Planning is political. It mobilizes a particular body of knowledge to address public concerns. The knowledge embodied in professional practice becomes political at the moment in which it is actively used to define and address the public good. Moreover, expert knowledge carries prestige at the moment in which it is legitimated by institutions that recognize its relevance in the arena of policymaking. Because of this prestige, expert planners and planning academics do always make a difference in politics. This is the answer to the title of this book. But the relevant question is really ‘what kind of difference do planners make when they act politically?’. The title of the volume edited by Albrechts may therefore hide the core of the problem: the type of politics that planners enact through their knowledge.
The volume tackles this question through an approach that celebrates the epistemological tradition of the ‘reflective practitioner’ that has dominated planning thought since the late 70s. The author of each chapter approaches the search for politics through self-reflection, looking back at their role in policy making during their career. Each chapter offers a personal meditation on the choice that led the author to move from an academic job to one in government. These stories are guided by a set of open questions given by the editor that lead each chapter to discuss the relations between academia and politics, between political activism and research, between policy-making and theory. Through these stories, the reader grasps how these analytical distinctions blend in the practice of planning: the political and the technical co-exist within the phenomenology of planning practice. On the one hand, political circumstances affect the selection of expertise and the strategies of knowledge mobilization. On the other, expert knowledge cuts through the political arena through its reputation and ability to persuade. Expertise helps to define the problem and establish a course of action to address it.
The person-centered approach of the volume has both value and limitations. The benefit of depth, detail and complexity hides the limitations of self-analysis. The individual, with their academic background and moral principles, becomes the subject and object of discussion. Each chapter carries out a personal ethnography of the career of the author and uncovers the unspoken motivations behind the specific professional choices and political decisions taken. In so doing, the reader – perhaps a junior planner in search of a professional career in politics – is gently brought into a pleasant confrontation with the author – the expert planner with their long history of professional engagement. The reader is invited to reflect on whether they would have carried out the same choices, or rather would have taken totally different courses of action. While prompting this kind of self-reflection on part of the reader, the book puts planning politics into the background. The planning strategies, the projects and their impacts, the partisan politics that led to particular policies, the social groups that benefited or were excluded from those policies; all become the environment where the individual authors operate. The reader is left with an appetite to know whether those policies led to results and what limitations they had.
The book privileges a description of planners rather than an analysis of planning. It refrains from any analytical framework or for any particular theoretical choices, making it a relatively light read, helped by an effective and concise overview of the volume by the editor himself. It is possible to identify two important contributions that this book makes to the ongoing debate about the relation between expert knowledge and politics. The personal stories of the book show two different meanings of politics and their problematic relation while giving a concise yet extensive overview of the essential skills, abilities, and know-how that characterize planning experts across countries.
A politics of administration is perhaps the most familiar to planners, this being a profession historically rooted in the building of modern welfare states. The stories of the authors show that administration is a satisfactory yet frustrating part of governing territories and addressing their problems effectively. Administration unfolds through concrete projects, through funding streams and the quest for political endorsement. Yet, administration has its inner logics. It operates within the protocols, procedures, and legal tools that bind governmental action. In navigating this machinery of government, planners mobilize their reputation, credibility and social capital. Their unique expertise does not only allow them to define courses of action but also to protect their decisions from political attacks. The capacity to enact decisions is, however, limited. In the reflections of the authors it is possible to see the authority of the circumstances, namely the power of external conditions to define the choices of individuals. The politics of administration that transpire from the book is a politics that frustrates radical potential, that is bound to agreement and compromise, that is incremental and faltering; it is dynamically conservative, as Barbanente’s chapter explains while citing Schön (p. 87). Planners have excellent skills to enact such a politics. They use the skills of negotiation, mediation, design and process management. They have the institutional sensitivity necessary to practicing politics in a way that is either accustomed to respect the long-standing legitimacy of existing democratic institutions or engaged in the building of those democratic institutions when they are missing.
Planners are also political activists. Through the authors’ life-stories it becomes clear that the shift to administration often results from the political strength gained in socio-political activism. These planners have built political capital through their advocacy practices in the favelas of Brazil, in the townships of South Africa, on the periphery of Milan, in the towns of Iowa, and in the post-revolutionary democratic movements of Portugal, to cite a few. The shift to administration was less the beginning of politics than its apex. It gave the possibility to these planners to take responsibility for publicly relevant decisions, to define public agendas and mobilize resources to their realization. But it also frustrated these agendas, reducing them towards a more reductive understanding of politics. Politics is conflict and planners enact this conflict through their practices. Expertise can empower planners to advocate for those groups that have no voice in the political arena. Storytelling is the vehicle through which these voices can be vocalized. Agreement is the pathway towards conflict resolution. This is where administration starts and the political ends. The stories of the authors reveal the necessary evolution of politics into administration. Through the voices of the authors, we hear that ‘truth itself is rhetorically created by agreement’ (p. 218) and that this truth is power (p. 227) that is constructed through ‘realistic normative ideals’ (p. 204). The pragmatic capacity to ‘build alliances and deal with the circumstances is essential to the exercise of administration, but it is always rooted in the planner’s drive to advocate for unheard communities and their long-lasting engagement with citizens. Planners are first of all activists because they can mobilize their deep knowledge of the territory, its communities and place-identity while taking a normative position. Through their know-how, built in practice and in context, they can capture the sentiment of those social groups that then turn into the polity of their administration.
In this book, administration and activism blends throughout the personal stories of planners. The practice of policymaking shows the dilemmas and trade-offs that emerge because of their periodic incompatibility. The book reveals the original ways in which expert planners have dealt with these dilemmas. However, it also leaves open one issue that may have allowed the reader to understand better this problematic relation between administration and activism: it silences the normative, thus political, views of these planners, their understanding of the public good and its underlying ideologies. Entering into politics is never a neutral exercise. As politicians or experts working to realize political agendas, planners embrace particular social, economic and territorial agendas. All the planners in the book have served under governments that can be defined as left – both extreme and moderate (with two exceptions at the center of the political spectrum). Yet, as readers we don’t know what this or that left was about, nor what the alternative stories were that those agendas would counteract. Politics is confrontational, it is made of positions, and it needs explicit pluralism. By openly elucidating the different stories that confront eachother, planners can grasp the very nature of their political practice. In sum, the volume is a very accessible and engaging journey into the inner wonderings of prestigious planning scholars facing the daily challenges of policymaking.