Reflecting on theory and practice

Above all, we are committed to the planning field as a learning endeavour where contributions are made through engagement with both theory and practice and academic inquiry. There are many pressures to drive a wedge between these two. But we believe this weakens both types of engagement (Healey et al., 2000, p. 7).

As noted by Heather Campbell in the editorial for 19 (5) (2018), this volume of Planning Theory & Practice marks our twentieth year of publication. It seems timely, therefore, that the editorials for Volume 20 will reflect on the core mission and values of the journal as well as speculating on the challenges of academic publishing in the planning field into the future.

As can be seen in the opening quote above, one of the core beliefs of the original editors – Patsy Healey, Heather Campbell, Robert Upton and Genie Birch – is that this journal should bridge the gap between the academy and planning practitioners to foster new knowledge and creativity for reinventing the future that places could have. Healey and colleagues drew on Donald Schön’s call for ‘reflective practitioners’ to address the deficits of outmoded ways of working through providing a forum for advancing and developing the theory and practice of spatial planning. By focusing on theory and practice, the journal aimed to strengthen engagement across knowledge and experience to open up new possibilities for place-making and spatial policy. In turn this would overcome what Schön had referred to as “the expression of lagging understandings, unsuitable remedies, and professional dilemmas” (Schön, 1983, p. 9) that had become the norm over recent decades. In this context, Schön argued that ineffective practice often stemmed from theories which had been shown to be fragile and incomplete, frequently leading to new problems.

As Campbell (2002, p. 7) argued in another early editorial, the activity of planning is founded on the tension between understanding and acting, requiring “analysis and dialogue to bridge the continuum of knowledge and action”. This suggests that academic researchers should move beyond critique and systemic analysis to critically engage with advancing planning practice through their research. Similarly, a reflective planning practitioner requires opportunities to overcome bureaucratic routines and to engage with ideas, new evidence, and international perspectives that could make a difference to what practice could become. While reflection-in-action should be a core professional skill, Porter (2011, p. 477) is critical of the tendency for action without reflection, or action without a critical awareness of power and politics: that planning (practice) has become far too interested in change or action “without its political content and disturbingly unable to judge the politics of change’s outcomes”. The challenge for authors (both academics and practitioners) publishing in Planning Theory & Practice is not simply to inform policy debates, but to challenge practice, seeking the radical and transformative implications of research for practice and policy-making which shape the future of planning.

Re-reading Schön’s work today is a reminder that reflection-in-action remains an enduring goal. The first chapter of his seminal book is entitled ‘The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge’. While this crisis of confidence emerged from the failure of expert-centred planning models and a reflective questioning of professional knowledge and values, this theme echoes with our current political age when professional knowledge is also being questioned, this time as ‘experts’ are viewed as part of an elite group, unvalued by rising populism and ‘post-truth’ politicians. The challenge now, as when Schön was writing, is to develop professional knowledge adequate to meet societal demands and “the changing character of the situations of practice – the complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts” (p. 14) which are central to theory and practice.

The journal’s mission of linking knowledge and action was, in many ways, pre-emptive of the current focus in much of academia on demonstrating impact, increasingly quantified within metric-intensive university sectors across the globe. However, Planning Theory & Practice’s mission goes much beyond an instrumental perspective on demonstrating policy-relevant research findings towards something more fundamental: papers and research that not only inform practice, but challenge practice and open new frontiers or alternatives for theory and practice. Turning to Schön again, this is “as much to do with finding the problem as with solving the problem found” (Schön, 1983, p. 18). It is imperative that challenging practice is not solely the mission of researchers, but also demands that professional institutes should take a positive role towards fostering reflection-in-action and dialogue between practice and research to search for alternative modes of working. This approach may help facilitate the co-production of knowledge (Campbell & Vanderhoven, 2016), between researchers and practitioners to unlock answers to the question of what should be done?

Planning Theory & Practice has maintained our focus on linking knowledge and action over the last two decades, relevant to each of the Journal’s different sections. Within the original articles section, we seek contributions that engage with and advance practice as well as the theoretical basis for planning. However, it is perhaps the Journal’s other sections that enable Planning Theory & Practice to innovate and to foster dialogue. The Interface section has now an established reputation for agenda-setting contributions that seek to develop an interactive dialogue between researchers (including from outside the planning field) and practitioners working across international boundaries. In this volume we also launch the new Debates and Reflections section, which will enable ‘conversations’ to be developed within the Journal that reflect on recent articles, Interfaces and practice/policy debates, alongside book reviews. These shorter, reflective pieces will enable emerging debates to be addressed and new horizons to be explored.

The main article section for this issue has four papers, all of which critically examine planning practices and how planning knowledge is constructed. This first article, by Neil Harris, focuses on knowledge and action through exploring how planners interact with alternative ways of living that challenge conventional planning norms in relation to settlement planning and how sustainable development is conceived. Harris examines One Planet living – low impact development that either enhances or does not diminish environmental quality, often located in the open countryside based on permaculture. Drawing on recent experiences in Wales, this article employs a Foucauldian governmentality framework to examine how the planning system regulates low impact and unconventional development (and related lifestyles and behaviours). Harris explores the ‘regimes of practice’ that enable, restrict and regulate One Planet development, questioning the boundaries of town and country that often underpin planning regulation in the British context. Harris concludes that low impact One Planet development has enabled a ‘legitimate way’ for people to live in the open countryside, which had previously been constrained by the planning system in Britain. This has challenged or reconstituted the dominant rationality of urban containment as a form of sustainable development. However, as Harris notes, the additional regulations placed on this development (and its continuous monitoring) provide a controlling administration over the ways people live their lives.

The second article also focuses on planning as practice, this time through an examination of the experiences of planners in the private sector (often under-researched), contributing to an understanding of planning practice in the different settings that planners work. In this article, Juliana Zanotto explores the role of private sector planning professionals who have become significant players in shaping urban development outcomes. Empirically the paper examines the role of planning consultants working for developers in facilitating ‘regressive practices’, focusing on the development of upscale gated communities in Brazil. The key question for Zanotto is: how do practitioners make sense of their work in planning/designing gated communities while at the same time being aware of their negative impacts on social segregation? Zanotto advances ‘detachment’ to explain how planning professionals negotiate regressive practices that reinforce urban inequalities: political detachment, professional detachment, and valuation detachment, which enable the planner to put aside their personal or professional values to adapt to their client’s priorities. In this analysis, detachment is understood as an approach to planning practice.

In the third article, Edward Jepson Jr. explores knowledge and action through the lens of sustainability science. This addresses the ways in which we can broker a new relationship between science and society, and explores the role of planning in bridging this gap. In addressing this theme, Jepson highlights the importance of civic science, which recognises the imperative of communicating science effectively to the wider public as a means of facing the challenge of a public sceptical of scientific knowledge. From a planning perspective, Jepson argues for an institutional application of science in urban planning to deal more effectively with the city as a complex social-ecological system. Practically, this might include integrating scientists into plan-making teams, while also building an understanding of place-based communities as complex systems to develop resilient and adaptive places.

The final article carries forward these themes through exploring planning support systems within the context of collaborative learning. As the author, Dan Milz, recognises, research on planning support systems is a rapidly growing area, often allied to smart city initiatives, the use of ‘big data’ for urban management, or to enhance efficiencies in urban services. However, within this article Milz explores how planning support systems can enhance interpersonal communication within deliberative arenas tailored towards assisting the micro-dynamics of participatory planning. The article draws on the computer supported collaborative learning literature to contribute towards an understanding of social learning in the planning field seeking to support non-expert stakeholders in debating planning dilemmas. For Milz, the value of this approach is not simply improved communication, but facilitating an ‘end-product’ of co-produced meaning and effective joint problem-solving.

The Interface for this volume is an exemplar of how this section seeks to challenge planning theory and practices through examining a topic much neglected by planners – the implications of migration, mass mobility and refugees at the urban scale. The collection of papers examines the global phenomenon of the movement of people on a mass scale around the globe, often through displacement caused by war, fear of death and persecution, famine, or climate catastrophe in their home country. Millions more are internally displaced, moving because they have lost their homes and livelihoods due to urban renewal or infrastructure. As Libby Porter outlines in the introduction, examining flows of migration, citizenship and refugees are not seen as obviously within the remit of planning practice, theory or research. Yet, as this Interface demonstrates, the sheer challenge of the movement of people on such a large scale, as well as the everyday experiences of migrants and refugees are very much planning issues. For example, Romola Sanyal’s contribution brings our attention to the urbanization of refuge, standing in marked contrast to stereotypical media images of distant refugee camps. Instead, the majority of refugees live in cities. Within this context, Kelly Yotobieng’s essay argues compellingly for greater integration between humanitarian programmes and urban planning, particularly in finding appropriate ways to respond to humanitarian crises for refugees in urban areas. Moreover, in a political era dominated by narratives of constructing walls or new borders, this Interface also points to more progressive urban alliances that have emerged to rethink citizenship, solidarity and mobility in the context of urbanization. Similar to other global challenges, such as climate change, this Interface reminds us that while national and international political institutions often fail to provide leadership on complex issues, cities have often emerged to fill the void and provide much needed arenas for progressive debate.

Within the new Debates and Reflections section, we have two related comment articles and one book review on participatory research and planning. In the first comment article, Katrina Raynor examines the barriers facing early career researchers engaged with participatory action research (PAR) – in doing so, Raynor reminds us that being a reflective practitioner is not limited to planners, but is central to life as a researcher too. The article identifies the widely espoused virtues of PAR, particularly the opportunities to co-create new knowledge with impacted communities and as a form of direct social change through research. However, the article also explores the challenges associated with PAR for individual researchers, particularly reflecting on the differences between ‘academic’ research and ‘activist’ research. Raynor focuses on the additional challenges facing early career researchers, notably the time and personal investment in working closely with communities, building trust and relationships over a long term, while working on short term and fixed term, precarious contracts. Additionally, while recognising the importance of creating non-academic outputs, Raynor also reflects on how these are often undervalued in terms of career progression, raising important questions concerning what types of research are valued within a context of an increasingly casualised academic workforce.

In the second comment article, Meléndez and Parker argue for ‘expanding the conversation’ between learning sciences and urban planning to better design learning environments within participatory planning processes. While co-learning is central to participatory planning, Meléndez and Parker call for participatory spaces to be explicitly constructed and assessed as learning environments as a basis for enhanced civic engagement. In this context, the article stresses the need for careful consideration to be given to ‘design decisions’ within participatory spaces, from tools used, language, to the actual physical spaces, which enable, rather than constrain, interaction. The comment concludes by identifying the potential of learning sciences to provide additional tools to enable deeper participation and civic skills acquisition to build more equitable cities.

The final part of the Debates and Reflections section also examines knowledge, action and engagement through a book review, by Laura Saija, of Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century (authored by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Francis E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks). The book contends that more academics should engage with research questions crafted in direct partnership with the very people that might be positively affected by research outcomes. Saija suggests that the strength of this book is the authors’ reflections on their own experiences as engaged scholars, particularly in developing transformative partnerships with local actors.

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the many contributions of Klaus Kunzmann as the Planning Theory & Practice Artist, providing so many wonderful images over the last two decades. In this issue, Kunzmann provides an additional commentary to accompany his sketches and photographs of Qingdao (formerly Tsingtao), China. This commentary narrates the story of Qingdao, established as a German naval base in the 19^th Century to rival British Hong Kong. Its development reflected German style land ownership and regulation, demonstrating the long history of urban planning as a colonial tool across the globe. Today, most of the German district of Qingdao is protected from demolition within the wider rapidly expanded industrial city of almost 10 million people, which itself tells its own story of 21^st Century urbanization.