We Still Need New Ideas

While reading my colleagues’ reflections on this 20th year of publication, the realization struck me that I barely know of a time without this journal’s mix of theory and practice, its incorporation of learning from around the world, the inclusion of practitioners’ reflections on how we really actually get things done as planners, and its provocations to the profession on issues of social and spatial justice. The first issue of Planning Theory & Practice came out during my first year of graduate study in urban planning. I do clearly recall reading Leonie Sandercock’s ‘When Strangers Become Neighbors: Managing Cities of Difference’ and realizing there was a theoretical framework and scholarship about my deepest concerns as a new initiate into professional norms, providing a path to my learning to articulate how recognition and respect could lead to transformative justice outcomes (Sandercock, 2000) .

What I didn’t realize at that time was the unique space that Planning Theory & Practice was claiming as an academic journal – linking a professional society with a community of scholars who are deeply concerned with planning practice, including with pushing its boundaries.

Now that I am teaching students who are emerging professionals in planning and community development, I notice that articles from Planning Theory & Practice are more likely to be on my syllabi than those from the purely technical and academic journals. Our programs aim to instill the habits of reflective practice, and this journal provides pieces that examine cases of planning problems and argue for new ways forward. These articles and essays help my students to see how we use theory and research when, in the words of editorial colleague John Forester, we get ‘stuck’ – he writes, “theories can help alert us to problems, point us toward strategies of response, remind us of what we care about, or prompt our practical insights into the particular cases we confront” (Forester, 1988, p. 12).

It seems like an obvious need to fill – after all, in the first issue then-brand-new planner David Percival identified that “There clearly needs to be more interaction between the academic and practitioner communities. The narrow compartmentalization of roles within planning needs to be broken down … I would certainly suggest that planning needs ideas, and therefore the publication of this journal can only be of assistance” (Percival, 2000, p. 138). As a new member of the editorial team, I’ve learned how much care and effort goes into holding this space for developing our field – the support for practitioners’ writing in their spare moments to share valuable insights, the encouragement of junior scholars to express their arguments rather than bury them in data, the curation of pieces that explore new issues and challenge us to do better with persistent problems. This issue includes cases from the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, and more; the research methods include historical document analysis, relational analysis, reflection and participant observation; and the authors are scholars, practitioners, and advocates – all demonstrating the idea generation that occurs at the interface between planning academia and the profession that was envisioned by the journal’s founders.

The issue opens with two articles that describe the challenge of plan-making – specifically, the difficulty in writing plans that say and do precisely what we intend. In Hislop, Scott and Corbett’s ‘What Does Good Green Infrastructure Planning Policy Look Like? Developing and Testing an Assessment Framework within Central Scotland UK,’ existing plans for important ecological approaches for reducing climate impacts are found wanting. When current plans do not fully cover the concept of green infrastructure, nor identifying specific implementation actions and tools, then it will be difficult to make decisions and to make real progress. Not content to simply identify deficits, the authors suggest a model green infrastructure policy and assessment tools for plans in order to further knowledge. In the second article, Mace and Sitkin share research based on their experiences with brownfields planning in the relatively new Mayoral regime in London. The case described ‘Planning at the Interface of Localism and Mayoral Priorities: London’s Ungovernable Boroughs’ demonstrates that in a system where the balance of power is ambiguous, we may not discover what a plan will do until we attempt to implement it and have to negotiate and renegotiate between scales of governance from borough, city to regional and national goals.

Planning has been justified as a project of creating efficiency of land use, but ambiguity in plans may create inefficiencies as development activity is delayed. The next articles raise questions about whether efficiency for market actors should be a primary goal for public planners. Gallent, de Magalhaes, Trigo, Scanlon and Whitehead ask ‘Can “Permission in Principle” for New Housing in England Increase Certainty, Reduce “Planning Risk”, and Accelerate Housing Supply?’ – finding that while the multiple actors in land and housing development are interested in more routine planning permissions, that such a system would not allow for much community participation. It’s often the democratic process that creates inefficiency for private developers – and perhaps we find that an acceptable price, even if it slows housing construction.

Wideman’s study of the history of land use planning in Canada’s ‘frontier’ towns at the turn of the 20th century, surfaces the often implicit logic of land use planning to reduce ‘waste’ and inefficiency in cities. The paper warns that the concepts of ‘wasting’ land were linked to race, class, and gender. Even as planners were purportedly advancing community well-being by improving places – such as unsanitary slum housing – they were also labelling people as part of wastefulness, describing immigrants in slum housing as immoral. Obviously, the notion of efficient land use promoted by the growing profession of planning did not even consider the Indigenous peoples’ use of the land of what are now major cities.

Unpacking these histories helps us to consider how much work we have to do as planners to address exclusion and segregation. One mechanism is for planners to expand democratic practices and the co-production of knowledge for plan-making. In an article on planning for climate adaptation in the Philippines, Dujardin and Dendonker make the case that limiting participation to only the most technically knowledgeable stakeholders is not only undemocratic, but leads to poor outcomes. When people who are highly vulnerable to weather variation were invited to share their knowledge about past natural disasters and their actual use of land, planners were able to reconcile their often inaccurate maps and create plans that provided more options to the community than just relocating away from potential hazards.

The case of Bohol, Philippines serves as a reminder for those of us planning in systems where public engagement is taken for granted that learning from and with community can substantially change our plans. The Interface section for this issue also looks directly at practices of community participation, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the U.K.’s Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning, popularly known as the Skeffington Report. The authors of the Interface pieces – scholars and practitioners – were part of a symposium hosted by the Town and Country Planning Association organised of scholars and practitioners on the evolution of public participation and the unfinished project of expanding democratic process to all community members. These pieces, along with a view from the United States, are not merely celebrating public participation, but asking how we can engage more deeply in the coproduction of plans and address growing inequality and the continued marginalization of people of color and other minority groups.

In the Debates & Reflections section, authors take on old challenges and new technologies. In ‘Land for the Many and a New Politics of Land' Kenny argues that structures of land ownership must be questioned in order to make progress addressing housing shortages and climate change – starting from much deeper public participation in land use planning, including providing representation for future generations. This essay connects directly to the assumptions about property ownership and land use underlying planning, and could be read as a call to action after considering Wideman’s historical work.

Finally, we have two pieces on new technologies – the so-called ‘smart city’ and 3D printing of buildings. These digital marvels are reshaping our relations to the built environment and to one another in ways that we could not have imagined twenty years ago, the authors are raising questions familiar as core concerns of planning. Flynn and Valverde point out that the public-private partnership in Toronto’s Google-led waterfront development lacks transparency and community voice, both about emerging questions of digital privacy and about long-standing issues of access and affordability in a neighborhood redevelopment. Cameli invites us to consider the possibilities of 3D printing a city with new architectural forms – but also to keep in mind that dystopias are created from pursuing overly idealized utopias without considering the socioeconomic shifts that will accompany a significant technological advance.

Twenty years on, I still need ideas, and find them here, and I hope Mr. Percival, similarly matured in his career, will enjoy this issue’s explorations of plan-making and implementation, public participation, enduring issues of land and emerging issues of technology.