Planning Dilemmas

Planning in the Face of New Challenges

Planning is nearly always dilemmatic. Defined as the application of knowledge to a set of future actions, planning is dilemmatic because the future is wrought with quantitative and qualitative uncertainties as well as surprise events. Planning involves making choices between options that are, or can be seen to be, unsatisfactory at times. It is not always possible to predict the direct and indirect consequences of planned actions. Moreover, planning, whether carried out by small groups of public planners or wider groups of stakeholders, involves practical judgments. It has been and will always be a matter of planners’ best judgment, bearing in mind the spatial, inter-temporal and social circumstances provided at the time. This judgment may be unwittingly flawed. The likelihood – amounting almost to certainty – is that judgments are not just constrained, but also that choices are hard to make because there are limits to all our options. As earlier studies, dealing explicitly with the dilemmatic qualities of planning, show, planning is a paradoxical process. This is not only due to the complex nature of the issues that it deals with, but also due to the constraints and contradictions that planners face (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Savini, Majoor, & Salet, 2015; Thomas & Healey, 1991).

In this comment I argue that that the choices planners are asked to make are becoming harder because planning faces new key challenges. These include environmental deterioration especially climate crises, digitalization of urban space, globalization, migration and the subsequent rise of xenophobic populism. These issues existed before, but they have not only quantitatively intensified, but also qualitatively changed. Against the backdrop of these challenges, it is therefore appropriate to ask whether planning has become more dilemmatic? Has our knowledge of the future become even more uncertain so that the application of knowledge to actions involves greater risk-taking? Have the relationships between local, national and global become so complicated and conflict-ridden that a consensus on policies and actions has become well nigh unachievable. Accordingly, this comment consists of three sections that provide an overview of the intensified dilemmas as a result of the key challenges introduced above, and a concluding section that expresses the danger that they pose for the implicit contract that governs a multicultural, spatially defined and gradually evolving city.

Environmental Deterioration, Climate Crisis and Planning

Environmental deterioration and climate change pose the most crucial threat at all levels of human existence. Redressing environmental problems e.g. air and water pollution, has been one of the major objectives of planned intervention. In reality, planners have always faced the dilemma of how to advocate for environmental concerns in the face of the hegemonic status of economic growth in policy discourses.

The same year as the United Nations (UN) Habitat I conference was held in Vancouver (Canada), Harvey Molotch (1976) put forward the concept ‘city as growth machine’. In his paper Molotch not only discusses the role of cities in the global race for economic growth but also growth-related environmental problems of air- and water pollution as well as natural resource depletion. Planners, aware of cities’ dual role as growth machine and environmental predator, faced the dilemmas of focusing on environmental issues when these were then not part of the national or international agenda. Planners faced a plurality of legitimate perspectives with businesses and local political coalitions advocating growth-inducing investments against the backdrop of national economic policies, while environmental NGOs emphasized restraints on such investments owing to their environmental impacts.

It took another 20 years before cities were explicitly recognized as ‘platforms’ for sustainable development (Parnell, 2015). The 1992 UNCED, also known as the ‘Rio Earth Summit’ specifically pointed out the need for greater emphasis on sustainable development, and required cities and other urban places to carry out this development with the help of a planning framework called ‘Local Agenda 21ʹ (LA21), involving grassroots engagement and collaboration. However, promoting ecological, social and economic sustainability by integrating LA21 policies in local development planning proved to be difficult for two major reasons that are also relevant in the context of contemporary efforts to respond to climate crises.

First, consolidating traditional land use concerns (allocation of spatial resources for housing, industries, transportation, industries, etc) with sustainability issues (maintaining biodiversity, reducing the use of non-renewable resources, etc) which, at first sight, could be regarded as procedural and organizational issues, proved to be an ideological issue. It raised the dilemma of balancing ecological, social and economic sustainability. In the face of a prevailing economic growth doctrine, which by then had been further bolstered by the neo-liberal agenda in the public sector, economic ‘sustainability’ (read ‘growth’) prevailed in planning (Campbell, 1996; Selman, 1998). Second, LA21 emphasized grass roots involvement, changes in individual behavior, collaborative styles of planning, and greater input of local knowledge. The aim was to stimulate community-wide environmental awareness in order to break the impasse of unsustainable living and consequent transformation of production and consumption practices. Planners were faced with several challenges. How to go about changing individual behavior? Would grassroots involvement prove counter-productive in the absence of political and economic actions? If planners succeeded in acquiring people’s insights and perspectives, how would such knowledge be ‘balanced’ vis-à-vis market and political preferences? Achieving a truly collaborative shift in planning procedure in the face of a prevailing socio-economic culture has proved to be extremely difficult (Doak, 2000; Khakee, 2002; Low, Gleeson, Elander, & Lindskog, 2000).

It may be relevant to point out that the same year in which the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit took place, a Canadian researcher, William Rees (1992), put forward the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’ as an appropriate tool that could be used to assist urban planners in their efforts to plan for greater sustainability (see also Wackernagel, 1994). Moreover, the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (1992), with its supplementary report especially prepared for the Rio Earth Summit, estimated global temperature increases of 0.6–0.7 C during the next 100 years.

Since then the IPCC has published four more reports regarding unequivocal increases in global air and water temperatures, leading to severe impacts on the ecosystem and on different plant and animal species, in the absence of mitigation measures to reduce GHG (green house gas) emissions and lessen long-term climate impact. The Paris Agreement in 2016 recognized the broader and more severe impacts of global warming, and proposed limiting the increase of the global average temperatures to well-below 2 C. In the same year the UN-Habitat III conference in Quito (Ecuador) adopted the New Urban Agenda (NUA) that enshrined the first sustainable development goals (SDG) making cities and other urban places key drivers in the global push towards sustainable development (Garshagen & Porter, 2018; Parnell, 2015). However, GHG emissions already seem to be outpacing the goals set out in the Paris and Quito agreements. The signatories of the Paris agreement had requested the IPCC to prepare a special report on ‘Global Warming of 1.5 C’ (IPCC, 2018). The report showed that the current momentum of the global economic system is hurtling towards the warming of the planet by 3 to 4 degrees! Even going from 1.5 to 2 C would escalate the diversity and severity of climate change impacts and expose several hundred million people to dangerous climate related risks by 2050. The report estimates that global GHG emissions need to drop by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 i.e. around a 60% drop from today’s levels within 12 years!

Against the backdrop of the above development, the planners’ dilemmas seem to be overwhelming. The first dilemma is how to redress the lack of planning capacity to meet the climate crises and prioritize climate change, and at the same time to provide core services with prevailing limits in planning and financial capacity (Baker, Peterson, Brown, & McAlpine, 2012; Heidrich, Dawson, Reckien, & Walsh, 2015). Another dilemma is in prioritizing mitigation measures in relation to adaptation ones. On the one hand, planners have to recognize the urgency of mitigation policies in order to reduce GHG emissions, and lessen climate change impacts by shifting from fossil to renewable energy sources, use of renewable material in buildings and other infrastructure, enforced recycling of all waste, and reduction in the use of plastic and other harmful substances. On the other hand, local governments need to undertake adaptation measures in order to reduce the immediate effects of climate change e.g. building levees in response to sea-level rise or fire-breaks in response to forest fires. As for stakeholders’ involvement, SDG’s focus on indicators, data and measurement points towards a technocratic approach to urban governance which may risk business interests capturing the sustainable urban policy-making agenda which actually requires individual behavior changes as a prerequisite to political action (Caprotti et al., 2017). The planners’ dilemma is balancing the SDG’s technocratic undertaking and normative commitments with a progressive sustainable urbanism.

Local efforts to tackle global warming have proliferated since the Paris Agreement in 2015 to keep it below 2 C. Nearly six thousand cities have made quantifiable pledges to reduce their carbon footprint. New networks have been constituted e.g. Resilient Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors, America’s Pledge, C40 Group of Big Cities and Agenda 2030 for implementing SDGs. These and other local government efforts are important, but if the worst possible effects of climate change are to be avoided, bottom-up climate policies must be supported by national and global political and economic actions. Cities need to realize that their dual role as growth machines and key ecological actors is incompatible.

Digitalization of Urban Space

Just as ‘economic growth’ has a hegemonic status in sustainable development debates, the ‘smart city’ has also become a hegemonic notion in the debate on urban digitalization (Krivý, 2018). The smart city concept as discussed in contemporary planning literature is about two decades old. With the rapid advancement in internet and communication technologies (ICT), big tech firms have championed a vision where the entire urban fabric – infrastructure, services, government institutions and civil society are internet-connected. Their argument for comprehensive coverage is based on the scale of the effort required and the economies of scale involved (Townsend, 2013). In contrast, an incremental model might offer a less intrusive way to make a city smarter by letting those who govern try out decisions in virtual reality before rolling them out in reality, or introducing smart city initiatives in cooperation with civil society in delivering specific services like minimizing traffic congestion, reducing energy consumption and improving waste management (Greenfield, 2013). We have broadly three perspectives: the technologically deterministic development advocated by tech firms; co-evolutionary development with shared objectives about restructuring of urban spaces and electronic infrastructure, and; pro-active civic network-based development (Graham, 1998; Townsend, 2013).

Planners need not pay heed to visions proposed by tech firms since the latter do not understand how cities really work and what makes them truly livable. Nor can place-based relations and mobility be substituted by universalized interactive ICT-based communications (Greenfield, 2013). However, planners need to think more about the subtle ways in which technologies tend to shape the city’s future. Smart cities are promoted in terms of four dimensions – intelligent social infrastructure, digital information infrastructure, open governance and continuous socio-spatial adaptability (Roche, 2014). Planners need to examine all the pros and cons of digitalization in order not to end up in a situation saying ‘it wasn’t me who made the decision, it was the data’ (Townsend, 2013).

But even the co-evolutionary and pro-active visions pose quite a few dilemmas for planners. The first dilemma relates to the way to make a city smarter. Planners need to define goals, roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in order to ensure democratic control over step-by-step digitalization of urban infrastructure and services. It is important to avoid situations where the internet was introduced for one specific purpose e.g. in Rio where it was introduced to manage flood control but then extended to control many aspects of urban life (Paschoal & Wogrich, 2019).

Another dilemma concerns the ownership of all digital information. Planners need to sort out questions about who owns the data, who will exploit it and how? How safe is it to make the available data public? As UK examples (among them Bristol and Manchester) show, it is quite problematic to ensure rights to the city and its people in all internet interventions (Cowley, Joss, & Dayor, 2018). Tech firms are not only interested in organizing knowledge, networking, etc but also controlling all access to generated knowledge and determining who would use the data.

The third dilemma relates to the vulnerability of digitalization when operating systems go wrong or when software crashes. Some of these failures are technical in nature or as a result of human error. However, hackers in the service of foreign states or from local anti-social elements can cause damage too. The more extensive the internet coverage of urban infrastructure and services, the greater the consequences for the community (Greenfield, 2013). For planners it is not only a question of the costs of proposing security measures in relation to benefits but also the social costs of the state of preparedness required by more extensive internet coverage.

Another dilemma is the increased use of digital monitoring of everyday activities of citizens or particular groups of citizens. In marketing smart cities tech firms have promoted technologies of biometric recognition as a means of inspection and facilitating travel and other forms of mobility. However, there is an increasing concern that with a vast network of sensors, cities become an arena of perfect and permanent surveillance by whoever has access to the data feeds (Zuboff, 2015). Nowhere is this more apparent than in authoritarian states. For example, in China the big tech firms BAT and Alibaba share biometric studies examining public sentiments and behavior, traces of social and political unrest with national and regional authorities (Well, 2019). The planners’ challenge is to examine the potential dangers that this development poses for people lest cities may find themselves cogs in a global surveillance economy.

Globalization, Migration and Xenophobic Nationalism

Globalization and migration are not new phenomenon. They have been linked together through advancements in transport, communication and information technologies (Richardson & Chang Hea, 2005). However, current levels of human mobility are unprecedented. Though there is more internal migration especially in the developing countries than international migration, it is the latter that monopolizes the attention of the media and politicians in the developed countries (Freidman, 2007).

Anti-globalization and anti-migration forces focus on real or imagined negative impacts. However, the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2017) indicates that globalization has mostly benefitted large cities at the expense of small towns and rural areas. Even in big cities, migration has led to increased pressure on urban infrastructure and services, often leading to increased marginalization of distressed areas. Globalization with the accompanying revolution in ICT has increased global competition for low- and medium-skilled jobs through outsourcing.

This leaves planners facing several dilemmas in trying to balance the competing needs of global investments, specializing in specific skills to counteract outsourcing, with local social and cultural considerations and planning for diversity.

One of the major dilemmas is how to create appropriate conditions for attracting global capital and highly skilled labor, but at the same time providing for local populations plus incoming refugees (Kuhn, 2018). Planning for economic competitiveness involves continual structural changes in the urban region’s economic activities, some with low wages and/or low skills being (re)located to low wage countries; others need specific skills through improving education. Maintaining overall growth leads to unequal income distribution effects (Richardson & Chang-Hu, 2005) but also accelerates the ecological footprint of cities. Failures in equity planning (Friedmann, 2005) are promptly exploited by anti-globalization forces whereas failures in environmental planning increase the costs of mitigating and adapting to environmental crises.

Integrative planning for diversity requires that planners address challenges faced by all communities, creating among them a greater sense of belonging and sharing a ‘common space’ and, at the same time, assuage fear amongst native majorities about the consequences of integration and the provision of urban infrastructure and services. Migration has been a contentious field in urban planning, exacerbated by the lack of consistent national policies with respect to assimilation, multiculturalism or other forms of co-existence (Miraftab & Mcconnell, 2008). As a result, planners have to ‘tidy up’ the fragmentation of space and marginalization of minority communities. Complicating this situation is the increased use by populists and anti-globalists of social media for fake news, intimidation and spreading of xenophobic hatred. Planning has so far had limited success in mediating conflicting interests and will encounter further challenges in the face of inter-racial and inter-cultural dynamics and tensions.

Wickedness Runs Amok: Endgame for Cities?

Environmental deterioration and climate crises, the impending danger posed by algorithms replacing human judgment in smart cities, and xenophobic nationalism disrupting globalization and migration all imply a fundamental overhaul of the premises governing urban planning. The ‘invisible’ contract governing a multicultural, spatially defined and gradually evolving city is under threat. Underlying conceptions of material space and time are rendered problematic where people can be subjected to social and political abuses through ubiquitous surveillance whilst living under constant threat of human-induced natural cataclysms. The question is how to meet these challenges so that the city, the most unique attempt at collective enterprise in human history (Mumford, 1961), can survive?

Ever-increasing tensions between cities as ‘growth machines’, the rise of green house gas emissions, the accelerated depletion of natural resources, escalating divisions between the rich and the poor, threaten the future of this contract and the collective enterprise of the city. The rise of populism and subsequent risks of social conflict and even warfare, challenge the pursuit of reason, science and humanism (Pinker, 2017). Planning practice has, under these circumstances, become extremely dilemmatic and faces challenges that seem at present almost insurmountable.

Acknowledgement

My sincere thanks to Andy Inch and Crystal Legacy for their excellent help in improving an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abdul Khakee

Abdul Khakee is professor emeritus at the Umeå University. He researches the theory and practice of futures studies and strategic planning, planning ethics, planning evaluation, sustainable development management and cultural policy.