face me.

What I am trying to convey is that here, with a jolt, I am facing real challenges about what I am doing and I recognise, in principle because the practice has yet to be encountered or revealed, the contested nature of that. What I want obviously are not glib formulations but the “open frameworks” which help a practitioner develop perspectives on her or his work. And so I have found myself necessarily (and possibly obsessively) looking at this edition of our journal from that perspective.

Let me start with the Interface, where we are privileged to be publishing a review of the contribution that the late Peter Marris made to planning. This includes a selection from the extraordinary range of Marris's published and unpublished works, alongside contributions from Peter Marris's wife, Dolores Hayden, and Bish Sanyal and appreciations from a very distinguished group of his former students and colleagues: Ann Forsyth, Hemalata Dnadekar, Keith Pezzoli, James Throgmorton and Martin Wachs.

The pen portraits here would be enough by themselves, I think, to prove the case that there has perhaps never been a livelier sociological imagination, in Wright Mills's terminology, than that of Peter Marris. This was an imagination driven by empathy, unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries; governed and grounded only by first-principle tests of coherence and rigour. I do wonder whether the current university environment in either Britain or the USA (I offer no opinions about other countries) would support such emancipatory transgression.

Within the selection of his texts, I am really delighted that we are able to make his Reflections on Planning Theory available in print for the first time. I know this is a text to which I shall want to return many times in the future, not because of its length and its complexity but because of the compact strength of its argument that planning theory is “about behaviour, not method”, drawing power from the diversities of behaviour involved.

I offer one reflection of my own on the significance of Peter Marris's work. I suspect that I am not alone in having had some dark nights of the soul during my work in planning, times when I have wondered whether we have bunkered ourselves in some arbitrary construct of a discipline which we then defend more because it is ours than because of our conviction as to the value that it can contribute and create. In my stronger moments that is not a problem, but since I first came across his work Peter Marris has had a form of talismanic quality for me. That so fine an intellect could find its way to planning and develop an entirely coherent and communicable case for it has been a powerful reassurance.

As indeed is the continuing work of John Friedmann, whose essay (his own words) Place and Place-making in Cities: A Global Perspective also graces this edition, and is also certain to become a much-referenced text. Friedmann sets out a dystopic framework of an accelerating growth of the urban which includes tendencies to commodify cities and to focus ever more on the larger geographical scales and megaprojects, trends which are compounded by the de-spatialising effects of modern technology. Within this framework the idea of place itself comes under threat—place as something experienced and appropriated emotionally, place which receives meaning and gives value to our lives.

Friedmann uses examples from Asia, notably Taiwan and China, and in particular the rapidly disappearing hutongs of Beijing. Not surprisingly, in uncovering the loss inherent in these processes he refers to Marris's pioneering study of clearance work in Lagos. Friedman's concern running through this is to identify the moral imperative for planners to engage with the “small and ordinary” that are “neighbourhood places”, so as to promote the exchange of meaning and the understanding of value through any development or growth process—something which can only be done in an open collaborative process.

Friedmann describes this paper as “a discursive essay rather than an empirically based article… a personal view based on observation, extensive reading and long reflection.” If that description is meant to be at all self-deprecatory, then I think that he is unjust to himself. How do we move from the analytical to the normative other than through processes of reflection which give us the opportunity to test the values that we think we should promote and their weighting and cohesion? Just as Peter Marris's work achieved exemplary rigour and cohesion in its identification of the “stuff” that is the subject of planning, so a hugely important part of John Friedmann's work has been to develop a corresponding rigour and cohesion about the object of planning—the “what is to be done?”

Continuing in reverse order through the papers, David Adams and Steve Tiesdell are also focused on the “doing” questions. Their argument, tout court, is that, like it or not, planners are in the market—that is, they are market actors and involved heavily in the making and shaping of markets, and not just property markets. They align themselves with Ernest Alexander's teleological view of planning as justified only by the pursuit of better outcomes, and with Louis Albrechts's curt definition, and injunction, “Strategic spatial planning relates to action, to implementation—things must get done!”

Their paper brings out the movement in economists' understanding of the market in relation to bounded information and limits to rationality. Recent events suggest there is some distance still to cover there. Adams and Tiesdell link this analysis to the movement that has occurred in planning education where the writ of the RTPI's educational outcomes runs at least—and argue that there is an evolving agenda of both theory and practice which also demands further attention.

Paula Meth brings a different perspective to the action agenda. There are both formal and informal places—corresponding agendas of formal and informal action. Meth focuses on the insurgent practices which are associated with the townships and informal settlements of South Africa, particularly as practised by women's groups.

These insurgent practices when associated with planning issues, perhaps particularly housing and employment deficiencies, are usually portrayed as positive responses, proof of the need for place-empowerment and the possibility of its achievement. But Meth looks behind this to show how those same practices rapidly become morally very ambivalent when extended to vigilantism. She identifies a “messy framework” of neoliberal economic policies which forget the poor, conflicts over rights, failure of services and infrastructure and the rise of gendered politics within which we shall need to theorise and understand the values and rationalities in conflict here.

Underlying conflicts of rationalities and values are at the centre of Jennifer Foster's paper on “Landscape Continuity: Ecology, Power and Social Order in Environmental Planning”. This takes us to the fringes of Toronto in Canada, and carefully unpacks the way in which landscape concerns in the greater Toronto area are framed so that apparently neutral landscape norms may be used to impose constraints on the growth prospects for particular groups of the community.

Foster shows us just how un-objective (my term) the notion of landscape continuity actually is or can be; and how discourse analysis can be used to demonstrate here a clash with an underlying and insidious cultural continuity that wishes to protect a “colonial pastoral mosaic”. This paper broke new ground for me at least, and challenges my previous assumptions as to the objective or at least expert nature of claims being made in debates “at the landscape scale”.

Isabel Breda-Vázquez offers a critique of evaluation procedures across the impressive diversity of efforts of a range of agencies in Oporto promoting urban programmes against the background of a normative rhetoric proclaiming a doctrine of integration—not a rhetoric unique to Portugal.

Breda-Vázquez concludes that an adequate evaluation methodology must be sufficiently rigorous to analyse the programmes singly, from an internal perspective; as well as in the aggregate; and in terms of the spatial vision that should inform them all. But among the challenges that Vasquez identifies (like Adams and Tiesdell, following Alexander's teleological criterion for a justification for planning), is the need for clarity about the purpose which integration actually serves.

Our three book reviewers in this edition are all positive in their assessment of the case for reading the titles in question. Patsy Healey reviews Rubino and Starnes Lessons Learned: The History of Planning in Florida, and clearly finds much that chimes with her interest in institutionalism—indeed Florida seems to come across as the epitome of diffusion of power and assertion of rights under a neo-liberal economic regime. Heather Campbell looks at Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, edited by Peter Marcuse and others, which focuses on the continuing work of Susan Fainstein. For her (Heather Campbell) a particular point of interest emerging from the debate is whether the transformative change necessary to realise the “just city” implies by definition agents outside the state—or whether, against the run of play, there might still be something to be said for the role of the state. Declan Redmond draws strength form Angotti's New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, with the ringing endorsement that “This book shows that community planning and participation is not some banal and bureaucratic exercise but a real fight which can influence policy and development outcomes.”

So where does this leave me in my search for my “personal research questions”? Well, the selection of material in this edition does not miraculously arrange itself into a series of fungible propositions which I can pick up and apply—a touch of the teleological, plus a perspective on insurgent practices with an argument for the “just project”—nothing like that. My search continues But what this material does do is actually to hearten me with the reflection that in our shared work rigour and inspiration are not incompatible; that cynicism can and does yield to reformulated questions; that a view (my view) of planning as a practice of spatial ethics is certainly complex, but not beyond realisation.