Reimagining planning: moving from reflective practice to deliberative practice - a first exploration in the Italian context

Abstract

This paper explores what can be lost, both theoretically and pedagogically, if we reduce “planning” to “plan-making.” Under conditions of political conflict and plurality, complexity and connectedness, a subject-centered theory of reflective practice should give way to a situated and relational, inter-subjective and learning-oriented deliberative practice. By exploring diverse planners’ practices in Italy, based on 31 grounded, practice-focused oral histories, this paper represents an innovation, in terms of method and theory, in assessments of contemporary Italian urban and regional planning. The innovation is in identifying significant issues such as relationship-building, joining expertise with political power, integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches, refining participatory intelligence systems, and assuring public accountability in the conduct of planning for further analysis, and it identifies topics, strategies and skills that planning educators can and should address as well. Throughout, we explore not formal legal issues but informal social and political characteristics of critically pragmatic and interactive, deliberative practices that will be resonant with experiences of readers and practitioners in many contexts.

Keywords:

• Planning roles
• deliberative practice
• plan-making
• reflective practice
• narrative oral histories

Notes

1. For brevity, we refer to practitioners in these settings as place-makers and planners or just planners.

2. We wanted to evoke what our interviewees knew practically as practitioners; we did not wish to evoke their theories. We typically asked, ‘What did you do about X in this case?’ and not, ‘What did you think about X?’ We tried to connect the dots between project beginnings and endings; we sought to draw out in practical terms and to ground each practitioner’s story. See extensive accounts of this method in Laws & Forester (2015); and Forester (2012).

3. The shift from ‘interviews’ to ‘investigations’ could be also connected to work such as that of Terkel (1974), Coles (1972), Schön (1983) and Bourdieu (1991). We adapt this particular form of a ‘narrative’ method from (Forester, 2012; Laws & Forester, 2015) where it is discussed in greater detail.

4. These biases seem particularly strong the more that theorists' agendas engage issues of equity or injustice, race or inequality, political economy or neo-liberalism, for example. This observation recently led Forester (2011, 2017a) to the polemical argument that planning theory for too long has had a ‘dirty little secret,’ and that secret, ironically for the progressive left, was simply that ‘somebody has to do the work!’

5. From this perspective also De Leo’s work adopted this point of view as relevant, see De Leo( 2008, 2013).

6. Each of the 16 practitioners who reviewed their respective edited transcript corrected, slightly amended, and approved their texts for use in classrooms and related academic research.